The Grand Carnival Board Game

RRP: £44.99
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RRP £44.99
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Ladies and gentlemen, step right up — the carnival is coming to town! In The Grand Carnival, players compete to create the most impressive carnival this town has ever seen. You’ll need to carefully plan your carnival’s layout, build attractions, hire staff, and manage the crowds, all while learning a few tricks of the trade. Each turn, players cover a number on their p…
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Category Tag SKU ZSPG-GABCARNI01 Availability 3+ in stock
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Awards

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You Might Like

  • Easy to learn
  • Plenty to think about
  • Great mechanisms

Might Not Like

  • Player interaction is really just keeping an eye on what others are doing
  • The box gets a bit messy
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Description

Ladies and gentlemen, step right up — the carnival is coming to town! In The Grand Carnival, players compete to create the most impressive carnival this town has ever seen. You'll need to carefully plan your carnival's layout, build attractions, hire staff, and manage the crowds, all while learning a few tricks of the trade.

Each turn, players cover a number on their player board, then select an action. The covered number determines the effectiveness of their action — and won't become available again until the next round — so players need to think carefully about which number to use. Possible actions include:

• Place a Foundation Tile: Select a foundation tile to place on your fairground. The higher the number you cover, the more tile options you have. Each tile is a 2x2 grid and is made up of construction sites and walkways. Attractions can be placed only on construction sites, whereas guests can move only on walkways, so place your tiles carefully.

• Build an Attraction: Select a polyomino attraction and place it on the construction sites on your fairground. The size of the attraction you can select depends on the number you cover. Larger attractions can collect more tickets (and can be worth more points), but can be difficult for guests to move around.

• Move a Guest: Select a guest token and move it along the walkways on your fairground. The distance a guest can move depends on the number you cover. If a guest moves next to an attraction, place a ticket token on that attraction. If you move enough guests, you can hire a carnival barker; barkers help guests move quickly through your carnival, but take up precious space in your fairground.

After taking your action, see whether you qualify for any of the three "Tricks of the Trade" cards. Each trick has a requirement that must be met before you unlock its unique ability. Once a player unlocks a trick, each of their opponents has one turn to meet the same requirement or lose access to that trick for the rest of the game.

After seven rounds, the game ends. Players earn points from sets of the same size attractions, sets of each size of attraction, carnival barkers, guests that move all the way through your park, and their tickets. The player with the most points wins!

It was less than two years ago that I discovered my first polyomino board game. It’s so satisfying to get that perfect fit. The game in question was The Isle of Cats and I still choose to play it every time I visit my sister. But a polyomino game of my own was in order and after a bit of research, I decided to buy The Grand Carnival. It’s designed by Rob Cramer with artwork by Ryan Goldsberry and is published by Uproarious.

The aim of the game is to build the best carnival, filling it with fabulous attractions like trapeze artists and ghost trains. As soon as you get started on construction, you can also bring visitors in to purchase tickets.

On your turn you must decide whether to place a foundation from the railyard, build an attraction (as long as you have the foundations in place for it), or move a guest (as long as you have pathways for your guest to move along). You can do the same action for every turn of the round if you are able, or mix and match. There are five turns in each round, and a round for every day of the week. At the end of the week, add up all your points and find out whether your carnival was the grandest!

If you want to earn big points, collect groups of attractions the same size and try to get at least one of each size. Don’t forget to get tickets on them, or they won’t score you anything.

There are other ways to score points too. Carnival barkers can be gained by moving more guests into your carnival, adding one to all your guest movements as well as adding to your points tally at the end. If you can move visitors all the way to the big top by the end of the week, they score you extra points. And try to cover all the foundations with attractions. You will lose points if you have bare earth at the end of the game.

Mechanisms

There are several mechanisms in this game that make it a firm favourite for me:

Action slots are numbered 1 to 5, and have a corresponding value. For example, if you use the number 3 slot to move a guest, you can her 3 spaces or less. You can only use each numbered action slot once per round so you need to plan carefully. If you use the number 5 action slot to buy the foundation tile you really want before someone else nabs it, you can’t buy a 5-point attraction until the next round. Will it still be there then? Do you want to move that guest close to the big top where he will score you points at the end, or take him there in a series of smaller moves so he buys more tickets on the way? This multi-value action mechanism makes you consider carefully which order you take actions in, and can catch you out if you get too focussed on one goal!

The placement of polyomino attractions on top of the foundations is another great mechanism. It’s a real puzzle to make sure you have enough building space for the attractions on offer, while ensuring you leave pathways for your guests to access each one. Guests can only move on the grass, and if they can’t get to an attraction, it is more or less worthless. I’ve played The Grand Carnival many times since buying it last month, and the number of turns you get is cleverly balanced so that you can never quite get the layout perfect. At the end of the game there is always the tantalizing idea that you can do better next time!

Another great feature is in the acquisition of ‘tricks of the trade’. Each time you play, there are 3 of 14 goals you can work towards in order to gain an advantage over your opponents. For example, once you have 8 foundation tiles, any attraction you build next to a guest automatically gets a ticket. The clever part is that once the first player has achieved the goal associated with a trick of the trade, everyone else must achieve it on their next turn, or forfeit the chance for the rest of the game. This means you have to watch carefully what your opponents are doing. Are they working towards the same trick as you? Can you keep up with them or would you be better off aiming for a different advantage?

Art & Packaging

Although the artwork is not in a style that would usually appeal to me, I can see that it’s skilful and it really does match nicely with the theme. It’s clear and full of energy and looks better on the polyomino pieces than it does on the box in my opinion. I like that you can choose which attraction of a certain size you want even though it makes no difference to the score. Firebreather or fortune teller?

The box has no plastic insert which can mean things are a bit of a mess when you get the game out to play. However, I am fully in support of this reduction in plastic and an easy solution is to repurpose a small cloth bag to keep the polyomino pieces together. Or use a spare plastic bag from one of those games that gives you twice as many as you need!

Final Thoughts

I find this game just the right complexity for me. You have to think hard about nearly every turn, but the consequences of what you decide to do are never so convoluted that you give up trying to work out your best option.

Despite the many different ways in which you can score (and these are all clearly detailed on your player mat as a reminder), you can get a feel for how well you are doing during the game, without knowing whether you will actually win. I don’t even especially mind whether I do win – the good feeling you get from a well-planned construction is a reward in itself!

The game is easy to learn. By the second game we played there was no need to consult the rule book more than a couple of times.

In summary, I’m a big fan and will be on the look-out for other games from this designer.

It’s that time of year again – the carnivals have arrived in Littleton and each one wants to be the biggest and best in town. Set in the summer of 1937, guests can expect to be entertained by the house of mirrors, dodgems, fire breathers and more. As the manager of one of the carnivals, it’s your job to be the best at the Grand Carnival!

Set Up

Place the railyard board within reach of all the players, and place the foundation tiles in two face-down stacks in the ‘1’ carriages. From these, draw a tile for each of the carriages labelled 2 -5 and place them face-up. The white tent is the round-marker and starts the game on the space marked Sunday.

Next, shuffle the Tricks of the Trade cards and deal 3 face-up so that all the players can see them. The remainder won’t be needed this game.

Randomly select a number of attraction tiles of each size and place them on the table. Don’t stack them, as you’ll need to see which shapes are left throughout the game. If two of you are playing, use five of each size, for three players you’ll need six and for four players eight of each size.

Make a pile of tickets, a pile of purple guest pawns, and a pile of barkers. The number of barkers is again dependent upon the player count: five for two players, six for three players and eight for four.

The starting player token is a gold carousel horse and should be given to the last player who went to a carnival (or fairground, or school fete). Don’t stress too much over this as it really makes very little difference who goes first.

Each player chooses a player board, which they place in front of them. Take the eight corresponding action pawns and place five of these next to the action spaces labelled 1 – 5 on the left of the player board. The other three may be needed later if you earn the right to use tricks of the trade.

Place a purple guest on each of the two entry spaces on your board.

Turns

On your very first turn there is really only one option available to you and that is to place a foundation tile. The tile you take is governed by the action number you move a pawn onto. So, if you use action space ‘5’, you can take any tile, from carriage 5 down to 1. If you move onto action space ‘3’, you can choose a tile from the 3, 2 or 1 space. And so on.

If tiles are taken from face-up spaces, those remaining are moved left and a new tile is placed onto space 5 for the next person’s turn. If you used the 1 action space and took a face-down tile, you can opt to remove all the face-up foundation tiles from the railyard and

replenish from the stacks. If the stacks ever run out, simply shuffle the discarded ones and make new stacks.

Your new foundation tile can be placed anywhere on your player board, but any mallets on it must be the right way up ie you cannot rotate the foundation tiles. Bear in mind that the mallet squares are construction sites, on which you will be able to build attractions later, and the green squares are grass walkways, enabling guests at your carnival to move around and visit those attractions. You may also be thinking about how to achieve those tricks of the trade already.

After each person’s very first go, you will have three actions to choose from on your turn:

  • Place a foundation tile as before.
  • Take and place an attraction. Again, the number you choose for this turns action will dictate which size of attraction you can take. As the round progresses, and you have used some of the action spaces for other turns, your choices become more limited. If you choose action space ‘2’ for taking an attraction, you can only select one that covers 2 squares or 1. Then place your chosen attraction on foundation tiles on the board. The attraction tiles can be rotated and flipped over, but they must not be outside the original 4×4 board, nor must they overlap the large foundation squares, or grass walkways. You may only take one attraction on your turn, for example, if you are using the ‘4’ action space, you cannot take two attractions of size 1 and 3.
  • Move a guest. You can use a pawn’s action space to move a guest the equivalent number of spaces onto and through your carnival grounds along the walkways. When the guest ends up next to one or more attractions you’ve already built, add one ticket to each of those attractions. Each attraction can hold the same number of tickets as squares it covers eg a size 4 attraction can hold up to four tickets. Note that ending a turn diagonally adjacent to an attraction does not allow you to place a ticket on it. More on guest movement later.

Once all players have used up their five action spaces, move the round-marker to the next day of the week and replace the action pawns at the side of your player board ready for the next round.

Tricks Of The Trade

Each of these cards is divided into two halves. The top half tells you what you need to achieve in order to gain the benefit depicted on the bottom half. For example, once you have five tickets on your attractions, you may place tickets on diagonally adjacent attractions to a guest after movement.

Once you have achieved the requirements to use a trick of the trade, place one of your spare action pawns on the card. Each other player now has only one more turn to achieve it themselves, or they forfeit the chance to achieve it for the whole game.

More About Moving Guests

Guests may only move on grass walkways, and may not move through a square occupied by another guest or a barker. They can’t move diagonally.

At any point when both your entry spaces are empty because you have moved both guests into the carnival, place a new guest into each of them. You can now add a barker to one of the walkway squares in your carnival. Careful here, as you don’t want to block access for guests, but tucked away in a corner, barkers will benefit you. For each barker in your carnival, you may move guests one extra space if you choose that action.

If you manage to move a guest through the fairground and into the big top, they stay there for the remainder of the game and are worth points when the scores are added up.

The End Of The Game

After Saturday, the carnivals pack up and move on, but work out how well you scored first!

The player boards have a very useful scoring summary, so that you don’t forget what you are aiming at during the game. This is certainly worth checking every now and again, as it’s easy to forget something (mainly tickets).

You are awarded points for sets of three or more attractions of the same size, as long as each one has a ticket. The bigger the set, and the larger the attractions in it, the more points you get. You also get 22 points for having at least one attraction of each size, and again, these all need tickets.

If you have fifteen or more tickets, you gain 12 points.

There are points available for each barker in your carnival, and for each guest that made it all the way to the big top.

A point is subtracted for every visible construction mallet, large or small.

Add up your scores and see whose carnival was the grandest!

Finally

This is a fantastic game in which you always need to be thinking about which action space to use for which action, which scoring opportunities you want to prioritise and what your opponents are doing. Have fun but be warned – Grand Carnival is addictive!

Zatu Score

Rating

  • Artwork
  • Complexity
  • Replayability
  • Player Interaction
  • Component Quality

You might like

  • Easy to learn
  • Plenty to think about
  • Great mechanisms

Might not like

  • Player interaction is really just keeping an eye on what others are doing
  • The box gets a bit messy