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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Rio Grande Games | Mall World

Mall World

Price: £24.99

Board Game; 3-5 Players; Ages 12+ Players compete in the building of Mall World, scheduled to be the largest indoor shopping mall in the world. ********** BeWitched Spiele / Rio Grande 3-5 players, 90 minutes designed by Andrea Meyer reviewed by Ben Baldanza Andrea Meyer comes up with interesting themes. Ad Acta has the driest idea around (an office filing system), yet the game works pretty well and makes up for the paper clips. Mall World is about the development of a shopping mall, and players earn money by positioning stores in specific situations and getting the specific types of people to visit the right store. No railroads, no elves, no pirates, no Medieval Europe, no historical context, just a shopping mall! The board shows the footprint of the unbuilt mall, and on each of the grid spaces one of four types of store tiles can be placed - hobby shops, food shops, clothing shops, and sports shops. Tiles are placed using ``approval cards\'\', equating to zoning or other approval to put a certain store in a certain place. An approval card may say ``place a hobby store next to a clothing store\'\' or ``place a sports shop next to another sports shop\'\'. Players choose when to score by playing a different type of card, called an order card. This means that an order is being fulfilled, and the card states specifically what will be paid for and at what rate. For example, an order card may pay for every instance of a food shop next to a sports shop. If a player plays this card, they score for every orientation like that on the board when they play the card. There are two types of approvals and scorings in the game. The paragraph above describes the first type, those related to unvisited stores and their relative position. Approval cards also give the right to create specific stores, meaning one of four differently colored people counters placed on each of the four store types. A food store is an empty green tile; place a blue people counter on it and it becomes the specific store called ``Jen\'s Got Berries\'\'. You don\'t need to know the names of the stores, but it\'s fun that Andrea thought of them. Order cards initially reward only empty store placement. Later order cards start to reward instances of specific stores, and importantly once a generic store is made specific by placing a people counter on it, that tile no longer can score for the other type of order card. An order card may show, for example, that it will pay for each instance of ``green person on a sports store\'\' or ``purple person on hobby store\'\'. The game play follows these ideas. On a player\'s turn, they first can buy one of four face-up order cards (cards that can score) in a Showmanger format. The card on one end costs only one Swiss Franc (CHF), the next costs two, the next four, and the end one costs seven. When one is purchased, the others slide down and a new order card is placed on the seven CHF slot. Unlike Showmanager, the orders can\'t be flushed to find the one you really want. After buying (or not), they take one, two, or three approval cards from their hand and an in-the-fist auction can ensue. Players bid with coins, which are markers separate from the primary CHF track that circles the mall. At game end, though, each coin equals one CHF space, so the idea of separate markers is to make the auctions work properly. What happens in the auction depends on how many cards are put up for use. If only a single card is chosen by the player, no auction happens and the player pays one coin into the ``slush fund\'\', and then executes the approval action (places a tile or a person on a tile). If two cards are auctioned, the high bidder (the auctioneer does not bid) pays the slush fund and takes their choice of cards; the auctioneer then plays the other card for free. If three cards are selected, the high bidder gets first choice to execute and pays the auctioneer, while second high gets second choice and pays the slush fund. Again, the auctioneer gets the final card for free. Auctioning three cards is the primary way to get money for future auctions, and it also encourages the building of the mall. The other way to get money is the distribution of the slush fund at the end of each player\'s turn. This is done in Traumfabrik style, meaning that the fund is evenly distributed to all players with any remainder staying in the fund. Instead of building the mall through the approval card auction, a player can choose to score an order card from their hand. This is the only way to score, and order cards held in the hand at game end are worthless. Deciding when to play a scoring card is key, as holding them can be beneficial to make them more valuable, but as people start to populate the stores the values can begin to decrease. After building the mall or scoring, players can take more approval cards. The game goes through three rounds, all played the same way and metered through the use of bribe chips. These chips show values from +4,000 to -3,000. In the first round, a set of chips is randomly chosen equal to the number of players plus one. Each time a player scores an order card, they take the most valuable bribe chip and this modifies their score. Obviously, scoring early nets a better bribe modification than scoring late. In the second and third rounds, bribe chips are placed as a function of the number of players but the same idea holds. In the third round, players can build the mall through the auction and cash in an order on the same turn, making it less risky to go into the third round with multiple unscored order cards. At the beginning of the game, each player also receives a special order card that defines a combination of specific stores that must be adjacent to score. From early in the game, players will try to create this structure as the value of the special score is much greater than the order cards purchased in the game, but of course the structure is harder to create too. The result is a game that works, but is somewhat tedious and prone to over analysis. The 16 combinations of people and stores must be considered for every purchase of order cards and selection of approval cards. Played with five, the game can really bog down. The game was designed for four; it does work better in this format but three may be best. The whole experience seems too mechanical and coldly optimizing. The game makes you think, but it isn\'t fun to play.

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Main Catalogue | Board Games & Card Games | Rio Grande Games | Mall World

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