Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7880987/tenby

Designer: Benjie Talbott
Publisher: Cosy Cub Games
Artist: Benjie Talbott

Tenby is a tableau building game focused on creating streets in the beautiful city of Tenby. Each round, players draft cards to add to their streets, gain citizens for their city, and even gain life ring tokens to help them throughout the game. After ten rounds, players score their streets. Each card in a street has a specific scoring condition that relates to adjacent cards and the citizens provide points for certain accomplishments and completed streets.

The solo game incorporates a compass deck and an anchor deck. The compass deck is for the player who draws two each round and chooses one to use. The compass cards outline which types of cards the player can draft that round (or other actions they can do). The anchor cards are for the automated opponent which removes cards from the draft grid. There is a clever initiative type system where the anchor and compass cards both have numerical values on them, and whichever has the lower value goes first. If the player is allowed to go first, any cards they take that would be taken by the opponent but cannot be then count as negative points at the end of the game.

Besides the standard game, there are some variations to try (there are some for solo and multiplayer). I gave a couple of them a go, but I think the base game is my favorite way to play. The accolades were an enjoyable addition and provide good variety, but the other scenarios were entirely too challenging and luck based for my preferences.

Expanding on that point, in general, this game has a little too much luck for me, but especially when it comes to those additional versions. There are certain cards you may need to be successful and there are so many cards in the decks that you may never see them.

On the other hand, the number of cards included is really impressive and great for variability. It would be nearly impossible to have similar games based on the card shuffling and which card combinations you get. That said, the gameplay for me got a little stale after five or so plays. Like I said, I tried some of the additional scenarios included but none of them felt different or interesting enough to keep me engaged.

The artwork is absolutely adorable though. It’s perfect for the game and really fits the vibe. I also really like the scoring and how each card scores differently and gains points based on certain symbols being on adjacent cards. It’s very clever and creates a really fascinating and challenging puzzle to solve. The storage boxes included are also amazing. They’re even labeled!

For me, Tenby is good but not great. I am interested in trying multiplayer, but the solo game got repetitive pretty quickly despite the inherent variety. I find the scoring really neat and I like the drafting, but there’s not much mechanically that really sets it apart from other set collection games.