Name – Housing Crisis
Players – 2
Difficulty – 8+
Time – 5 mins
Cost – £9.99 (Projected cost)
Available – Unreleased as yet. (Soon to be a Kickstarter project.)
Game Company – Rack & Pinion Games
Credits – Ashley Yeates (Game designer, artist & developer) & Hannah Pazza (Assistant designer)
In this exciting 2 player strategy game, players assume the role of overwhelmed real estate brokers trying to place lodgers into a new suburban development without wasting any housing space or upsetting them by cramming too many into one plot.
Game tokens represent the daily clients calling into your office which you must house effectively to earn maximum commission and ultimately the coveted “Broker of the Week” award.
The rules for this boardgame come on a two-sided A4 sheet of paper, which explains the mechanics of play with examples to help. Simple to read the first time through, and the examples of play helped with anything that would cause a little head scratch. But overall it was a simple and straight forward rule book, that took next to no time to read through. Now I enlisted a friend that is not your typical gamer, in fact you could not really call him a gamer as such, unlike you or me. (I thought he would be a good test guinea pig for this.) He mostly understood & quickly suggested to get down to a game.
Once the tokens were separated and then shuffled, we got down to play our first game. A little over five minutes later we had finished our first game, and my friend had rally enjoyed himself, and happily agreed to another round. We played two further rounds, both lastly about five minutes.
These next three images are of the final lay-out of the board after play. (After 1st play, then after 2nd, and then after 3rd.)
Well my friend who isn’t much of a gamer really enjoyed playing this game, and easily understood what was happening, and how to play straight away after beginning to play the first round. Now he has enjoyed playing Carcassonne a few time before, but has not always knew what he was doing in most parts.
This game for me was a straight forward, easy to learn, and simple to play game. But after playing you start to think about where and how to play to gain the most and screw your opponent up. It is a quick game to play with not a lot of parts, or a big play area needed. It may look a little simple, but there has been a lot of thought in to the mechanics of the game, and a lot of play testing involved.
Ashley has told me that they will be going down the Kickstarter route to begin with, so keep an eye out for this project popping up, I feel this is worth a look at and supporting. A really fun game to play. I will let you know when the Kickstarter goes up too.
GAMING TALES 