Round House Board Game First Impressions

Round House is an Area Movement, Card Drafting, and Set Collection game.

This is my first impressions of this game.

The round houses (a.k.a., Fujian Tulou) are unique rural dwellings that can be found in the mountain areas in southeastern Fujian, China, dating back to the Ming dynasty (17th century). A round house is a large, multi-floor, enclosed, and fortified earth building housing usually a whole clan, which functions as a village and is known as “a little kingdom for the family”.

Round House Review

My first impressions of Round House including a brief overview of gameplay followed by my final summary.

Summary

So, you obviously have to try different things when you’re making a Euro game. You can’t just redo something someone else did with a little twist, people will notice.

But sometimes it just doesn’t work for you. I mean, all of these mechanisms are good but collectively they don’t work.

I don’t like a lot of the mechanisms in Terra Mystica and Gaia Project but they just work for me, weird isn’t it?

There just isn’t time to replay Euro games or any game that takes over 30 minutes, just because… It has to be good, or at least be good enough to you that it deserves your time.

Moving around the wheel is good fun. You have a restriction on the actions you can take, but you have plenty of options. VERY rarely do you look and think… “These options are terrible”.

I liked camping one of my workers in one space so no one else could take it, that was fun.

There is a lot going on, too much to go into detail. With things taking place both inside and outside the house. It all comes together in a clever way and does work well.

It’s just not… special?

I do like most of the components. The building tiles are really thick giving a pretty simple board some depth and variability. The pawns are a really poor touch and stand out on the board, in a bad way.

It’s a shame because everything else including the art on the card, the iconography and everything looks really nice.

It’s just the game is not good enough to compete.

Jesta ThaRogue