Description

An expansion for Alban Viard’s Town Center.
In Town Center, players build a city – in particular, the town center. They add cubes on their personal board and try to arrange them as best as possible in order to score the most victory points. Each cube represents a different type of module. Flats, shops, offices, generators, lifts, car parks, town hall can be built and stacked during the course of the game. Each module generates influence on adjacent land and on cubes directly below or above.

The Town Center: Essen / SPIEL expansion is comprised of 4 double-sided player boards, with the all-new Essen expansion map on one side, and the also all-new SPIEL expansion map on the other. There’s also an A5-sized rulesheet/cover that explains the special rules of each map.

The expansion was a special edition made for the SPIEL ’14 fair in Essen, Germany.

Both maps pay homage to the home of all of boardgamedom, that former industrial city by the Rhine, and the world-famous SPIEL fair. Essen is a spread-out urban/sub-urban environment with a distinct value placed on available parking spots, while SPIEL is divided into three large halls with very limited space in which to move around.

In Essen, just one part of the sprawling Ruhr megalopolis, it is always difficult to find parking, especially if a fair is happening at the Messe. This is why at the end of the game, a Residential unit must be adjacent to a parking lot (in addition to the usual Utilities cube) to score victory points.

In the halls of SPIEL, the most valuable booths generate the most sales and prestige for their occupants. In an abstraction of the time and effort that is necessary to build an impressive booth, this is represented by the height that the green (now booth) units reach. Their location is also important, as they can only be supplied by yellow Utilities cubes that can only be built in the Galleria. Finally, booths will earn bonuses if they can reach gamers in certain halls. This map demonstrates the difficulty in fitting everything (games, booths, visitors) in a very tight space (and time)!