The Grand Carnival Review

Build the best carnival around.

The Grand Carnival is a tile drafting worker placement game with much more strategy than meets the eye. On your turn, you place one of your workers on an empty numbered space on your player board. Then you choose to either take a foundation tile, an attraction tile, or move visitors the number of spaces as the number you selected. The core gameplay is done in foundations and attractions. You must have foundations played in order to place attractions. Moving visitors will help you score points. If they stop adjacent to an attraction then a ticket is placed on any of them which will help earn points at the end of the game. If they reach the top most spot on the board, the big top, you'll earn points for the amount of visitors in that space. There are also 3 special cards randomly laid out at the beginning of the game which will help you to "break" the game if you meet a specific prerequisite. For example, you can rotate pieces in one card which is immensely helpful, especially if you need a specific foundation. Whoever has the most points at the end of the 7th round wins.

The Good: There is so much thought that goes into every single turn you take. Because your foundation tiles must be oriented a certain way you must decide if it's worth it to use an expensive action on something that you may not want to do or if you want to take a chance and draw a tile blindly hoping that you'll be able to take a big attraction later in the round. You also need to be careful that you aren't blocking any potential movements spots. I love games that are deceptively challenging like this.

The Okay: I wish the game wasn't so restrictive with the actions of the Tricks of the Trade cards. You're at the mercy of 3 random cards that may not be super beneficial to your gameplay. However, these cards are also necessary to the game because they can give you a huge advantage. Especially if they're available to you early on.

The Not So Good: My only real complaint with this game was that towards the end it felt like a race to get visitors to the big top or get as many tickets placed as you could. Around the 5th round or so my wife and I had both had our boards as full as they could be.

Overall: 8/10

The Grand Carnival really took me by surprise. What I thought was going to be a somewhat simple tile laying game turned out being something completely different. The restrictive nature of the game made it feel so much tighter. Every decision felt important. This is a game that I could play over and over again.

Thanks to Uproarious for sending this my way.