Design Your Post-War Suburban Paradise in the Board Game Welcome To…
At Gen Con this year, Deep Water Games held an open session of the game Welcome to… in a large room at the Indianapolis Convention Center and announced that they were looking for two hundred people to play it. It was a hell of a marketing gimmick, both because the number was such an attention grabber and because it demonstrates so well the way Welcome to… scales to any number of players. With simultaneous turns and plenty of decisions for players to make, it’s quick to play but has the depth of a much longer game, and it plays as well with two as it would with two hundred.
In Welcome to… each player gets a paper map of their new town, with three streets of 10, 11 and 12 houses. All players work from three decks of house cards to fill out their towns to maximize their point totals while obeying numbering rules—your houses must go in ascending order from left to right on each street, lest you confuse the mail carrier. On each turn, the top card of each deck is flipped to create a new pair of cards: a house number from one to 15, and one of six possible actions for the player to take. Each player chooses one number-action pair, writes the house number somewhere on their map, and takes the (optional) action. Two players can choose the same pair, of course, and everyone takes their turns at the same time.
The numbering is important, but the actions are the heart of the game. There are dashed lines between all the houses, and you can take a fence action to make one solid, creating “estates” between the fences or between a fence and the end of a street; estates can comprise one to six houses, and you earn points for each completed estate (fenced in, all houses assigned numbers) at game-end. The real estate agent action lets you increase the points you earn for a specific size of estate—for example, you can increase the point value of a one-house estate from one point to three. The temporary worker action gives you flexibility on the house number you use in that turn, allowing you to increase or decrease it by one or two (so, yes, you could number a house zero, or go up to 17). Some houses have pools drawn above them on your map, and if you take a pool action, you can write that associated number on one of those houses and score the pool, with the value of pools increasing the more you build. The park action lets you increase your points for parks on the street where you’re writing the house number; if you max out your parks on any street, the point value jumps to 10/14/18 depending on which street.
The last action allows you to duplicate a house number you’ve already placed, which can be critical in filling in an estate or any other gap you’ve created on a street. It’s the only action with a penalty associated with it; the first time you use it, you lose one point, and the penalty increases the more you use it. But filling in all your house numbers without ever needing this action is difficult, and you may decide to plan for this action to score more points elsewhere—for example, you might want to put number 11 on a house with a pool to score that feature, but by doing so, you’ve left a blank house between that and house number 10, which you could only fill with a duplication card that lets you number another house as 10 (you would write “10 bis” for the mail carrier).
