This week, I was back from Essen with a stack of new games to play. One of the games getting good initial reports was the latest from Andrea Meyer, about developing a shopping mall. Five of us met at John's house to give it a try.

The idea of the game is to make money by building stores within the mall in the best positions, as dictated by the order cards. These orders are either Use orders which state that certain store types need to be adjacent to other types (such as clothing shops next to hobby shops) or Rent orders. Each store type can be rented to a vendor who targets one type of consumer (men, women, teenagers or kids) - so Belt & Button sets up clothing stores targeted at men. The Rent orders then reward setting particular vendors next to each other (Belt & Button next to Skateman - a sports store targeted at teenagers). The gameplay involves taking an order card from four available; then either confirming an order by placing it on the table in front of you or offering up to 3 Approval cards for auction. These cards allow the winning bidders to reserve a site within the mall for a particular store type or buy up a site of the correct type for a particular vendor. The cash paid for these cards will either go to the auctioning player or the slush fund. Once this has been dealt with, players can change cards no longer playable, restock their hand by two cards (up to a maximum of 8) and, distribute the content of the slush fund if sufficient money has been paid into it.

Play continues in each round until a certain number of orders have been confirmed, at which point players receive income from the confirmed orders they have in front of them. The game ends after three rounds or earlier if all the vendors have been placed in stores within the mall. Whoever has the most cash wins.

The game looked pretty good but our attempt fell a bit flat. Nige decided confirming an order on every turn was the winning strategy (where possible) and this was repeated by everyone else except me. Consequently, while I was trying to place store types and vendors to best suit my order cards later in the game, other players had their order cards down quickly, ending the round before I could get mine down. Now I'm sure if everyone had not followed the Nige strategy, the rounds would have lasted longer, enabling longer term strategies to work, but it certainly hampered my position in the first two rounds. I caught up a bit in the third round but not enough to catch Nige and Mark G. I hope this isn't a killer strategy and, on hearing some of the favourable comments from those at Essen, I suspect it's not but it certainly dampened our ratings of the game. This was a shame because the theme certainly appealed to me. We'll have to try again soon.