Mauer Bauer is a new game by Leo Colivini and published by Hans im Gluck. It is a game about building walls, towers and buildings to create towns in such a way that you satisfy the conditions laid down on your hand of building project cards. These might, for instance, give you 2Vps for every white tower in the finished town or 1VP for each blue building not inside a completed town.

Gameplay is pretty simple but there is usually a bit to think about on every turn. First you have to lay a piece of wall anywhere on the board. Then you place towers at each end of the wall and buildings either side of the wall. You roll some dice to indicate what colour tower and buildings have to be placed. If your wall and others previously placed completely enclose an area, a town is formed and scoring occurs. Each player has the option of declaring one or two of their building projects and scores points according to how well they have matched the card’s conditions. You then get to draw one new project (even if you’ve declared two, in which case your hand is reduced for the future). Instead of scoring, you can, however, discard a card and then get to draw 2 new projects. The game ends as soon as the supply of one of walls, towers or buildings is exhausted. Whoever has the most points wins.

The game played quite well but points are very much determined by having the right building projects at the right time. Mark K and I both suffered early on by not having decent cards and, although the person in last place has the option to swap any number of cards in their hand after a scoring, we felt we were always playing catch-up. Of course, it may have been that Mark G and Phil had planned the development of the board better to suit their cards but they consistently seemed to have good-scoring projects to declare. I also suffered through having two black tower projects in a game where nobody seemed to be rolling black towers on the dice. We also thought the game lasted a bit too long at nearly ninety minutes. Maybe we were taking too long in deciding our moves but I don’t think so. Consequently, our ratings were a bit lower than I had expected them to be, as the game seems to have been fairly well received. Maybe our game was a bit of a fluke so I’d like to try the game again. Anyway, Mark G did enough to take a decent lead going into the last few turns and was able to limit the final scoring by closing off a one-space area with the final wall to claim the win.