The guys in my Wednesday gaming group started a push to play more of the old, dust-covered games at the bottom and backs of our respective game closet shelves. The premise was simple: let’s try to remember why we keep all these old games when all we ever play now are the newest, shiniest things in shrink.
Right on the spot, the Dusty Euro Series was born, and I’ve enlisted multiple game groups to help me lead the charge on covering older games.
In order to share some of these experiences, I’ll be writing a piece from time to time about a game that is at least 10 years old that we haven’t already reviewed here at Meeple Mountain. In that way, these articles are not reviews. These pieces will not include a detailed rules explanation or a broad introduction to each game. All you get is what you need: my brief thoughts on what I think about each game right now, based on one or two fresh plays.
Manhattan: What Is It?
Manhattan is a 1994 city building and area control game for 2-4 players. The game’s relatively bland board features six cities, such as Manhattan, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, and Frankfurt! (I don’t remember the skyline of Frankfurt being much of anything, but then again, life might have been different in 1994.) Players try to build the most buildings—and ideally, the highest one not only in one zone, but the biggest of the big buildings overall—to score points at the end of each round. Six rounds comprise the entire game.
Turn structure is aligned very closely with Manhattan’s key hook—the relative position that each player sits in at the table. That’s because players have a pool of 24 buildings (ranging from one story to four stories tall) and they will always have a hand of four cards used to place a building in one of the spots within each city region. The cards show a highlighted icon in one of the nine spaces available in each 3×3 grid, but each card’s relative positioning applies to each player based on the way they are seated at the board.
This means a player can’t build just anywhere on their turn, but they will always have a diverse hand of choices where they can legally build in a round. Plus, players can build on top of other player buildings, as long as they meet or exceed the number of floors anyone else has placed.
Turns are super fast in Manhattan, and even with the teach, we did a three-player game in about 30 minutes. By the end, our scores were all within four points of each other, so it felt like the scoring would always be relatively well-balanced.
You Could Go Big, But It Wasn’t Bad to Stay Home
Manhattan was only OK. There was some nice tension in each round to keep a mix of four different building spots in hand, so that you could always pivot to play a building piece in a location where you needed to keep control to score those points at the end of a round. There are easy ways to ensure that no one can score a zone if you can play a zone into a tied condition with multiple players, so that ended up being an interesting way to nerf a player who might have a big points jump late in the game.
I generally prefer my area control games at the max player count, and I think Manhattan falls into the same boat—at three players, the map was a little loose. I’d love to see how it plays at four players to see if the majority scoring would be different.
Manhattan is a 30-year-old game…and it looks that way. The Ian O’Toole of the 1990s was clearly not consulted when card design was completed, and the dry board art is in desperate need of a makeover. That said, I loved the way the board functionally does the job, so it’s easy to figure out where a player can build and the score track takes up a ton of the real estate here.
Manhattan was designed by Andreas Seyfarth. Seyfarth basically didn’t get another game published until Puerto Rico, easily his most celebrated design. Seyfarth also gave the world the Puerto Rico card game spinoff San Juan (my preference of the two), then he designed a game called Thurn and Taxis, another classic. Looking at that three-game window, there aren’t many designers who hit home runs like that in such short succession.
Manhattan is a full level or two below those other classics, so it was fun to see some of what led Seyfarth to the point where he became one of the most celebrated Eurogame designers of the modern era. I won’t be going back to Manhattan (the game, anyway), but it was a decent trip.
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