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Barker's Row is a 2-4 player game in which you are a carnival barker trying to fill your 3D chipboard seats with "rube" meeples by playing the most fantastic attractions.
You draft these barker cards from a community pool and play them into the midway. Then you use those cards to play one of fifty or so attractions that will amaze and delight the rube meeples in your seats while giving you a special power to use later in the game. Stay tuned for some drafts of these attractions, such as Lobster Boy, Goose-Necked Girl, and the Fiji Mermaid. Each time you play an attraction, you climb higher on the strongman tower, making the next one harder to play, serving as an elegant and thematic catch-up mechanism. The player to first fill all their seats wins!
- Strong aesthetics and presentation
- Accessible light-weight design
- Not highly innovative mechanically
- Carnival of oddities and attractions
- Spooky carnival
- theatrical, showman vibe
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Set Collection — Collect attractions to gain unique benefits; aim to score quickly by filling slots and accruing rubles.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- this is the game where you're going to be putting together a spooky Carnival filled with Oddities Horrors beasts and all sorts of variety of attractions in order to shock and thrill your audience
- it's cute it's very light-hearted but the set collection elements are actually really fun
- it's like being at a party and going from Booth to Booth
- one of my all-time favorite aesthetics in board gaming
- this is a really cool game ... it has a niroshima hex vibe
- the reference materials are so well put together that it's never difficult to know what to do next
- this is a gorgeously punishing game that I own
- the Bloody Inn is a card game where you lure and guests into your murder hotel