Tenby - How to Play. Including variants. Complete, Concise, Clear Board Game Tutorial
Transcript
In the quaint town of Tenby, full of houses, fish and chips shops, and more, rearrange your town efficiently in Tenby.
And today, we'll be teaching you how to play Tenby, game designed and drawn by Benji Talbot, and published by Mighty Boards.
And hi everyone, it's Stella.
And Tarrant, welcome to Meeple University.
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The Welsh town of Dinbych-y-Pysgod, known to the English as Tenby, is renowned for its seaside amenities and brightly colored terraces. In the game of Tenby, players will draft cards to build their own terraced streets. Each card has a scoring objective, which will score for the cards nearby, as well as to satisfy the residents of their towns. And over 10 rounds, whoever can score the most points in their town will win. Tenby is a card game, and to set up, you'll prepare all of the decks. In the base game, these are shuffled face-down decks of terrace cards, pier cards, and landmark cards, as well as three smaller decks, the plain end terraces, the plain end piers, and the starter cards, which show the word Tenby.
These are all collectively known as town cards, and for the starters, each player takes one, with any leftovers returned to the box. The non-town cards are residents, day cards, and night cards, and for basic play, you'll set aside the accolades and the two decks of solo cards. Prepare all those cards into the central area in some way that fits. You'll have night cards up to the player count laid out in a row. Deal out one more day card than there are players, and arrange them left to right in ascending numerical order. Deal one more terrace card than there are players. Deal as many pier cards as there are players.
Deal one fewer landmark than there are players. And leave room for a discard pile for each of those four decks. Remember this layout. At the start of each of the game's 10 rounds, you're going to refill to a tableau of this size. Make a supply of life rings. This is the game's base currency. Randomly choose a first player and in clockwise order put each player's marker on the night track. To complete setup, each player draws two resident cards from the top of the deck, looks at them, chooses one to keep, and places the other on the bottom of the deck. Players must agree before the game whether resident cards are face down and secret or face up and public.
You're now ready to play.
Then be placed over 10 rounds.
That's 10 chances to build the quaintest, most colorful, and highest scoring slice of seaside paradise.
Each round resolves in three phases: night, day, and cleanup.
The first phase is night. And in this phase, each player will take one turn to choose their action for the day. Resolve this from lowest number to highest number on the night track. On your turn, move your marker to any one of the day cards that you wish, which does not already have another player's marker. If you choose a card with a life ring on it, and we'll see how those get there later, take it now. Once each player has chosen a day card, you'll proceed to the day phase. In this phase, each player takes one turn from left to right on the day cards, during which they'll collect any rings on their card, resolve any other action icons on their card, and optionally pay life rings from their supply to take any number of the life ring actions printed on the player aid.
You can always resolve all actions available to you in any order. Other than gaining rings, there are four different actions you'll find on day cards. The gray action is gain a terrace. Take a face-up terrace from the market or a face-down one from the top of the deck or a plain end terrace from the stand-alone display if any remain. Then add it to your town. There are rules about how to add these and other cards to your town and I'll explain these later in the video. The blue action is to gain a pier card. In a similar vein, pick any one from the face-up market or face-down off the deck or from the plain pier end pile or take a terrace card following the standard terrace card rules.
Piers tend to be better than terraces, which is why you can downgrade a pier action to a terrace action. The yellow icon is to gain a landmark. Same rules apply. Take a landmark from the face-up market or face-down off the deck or downgrade that action to take either a pier or a terrace card. And for the purple resident action, take two cards face-down from the top of the resident deck, look at them, and choose one to keep, returning one to the bottom of the deck as you did in setup. A resident action cannot be changed or downgraded to a landmark, pier, or terrace action. You can, however, downgrade any of the four actions, including the resident action, to be simply gaining a single life ring.
Then, during your day turn, in addition to those actions on your day card, you can also take those same four actions as extra actions by paying life rings. A terrace action would cost you two life rings, a pier action would cost you three, landmark or resident would cost you four, and you may also choose to spend one life ring to flip a new card face up to the landmark, pier, or terrace market. The only other action is move, but we need to know a little bit more about placement rules and building your town before explaining this action. Once each player has taken a day turn, it's time for cleanup. Add one life ring to the unchosen day card.
Move player markers from left to right back onto the night track. Discard all of the chosen day cards and all unchosen town cards. Now, refill the market to its original state. Should a deck run out while you're doing this, shuffle its discards to form a new deck and then continue drawing. Now, proceed to the next round. In a town as picturesque as Canby, players can't just plonk their piers and terraces all over the place willy-nilly.
That's right. About placement rules, you must respect.
Each player's town is broken into streets, and each street is an unbroken row of cards. There is no limit to how long a street may be, and no limit to how many streets you may have. Anytime you gain a new town card, you may use it to start a new street, or you may add it to either end of an existing street as long as the artwork matches. That is terrace to terrace or pier to pier with one of these end terraces found in the terrace deck used to transition between the two. Those standard double-sided end terrace cards can be used for this purpose and they are reversible allowing you to choose which side they transition.
You may not insert a card into the middle of a street. It may only be placed on one of the two edges. A card showing this tick mark represents the end of the street. Mostly seen on pier cards, but occasionally on end terraces, this closes off the end of that street meaning no further cards may be placed on that side. The plain end pier cards, which again can be reversed either way, may also be used for this purpose. A street with a tick on each side is called a completed street and may score more points at the end of the game. A street may have any combination of terraces and piers as long as the artwork matches with one exception.
Which is that a street may not have more than one landmark card. These are the yellow backed cards generally worth the most points, which can also be identified by the landmark icon in the top right and the yellow border around its scoring objective. Right now, if I were to gain a new landmark card, I would have no choice but to start a new street with it because both of my existing streets already have one landmark. Once you started building your street, there is only one way to adjust the cards in their interior and that is by taking the move action at a cost of two life rings. A single move action lets you pick any one built card from anywhere and move it to any other location in your town.
This could include a new street or onto the ends or middle of an existing street. If you pick a card out of the middle of a street, immediately slide that street back together. Once you're done, all streets must still conform to all placement rules including edges matching between cards and only one landmark per street. After 10 rounds, the game is over. Your towns are complete and it's time to count up the final scores.
May the best quaintist town win.
Go through all of your played cards and score each one one at a time. A card with a number simply scores the points printed on it. A card with a white single arrow scores for each time the printed feature appears on the adjacent card each side. This is at most one card each way and does not count itself. Here, it's two points per adjacent lamp post and therefore four points. A card with a black double arrow is similar, but it looks at the two cards either side. Again, excluding itself. Here, we're looking for flower boxes and in the two adjacent cards each side, there's five flower boxes for five points.
The landmarks have a gold full-length arrow and will score that feature across the entire street including itself. Here, it's two points per home and there are three homes for six points. Objectives may score for illustrated features, building types printed at the top, or building colors. The white question mark buildings count as if they are all colors, meaning they can match multiple different colors on other cards scorings. While these gray or brick patterns often seen on landmarks count as having no color for these scoring purposes. Finally, score your resident cards. There are two types of cards per street and one street.
For a per street resident, count up the total number of different streets you have that meet the objective. Here, for example, it's a street with two yellow buildings. In this case, you'd score five points for each completed street. Remember, that's with a tick on each end, which meets the objective, and two for each incomplete street that meets it. For a one street only, you pick your single highest scoring street in that objective, which in this case would be six, eight, or 12 points for a completed street with three, four, or five or more benches, or half those points if the street in question was incomplete. The player with the highest score wins. If tied, whoever has the most completed streets breaks the tie.
If still tied, most points from residents, and if still tied, victory is shared. There are a couple of variants which come with the standard game of Tenement City. You may agree to play a shorter game over eight rounds instead of 10. You may choose to trigger the 10th round thanks for visiting bonus. At the end of round nine, after clearing the markets and before replenishing them, in turn order, each player takes a turn to get a pier or a terrace for free, drawing a total of three cards from between the two decks, looking at them, choosing one to take, and discarding the others. You may downgrade this choice to a single life ring if you wish.
The other optional module is to use the accolade cards, and there are three ways to do this. In the open sea variant, lay three of these accolades face up in setup, and at the end of the game, each player counts up the total number of the given feature in their towns, with 10 points going to the player who has the most. If tied, split the points rounded down as evenly as possible. In the ebb and flow module, each player is dealt one accolade face down. You can keep your accolade face down forever, or you can flip it face up for free in setup, or flip it face up at any stage during the game for a life ring cost equal to the current round.
At the end of the game, if your accolade is still face down, but you have achieved it by having the most of what's shown there, then you gain five points instead of the printed 10. It's worth fewer points, but nobody else can claim it. If at any point you've flipped it face up, now any player may score it based on whoever meets the objective. And whoever scores it scores 15 points instead of the printed 10. As usual, tied players split the points rounded down. Finally, in the high tide variant, lay as many accolades face up near the board as one more than the number of players. These begin the game inactive. Nobody will score them.
But as a life ring action during a day phase, you may pay life rings to make one of them active. The first activation costs two rings, the second and third each cost three rings, fourth and fifth cost four, and the sixth cost five. Once an accolade is active, all players are competing to score it exactly as they would have in the open sea variant.
Thanks for watching. And if you like this video, maybe just maybe you'd like to watch this next one. Have a great day. Bye.