Flatiron

The Flatiron building is a famous landmark in New York, well-known for its triangular shape. When I first saw the name, I thought it was rather weird because I thought it was pronounced as "fla-tee-ron". Only after I saw the Chinese name I realised this name was "flat" and "iron" combined. I feel dumb now. This is a 2-player game about constructing the Flatiron building. You are builders working on this skyscraper. When the project is completed, you compare points to see who wins. 

Game setup

There are four main streets surrounding the construction site. A stack of cards is set up at each street. The game uses a worker placement mechanism. These four streets and the city council are the five spots you can place your worker. Each player has only one worker. On your turn you must move him to a new spot to perform an action. 

This is your player board. It is divided into four columns. These four columns correspond to the four streets. When you visit a street, you can buy the top card there, or you can execute the actions on your player board matching that street. When you buy cards, you can tuck them below or above your player board, depending on whether you want to use the top half or bottom half of the card. This augments the actions available at your player board. Every column can have at most 3 cards added. You can't remove cards, so you have to think carefully when you add cards. When you execute actions at a particular column on your player board, you always go from top to bottom. The dark coloured cards are not action cards. They are scoring cards which will only be evaluated at the end of the game. 

Those coloured circles on your player board are your storage for the four types of pillars. Each storage space can store just one pillar in one specific colour. You need pillars for constructing the building. At each level of the building you'll need to build three pillars of different colours before you can build the next floor.

Actions you can perform in the game include buying pillars, selling pillars, building pillars, building floors, making money, and exchanging pillars. The player boards for the two players are different. The pillar costs and action positions differ.

Every floor has a unique rule. This rule takes effect when the floor is the topmost visible floor. In the photo above, the floor-specific rule is whoever visits the red street (5th Avenue) earns $1. There are three positions on a floor for building pillars. Some of them give specific rewards. The act of building pillars gives you points. The more expensive that pillar is, the more points you'll score. 

The player workers block each other. You often want to deliberately deny your opponent if you see there is something he wants to get or do. 

This is the scoring board. Whenever the leading player reaches a multiple of 10, he collects two newspapers from the paper boy (the white pawn), and the paper boy jumps to the next multiple of 10. Newspapers are single-use special powers. The leading player keeps one and gives the other to the trailing player.

Some cards that you buy affect your reputation. At the end of the game, your reputation is evaluated independently for each of the four columns at your player board. You get a bonus if the column sum is positive, or a penalty if it is negative. This is another consideration when you purchase cards. Yet another consideration is that you can only have one dark card per column.

This is a very Euro strategy game. You must plan to upgrade your player board because this makes your actions more powerful. You will be able to do more within a single turn. This is the interesting part of the game. You can augment your abilities differently from game to game. You try to build effective combos. And all this is happening at the same time as you are trying to construct the Flatiron building as efficiently as possible. This is a two player game that does not feel like a two player game. I wonder whether it was originally designed as a multiplayer game, but during development they found that it worked mostly as a two player game, and then decided to make it so. 

I played with Jetta at Board Game Station, which is in Fo Tan, Hong Kong.