The Estates Review
Delicately, a chunk of wood is lifted from the collection beside the board and placed emphatically in the centre of the table. A simple piece of wood, and yet… the air thickens. Chairs creak as bodies lean back calculating. Someone groans. The person who chose that piece of wood smiles. They chose well.
Players: 2-5
Time: 40-60 mins
Designer: Klaus Zoch
Artist: Daan van Paridon, Thijs van Paridon
Publisher: Capstone Games
The Estates is a game of gentle minimalism. Minimalist aesthetics meets minimal mechanics meets the merest hint of thematic grounding. At its heart is a simple auction. A mechanic that dominated game designs in the late 90s but fell out of vogue. Indeed, The Estates is a (reimagining? Update on? Reimplementation of) a 2007 design, Neue Heimat. Yet this long neglected style of game is here to show you what games can be.
You are builders constructing three streets of towers… wait, no, you can own multiple building firms. Or even none at all. Hold on.
You are investors, attempting to make the most money during a construction boom. Three new streets of glistening steel and glass… wait, no, you’ll be deciding where things are built, regardless of what company you own. Hold on.
You are players, attempting to get the most points by investing wisely and building three streets of wooden blocks in the way that most benefits you. Whether you think of yourself as builder or investor doesn’t overly matter yet both offer a sufficiently good heuristic for your role in the game. You will have a hand of money.
You will bid that money for the right to place the wooden pieces that will become the titular Estates. The auction is simple. If it’s your turn, you select one of the available wooden pieces and each player, in turn order, gets to suggest a price or pass. You, as selecting player, may choose to accept the highest price, in which case the bidder hands you that much cash and gets to place the piece on the board, or you decide to pay the suggester their price so that you get to place the piece you picked. It is about the simplest auction system possible and gives the game a fantastically punchy pace. You barely have to wait to be involved and you care what everyone else is doing.
It has some wonderful implications. The economy of this game is closed: money only moves between players it never* leaves the game, it never enters. Any money you hand to another player is money they will be able to use against you later. The richest players have immense power but actually wielding that power depletes it and ensures no one player can take an insurmountable position.
*yes, yes, I know, embezzling but shussh.
The simple act of choosing what to put up for auction is immensely important. Do you want to guarantee you get a chance to place a particular piece? But then miss out on the chance to gain money for a whole round of auctions? Can you afford to leave other pieces out for someone else to control the auction of. When bidding, even if you don’t want to place the piece is it worth bumping the price up for the player who does? It’s fraught with difficult to evaluate options and that decision space is joyous to navigate.
Why it is so good is in what those pieces of wood mean. Why you care about them. The main type to worry about are the coloured square blocks. These are the core tower pieces. The first time a purple block comes up for auction, you are not just bidding to place the block, you are bidding to be owner of the purple company. From then on, you will care intimately about where purple blocks get placed. That brings us to how things score.
There are a lot of spaces on this board. The dirty churned up building site is where towers will be built into three streets. Each tower is worth points equal to the numbers on all the wooden pieces in that tower. But the tower is owned by whichever colour is at the top of the tower. Placing a block on top of another block is a power move, depriving the lower block’s owner of its points and gifting them to the owner of the new block. The only way to secure your tower is to place a rooftop piece on top. The tower is finished, those are your points. Good news.
Except, is it? Ownership can easily become a poisoned chalice thanks to one spectacularly brilliant rule: any street that is unfinished (not full of roofed buildings) at the end of the game scores negative points.
Suddenly the game goes from some jolly construction exercise to balancing on top a bronking bull. As soon as you take control of a good scoring tower, everyone else will be determined to make sure that street does not finish. The game only needs two streets to finish to end the game so somewhere has to lose out! Therefore everyone is motivated to find someone to work together on finishing the street they are most exposed on. This is why you’ll bid on other players pieces. To bring them into your streets, even to cover up your blocks on a street you want out of.
The game is in trying to manage this exposure, but to still come out ahead of everyone else. It starts at the very beginning with those first bids that assign companies. How many blocks does that company have? Are they near the edges of the stack? What’s their value? How many companies do I start? Dare I try having no companies and attempting to arrange no street finishing, leaving everyone else on negative points? Because such a thing is absolutely possible.
The final, special pieces lean into this chaos. 3 blocks can be used to extend or reduce the length of a street, deep into the park if you so wish! Skewering a high scoring street or saving a short street you control. There’s a cancel block to throw one of these pieces away. And finally we have the mayor’s hat. A hilarious piece that doubles the score of the street he is attached to – positive or negative!
Every piece that gets placed shifts the game state in new and exciting ways. It makes The Estates highly tactical. Any plan is one of mitigating your current risk. It evolves constantly. You need to be able to pivot and grasp opportunities when they appear. But as much as it may be about riding a middle line, it’s a wild ride! You’ll run out of money, players will win games with negative points, you’ll overspend, underspend and end up with pieces you never wanted because you thought someone else cared more than they did. It is that most wonderful and addictive of things: surprising.
It has so pleasantly surprised me. Every so often a game comes along that grabs your attention and refuses to let go. The Estates is such a game. I want to revel in this wild west of towers and zoning permits. And I want you to revel in it with me.
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