Tybor The Builder Review

Tybor the Builder!
Can we fix it?
Tybor the Builder!
Yes we can!

Players: 2-4 (2-8 with 2 sets)
Time: 30 mins
Age: 8+
Designer: Alexander Pfister, Dennis Rappel
Artist: Klemens Franz
Publisher: Lookout Spiele, Österreichisches Spiele Museum e.V.

Tybor the Builder is a new small box game from our Lord in board game heaven, Alex Pfister, and therefore the game is a must buy. Amen.

What? You’re still here? You mean to say you’ve not taken the good word of Alex Pfister into your heart? Oh my poor child, come sit down on the pew and I’ll share with you the parable of Tybor the Builder.

Oh My! Goods?

Once there was a small game called Oh My Goods! and many players saw that it was… well, good. So many indeed that there came from across the sea, expansions! Longsdale in Revolt. But what is this Longsdale and who are the people that inhabit it? That is the story that Tybor the Builder tells.

That’s right. This isn’t just a neat little card game. It has a story, a place in a world of other, excellent, small box card games. (I believe Port Royal is also set in this world). It’s like the Marvel Cinematic Universe of Euro games! Except you don’t need to feel like you must have played all the other games first. It’s just a neat little bonus for you if you have.

Instead you just get to appreciate the little bit of backstory that comes along with the games of Tybor you play. Each game features a Scenario and a Chapter which when combined gives you a dramatic 24 different games to play. Although mechanically they mostly only add some small scoring tweaks to the gameplay rather than dramatic shifts, but for a card game this small that is more than enough to add a couple of extra things to think about to the core game.

Which I really ought to explain hadn’t I?

Building Longsdale

Given the name of the game you might be expecting to be building things and you’d be right. You might also expect to be Ty-bored, but there you’d be wrong! There is a wealth of building cards to construct that will earn you points, as well as some bonuses for collecting certain colours and for making big buildings instead of small buildings and all those usual euro subtleties. But these aren’t the meat of the gameplay. That lies with the people.

Not that I mean people are meat. Don’t eat people, ok?

Each round you’ll get a hand of 5 people, choose one of them to keep and pass the rest to your opponent. It’s a classic drafting game in the style of Sushi Go or 7 Wonders but unlike those games the decisions don’t end with the selection of a card. The people you choose will do one of three things. You’ll invite them to move in, becoming permanent citizens of Longsdale and contributing some profession-associated symbol for set collection purposes, and some number of discounts on the cost of buildings. You can collect lots of these discounts to make building really cheap!

Alternatively you can take someone on as a temporary worker. In this case you get their fists! Hoo-rar! Fists, as we all know, are the main currency for paying for buildings. So by collecting workers you’ll be able to pay for buildings. But these workers get spent, whereas citizens, and their much smaller discounts, stick around forever.

Here you see the main optimisation problem, balancing the strategic citizen selection with more immediate, short term benefit from workers. But there is more to it than that. To actually build requires you to first bin the card you just drafted, then discard enough fists worth of workers to pay the cost of that building and, of course, you don’t get change. So you want to optimise the value of workers to not waste left over fists, but ‘optimal’ needs to take into account the current citizen discount you have for the colour of building you are trying to build and the current building price which steadily increases with each round that goes by.

These extra decisions make this small card game much more interesting than your classic drafting games, and much more thinkey than the size of the box would have you expect. There is a generous amount to consider with every play but never so much that it gets overwhelming. Indeed, the scenarios, chapters and personal objectives give you targets to aim for, whether it is certain kinds of buildings or “have two citizens by the end of the round”. Tybor perfectly balances the gameplay forces tugging on you like any good architect should.

But it never gives you a perfect run and this is its secret to success. It’s impossible to get a perfect set of workers and citizens and buildings. The varying cost of building coupled with the large variation of workers’ fist values means you are almost always letting something go to waste while you progress. This approach of trying to minimise your inefficiencies is a key trick to a great number of economic euro games that I find thoroughly engaging. Tybor falls comfortably into that category.

Tybor is another excellent game from Alex Pfister. Its core gameplay is fascinating and clever. It plays great, even up to 8 if you combine two sets which, since this is a small boxed game, is not unaffordable. Then on top of that you get a pile of scenario combinations that tweak those decisions every game you play. A must play.

Rating: Pfirst

Our copy of Tybor the Builder was provided for review by Asmodee UK. You can get hold of a copy from your local hobby store for £11.99 RRP.