Designers: Benjie Talbott
Publisher: Cosy Cub Games, Mighty Boards
1-5 players | 30-45 min. | ages 8+ | MSRP $30 | BGG Entry
Time to teach and learn: 5 minutes  

Game Synopsis

Ddinbych y pysgod is the name of one of the most charming seaside towns in Wales. It means little fortress of fish. Its long beaches, colorful terraced houses, and landmarks like a medieval city wall make it an ideal spot for a quiet holiday or a cozy place to call home. Ages ago English invaders renamed the town Tenby. Visitors now flock to Tenby from across the British Isles. In this game, players get the chance to build their own miniature version of Tenby, street by street, hoping to assemble the right combination of features, icons, and residences to make their little fortress of fish shine the brightest and score the most.

You have ten nights and ten days to build your version of Tenby. At night you place a token on the action card you want to use during the day. Day actions allow you to claim town cards from the marketplace that will shape the streets you build or resident cards whose preferences can give each new building decision a direction. 

Three types of town cards will create your Tenby: terraces, piers, and landmarks. The charming illustrations on each town card depict houses, shops, restaurants, scenic, locales, and waterfront vistas. To create your streets, the artwork on each town card you place must line up correctly. You could create one long street or many shorter ones, hoping to cap off each street with end cards. 

After ten turns every card in your little Tenby will score based on a simple condition, asking you to look closely and count features like seagulls or chimneys - flowers or clouds - lobster traps or lamps. Resident cards follow a similar method but apply their preferences to a single street or the whole town. Resident’s scoring potential is also greatly enhanced when your streets are complete. The town with the highest point total wins the game.

Why We Love Tenby

Tenby offers players a great deal of freedom and creativity in how they construct their town. Day actions may give you access to multiple kinds of town cards, each with their own scoring mechanism and series of illustrated elements. Many action cards have life preserver icons, which are an additional form of currency in the game.

You can spend these life preserver tokens to add new cards to the marketplace, move a card within your town to a new location, or even take additional actions on your turn. So the freedom in Tenby includes a wide array of choices when building each card into a street and an equally flexible set of options when it comes to selecting your actions each turn.

Tenby is also incredibly modular, offering players of vastly different ages and experience levels a variety of ways to explore the game. I have described the base game above, but included in the rules are five different options that add depth and complexity. There is also a solo variant. Most surprising of all are the rules for eight additional family games that can be played using Tenby’s components. There are many worlds to explore in this one small Welsh town.

Tenby is the epitome of coziness. What does cozy mean in this context? Though there is a winner and a loser in a cozy game, greater emphasis is placed on the process of playing and each player's shared investment in the world of the game. The world of a cozy game must be compelling to the point that players lose themselves in helping create it. How many games do you know of that come with their own soundtrack? 

We are still guided by a common goal: create optimal scoring engines for each town card we build into our streets. But the risks and sub optimal moves that are baked into the DNA of this game shift the focus to an equally important endeavor: playing for play’s sake. 

Many turns there may not be a terrace or pier or landmark card that meshes well with the compliment of features on your streets. You may decide to start a new street or place a seemingly useless card on an existing one, hoping it may pay off in other ways down the road. Or you may make a purely aesthetic decision because your current street doesn’t have enough restaurants along the seaside. 

The charming artwork creates a modular storybook landscape, rich in detail, and is far from window dressing. Almost every small element in each illustration on a town card could potentially benefit your Tenby in some way. If only you could find the right place for it, that is.  Each player’s tenby offers a series of puzzles to be unraveled as you build out your town over ten turns. 

Winning still provides structure and purpose in a cozy game, but there are internal victories, not measured by the final score in a cozy game that bring as much pleasure and enjoyment as winning. Given the vagaries of the marketplace of town cards and random resident cards you may have access to during the game, your goal may soon shift to creating the best little town you can with the options you were given.  And that achievement can be just as satisfying in Tenby as having the town with the highest score. 

Cozy games help us understand and rewrite the rules of why we play. Winning can be fun and is an important element to be sure, but it isn’t the only one that can bring real joy in satisfaction. Tenby insists that you can find just as much major fun wandering through the side streets, listening to the music of your very own quiet seaside town in Wales.

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Congratulations to designer Benjie Talbott

More information on Tenby at Cosy Cub Games

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