SiliconVania

Categories: N/A

Mechanics: Auction/Bidding, Tile Placement

Players: 2–5

Ages: 14+

Playtime: 45–90 Min

The Vampire Council is seeking a visionary City Planner to transform Transylvania into the world’s newest tech haven! You and your rivals are vying for the position, aiming to create the most innovative and diverse cityscape for both vampire and animal life. You'll need to ensure ample bloodbanks for your citizens, secure lucrative contracts, and recruit top specialists in the industry. The race is on to present the best plan to the Vampire Council and turn Transylvania into "SiliconVania"!

In SiliconVania, players bid on building tiles and multi-use specialists, each offering either one-time bonuses or end-game scoring opportunities. As you win tiles, you'll strategically place them in your 4x4 city grid, balancing various scoring options and accommodating vampire and pet meeples looking for a home.

Each round you will:

• Bid on building tiles: Add them to your grid, but choose carefully—once placed, they’re difficult to move!
• Bid on Specialist cards: Use their abilities and gain new specialists. Stronger bids yield weaker abilities, and vice versa.
• Commit a Specialist card: Use it for its scoring condition, earning points while revealing to your opponents which buildings you need most!

The game concludes after 8 rounds, with each player's city grid fully developed. You'll earn points for including all 7 building types, creating a vast network of blood banks, and providing proper housing for vampire meeples brought in by your specialists. The vampires also value biodiversity, so you'll score additional points for maintaining a variety of animals and animal meeples on your tiles. Specialists bring unique scoring conditions, such as Engineers who seek columns with four different building types, or Nobles who want blood banks adjacent to mausoleums. Players also compete to develop innovations, uncover artifacts, and construct castles and train stations to make their cities even more appealing to the growing vampire population.

Combining bidding, tile-laying, hand management, resource management, and more with smooth gameplay, SiliconVania is a game you'll want to play over and over again—for the rest of your endless, immortal lives!