Before we go any further, I’ve got something to get off my chest. I promise it’s not one of my usual rants, it won’t take long. Promise. But… It’s a shopping centre, okay? It’s not a mall. I didn’t pull on my favorite color of pants before heading out on the sidewalk to get there, doing a spot of jay-walking while eating a family pack of chips. This is England, and I won’t stand for it! We use England-isms around here, and that’s that. Okay, I’ve put that to bed, and I’ll never mention it again. Onwards…
Midtown Mall is a Roll and Write game where you will be running your own shopping centre. I mean mall, sorry. Build up the reputation and stores of your mall while you manage different resources to get the highest amount of sales. This game is designed to be played solo over 20 minutes, and it only requires 5+ dice in total. Just print out the game to start playing (and pray that your printer isn’t evil and that it doesn’t hate you the way mine hates me).
It involves engine-building combos (where investing in marketing unlocks more dice and bigger turns), strategic trade-offs (do you improve products now or build hype for later sales explosions?), and high replayability, with the availability of different products and upgrade paths every game, and not forgetting that all-important solo-friendly depth.
This roll and write game features three main sections, Product Development, Marketing and the actual Shopping Centre… sorry, Mall itself. In the Product Development phase you will increase the prices of the products that are sold in the mall. The more focused the development of a product, the higher the price and marketing for that product. The next phase is Marketing, which helps increase the number of customers who come to your store, as well as building hype and review ratings for the store. This section also includes attracting investments into facilities for the mall as well as unlocking more dice to add to the total customer dice. The final Mall section includes all the different stores that sell the products you have been working on as well as stores for the wealthy VIPs (oo, look at you) that have been generous with their investments. Each customer bring potential sales and even build hype to further more marketing efforts through word of mouth.
Midtown Shopping Centre… sorry, I mean Midtown Mall (oh yeah, that does sound like a better title actually) is live on crowdfunding right now, so if you’re window shopping around Kickstarter (see what I did there?) then why not pop in here for a price comparison?
About the author:
Steve is currently a freelance board game blogger, but often dreams of life as a pirate, or as a ghost herder in the Lake District, or as an evil estate agent who sells haunted houses for his own dark pleasure. Instead of figuring out how to do these jobs in real life like a normal lunatic, he tries to write about them instead, and releases the resultant books upon the unsuspecting world via famous digital bookstores. More books are bound to follow. Find this peculiar entity here.
