Tolleno is a pretty 2–4 player game of city building, designed by Gilles Turbide and published by Sit Down! The main game is aimed at ages 10 and up, but simplified family friendly rules are provided which allow for 8+.
The publisher’s blurb reads: ‘Immerse yourself in the enchanting warmth of Southern Europe and discover the thriving city of Tolleno! Here, bold builders and visionary strategists vie for dominance over streets and canals, each move expanding their influence. In Tolleno, every structure is an opportunity, and each canal a pathway to power. Challenge your rivals and leave your mark by shaping this unique city in your image. Become more than a builder—claim your place as the master of Tolleno!’ Ignoring the overexuberance of exclamation marks, this translates as: grow a shared city map by extending canals, and raise buildings on land adjoining those canals. (No streets, to be sure—maybe the game should have been called Venice, except that already exists.)
Playing the Game
To begin, a central map is laid out with a shared contract selected at random from 4; the city tiles are shuffled and placed face down; the contract tiles are shuffled and placed face down, with 3 revealed; players take their 20 floor tokens, boat and a player board. (I like how the dual-layered boards have spaces for the floor tiles, but it irks me way more than it should that there’s no space for the boat on the board.) Finally, each player takes a city tile.
Each turn consists of 5 steps:
- Add your city tile to the map orthogonally adjacent to at least one already placed, making sure that all canals on joining edges line up;
- Create or add to a building by taking the first available floor token from your player board and placing it on a ‘valid constructible space’ anywhere alongside any canal you’ve extended—these valid spaces are empty foundation spaces or ones containing a building you’ve already created;
- Place either another floor token or a contract token (I’ll talk about contracts in a bit) similarly, but this time on a canal perpendicular to the one you extended (but not on the same tile as the first one you placed); if you’ve placed a contract token, turn another over so that 3 are available for the nest player;
- If you qualify for boat movement (see later), move your boat in a straight line along any canal from its starting tile, optionally picking up a floor token as you pass its tile and deposit it on the boat’s destination tile;
- Draw another city tile, if available.
The game ends when the final city tile is placed.
Before we get into scoring, a note on the player board and boats. Floor tokens are taken off the player board in a specific order, such that after a certain number of turns, various waypoints are passed: on your sixth turn, your boat can enter the city; on your thirteenth, it gains the ability to take one right angle turn on its journey; on the sixteenth, two turns. When a player’s boat is on a specific tile, no other player’s boat can stop in that tile (though they can pass through it), nor can they place a city tile adjacent to it; other players can’t place floor tokens or contracts, nor can they pick up floor tokens using their boats.
Players score points in 4 ways:
- Whoever has the tallest building on any city tile gains the number of points indicated by the number on the tile, with your boat adding 1 if it’s on that tile;
- Each player board has a unique scoring bonus, such as points for every building on city tiles of a particular value, or for buildings of certain heights (note that there have been comments about the player board bonuses being somewhat unbalanced, but I’ve not played the game enough to tell how valid this criticism is);
- The fountains on the map all have little arrows, and you gain points for buildings with adjacent fountains pointing at them; and
- The initial contracts award points similarly to the player board bonuses (though 1 initial contract is ‘neutral,’ offering no bonus).
The contracts you place during play also award points, but those are added as soon as you place the contract, based on the current state of the tile they’re placed on and its 8 neighbours (i.e., diagonally as well as orthogonally). Example contracts are: a point for each tile with no uncovered foundation spaces, or points per tile either with or without a contract.
And that’s Tolleno.
Similar Games
To me, this game feels a lot like Carcassonne, reviewed here, with tiles being assembled orthogonally so as to extend roads, and meeples (or other components in expansions) placed on top to score points. Tolleno’s contracts act like a few of the modified scoring mechanisms in Carcassonne’s expansions. Carcassonne (with its expansions) has a lot more flexibility, but Tolleno is prettier. Forced to choose between the pair, however, I think I’d pick Carcassonne.
There are many other map building games, such as Kingdomino, but card game Sprawlopolis, reviewed here, is one of my favourite tiny games and the way arrangements of areas contribute to scoring seems akin to Tolleno’s contracts.
The game also reminds me a little of Shallow Sea, not so much in the tile laying, but in the multiple ways of scoring and the ability to move pieces after placement, something I’ve not seen in many games (but maybe I haven’t been looking in the right places).
Wrap Up
The construction of the game is solid: nice chunky tiles, double layered player boards, and wooden floor tokens.
The tile laying part of Tolleno is so simple it makes the game seem dull. However, the myriad ways of scoring points—contracts, tallest buildings, pointy fountains—makes the game much more interesting, by adding a nice layer of complexity. The boats provide another step up in strategic play.
A second rulebook outlines the family-friendly ‘casual’ mode, which dispenses with boats and contracts—I do think that’s peeling back too many layers, and after a couple of games, even the 8-year-olds will want a bit more from the game. One of the nice things about the scoring mechanisms is that you can easily select only a few to run with, rather than dive right into the complete set.
Overall, an easy to grasp, quick and fun game—and did I mention that it’s very pretty?
About the author
When not playing boardgames or blogging about them, L.N. Hunter keeps himself occupied writing fiction: a comic fantasy novel, The Feather and the Lamp, sits alongside close to 100 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and on websites and podcasts (see https://linktr.ee/L.N.Hunter for a full list). L.N. occasionally masquerades as a software developer or can be found unwinding in a disorganised home in Carlisle, UK, along with two cats and a soulmate.
