Walking up and down the canals of Amsterdam, there’s one thing that we couldn’t tear our eyes away from…the architecture of course! Which is the inspo for today’s game.

Key stats

2 to 5 players | 20 minutes | Age 8+

Publisher: Gigamic (distributed by Hachette Boardgames UK)
Designer: Zach Hoekstra
Art: Jason Gamber

Categories: City Building, Card game, Simultaneous play
Key mechanics: Closed drafting (pick and pass), Set collection, 

Game overview

In Canal Houses, players simultaneously build up their own colourful Amsterdam streets, from house bases to tippety-rooftops. Each round players draw a card from a deck of their choice (Bases, Floors or Roofs) and add it to their hands. Then they play a card from their hands into their streets (alternatively, if they don’t want any of the cards, they can discard one into their ‘canal’). The remaining cards in hand are then passed to the next player, and the process begins again.

Base and Roof cards are worth points at the end of the game, but only if their house meets their specific scoring requirements, like having a certain number of cats, not having any birds, or the house needing to be a specific height. And that’s where the Floor cards come in – play the right ones into the right houses to score them points!

The game ends when someone completes 4 houses, roofs and all. Players score up their houses (note: Bases can still score without roofs, as long as their requirements are met), including bonus points for flower pots. The player with the biggest single-coloured area also gets some nice bonus points. The player with the most points wins.

Our thoughts

The pastel colour scheme for Canal Houses is absolutely lush, as is the iconography and cute nods to Amsterdam culture (obviously the cats are my fave). Building up your pretty houses feels quite satisfying but it can take up a fair bit of table space, particularly at the higher player counts.

The game itself is so easy to learn and teach and thanks to the simultaneous play there is minimal downtime and gameplay feels fast-paced and fun. I think the only thing we struggled with was remembering to draw cards at the start of turns because we were playing so quickly, but that’s definitely our fault, not the games.

Because there isn’t a limit on how many houses you build and the bases score even when houses aren’t complete, the game is open to strategies beyond just racing to finish 4 ‘best’ houses. Although it’s super satisfying if you do manage to complete a house that fulfills both the base and roof scoring, and I wouldn’t blame you if you were smug about it.

The pick and pass adds some room for cheeky sabotage – if you really want to wind someone up, keep giving them a handful of roofs they can’t use! It also means that if there’s more than one card that you’d want to play, you have to choose carefully because the card you don’t take might not make its way back around to you. Someone else might want it for their own street or they may simply chuck it in their canal to spite you.

We played it at 2, 3 and 4 players and enjoyed it at all player counts. The game does change slightly as the more players you have, the less you can gamble that you’ll see a card you need again.

I think my only criticism with Canal Houses is that stacking the floors can tucking each new floor behind the last is a bit fiddly and tricky to keep your street neat and tidy.

What we liked

• Cute art and lovely colour scheme.

• Fast-paced with minimal downtime.

• Gameplay is simple but tactical, and you aren’t tied to a specific strategy.

• Easy to learn and teach.

• Works at all player counts

Considerations

• Card tucking can be slightly fiddly (but doesn’t overly detract from the game for us).

• Needs a decent amount of table space.

Verdict

Canal Houses is a charming quick-paced game with a cute colourful aesthetic and simple, light gameplay but enough tactics to keep it interesting. Just make sure you play on a big enough table!