Grinivil is what I want to see more of—ambitious design with thoughtful development decisions throughout. It’s not perfect, there’s the characteristic rough edges of a one-man show, but even the grumpiest player at my table was chuckling when someone would randomly say the game’s bizarre tagline: “You want to live here!”
This is a rondel house
Evoking my beloved Urban Sprawl, Grinivil is a game about building a town and using it to score points. But, it isn’t about that card-driven lifestyle, it’s about ~time~.
Grinivil’s disorganized rulebook buries the lede about what makes the game great: the TIME ACTION RING. Slightly reminiscent of Glen More’s square rondel/tile draft, there’s a ring of 20 tiles around the game’s resource market. Instead of drafting these tiles, you’re going to move your action pawn to any position on the ring, take the action, and then be forced to move forward a number of spaces listed on the tile. You can even fully circumnavigate the entire rondel and take the same action again. There’s a sort of “passing go” mechanism where you have to pay for your workers which discourages this, but it’s refreshingly open. The action ring also has 7 variable tiles each game, which add a wild texture to the experience—the tiles range from goofy crowdsourced auctions, forced trades, and powerful special abilities (which only stay in effect until you run by them again on the rondel).
I’m spending some time on the rondel here because like most board game mechanisms, a lazy designer will use them as a gimmick, rather than understanding and exploiting what makes a mechanism compelling. In this case, the rondel is used to set the pace of play for yourself and other players, like the rondels in Mac Gerdts games and Great Western Trail do. You can be slower, but a player that creates an efficient loop will leave other players behind.
Space considerations
If you look at images of the game, you might be scratching your head about how the spatial component works. Grinivil has these pie-piece tiles that spread out to create neighborhood partitions and a basic road logistical network, but it looks more wild and innovative than it actually is, which is just fine. It’s essentially a point-to-point network system with interesting looking aesthetics, but it’s simple enough to allow for meaningful decision-making without burying everything in layers of logistical complexity. Essentially, you build levels of buildings on plots to try and either create residences or commercial/civic buildings.
The goal of building these things is to house residents, which are essentially contracts. A resident will need a completed house to be housed in, and a number of requirements, both mandatory and optional. When the resident is housed, everyone gets different payouts relative to their individual contributions to the various requirements. It’s cool. It means that everyone is collectively building the town, while trying to maximize their own contributions in a way that captures more points. There are also endgame scoring points on each resident, which cause a pretty significant swing at endgame.
All that and a kettle of fish
There’s plenty more eurogame greatest hits in Grinivil: Brass-adjacent resource markets, point-to-money conversions, auctions, road building, tree planting, warehousing problems—the game has it all.
And, for the most part, it’s all well-crafted, though the game doesn’t escape the standard problems of some of these mechanisms. The blind bidding mechanism is a little arbitrary, and the end game contracts are very difficult to control, card-flop contracts can arbitrarily reward players for doing very little, the endgame is a little clunky and the last player might need more starting compensation than they get.
All that said, Grinivil is a delightful mix of time-tested mechanisms that genuinely does novel things with them, and gives players a cohesive package that serves as an interesting-decision machine. I’m looking forward to playing this a lot more, and it’s nice to see crowdfunding work every now and then. I want to live here!
