If there's a nightmare scenario in life, it's living in a community where every house is exactly the same, all of you have to follow rules about keeping your home "clean" and your lawn "tidy", and you swear that every one of your neighbors have a not-insignificant amount of Stepford blood in them.
Selling those houses, though... that's a win.
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Welcome to Your Perfect Home puts you in the role of a real estate developer with three long blocks of houses to fill—one of ten houses, one of eleven, and one of twelve. A fat stack of cards is split into three piles, each with an action on one side and a number on the other (with a small icon of the action on the flip side of the card in one corner). Each round, one card is flipped action side up, so each pile has a number and an action visible. Players choose one of these combos, put the number on one of the houses, and choose whether or not to use the action.
The goal is to fill all the blocks with numbers going in ascending order, while also pulling in enough points through putting pools in yards, investing in neighborhoods of certain sizes, and meeting other various goals to outscore everyone else. The game ends when somebody has a number on every house, or when someone marks off three stop signs (three instances of not being able to develop a house on a turn with any of the available numbers). It's a roll-and-write game, although with cards rather than dice. Apart from fences, which you use to create smaller neighborhoods within each block, you mark off a spot for each action you take, which (potentially) earns you more points by the end of the game.
The first time I played this, I put together a flawless game. I mathed out how many numbers I would have available to fill in the number of spaces that would be left if I put number X on house Y, and did not waste a single turn. The game ended when all my houses were full, and all three of my opponents had one empty. Given that real estate bonuses for the blocks you have completed only count if all the houses on the block are full, that's a nice edge to have.
I lost. Not by a couple of points, but by twelve (112-100). And that's why I think this is a pretty good game.
Here's the reason: when I saw I played a flawless game, it means I did not make any errors in figuring out what numbers to place where, and when. I strategized towards making sure all my houses were tagged, which is the end goal, and it worked perfectly. Yet I obviously did not play a perfect game, because I got noticeably beaten.
The nature of the card draw means you're always playing the odds. There are enough cards in each deck that you can't really card count effectively (if you can, you will be godly at this and you don't need any strategy tips). But you have to take into account how many points you're likely to score with each move. If you put a palm tree up in six houses across all three blocks, you'll get twelve points. But if you fill them up on one block, the same number of palm trees will earn you more in sum because of the finishing bonus. You'll probably have reason to take real estate bonuses before you've started forming your blocks, so do you choose a number and let that guide how you build? Will you build towards bonuses? Can you see what bonuses your opponents are going for, and can you beat them to the punch?
There's probably some perfect strategy to the game that's most likely to win as long as you get the cards you need. That last part is the key, though. Unless that strategy is the best under any circumstances, and you'll only lose if you're desperately unlucky—and, while unlikely, this is possible—you'll need to know how to adjust. That's where you get gameplay rather than rote memorization, and that's what makes a game good.
Score: Twenty-eight filled houses out of thirty-three (good profits).
