Hey all, Sam and David here today.
Wow, our schedules are all messed up right now. It’s like it took a week before the energy drain of Gen Con sank in and threw us all out of whack. We obviously now have a bunch of games and gaming accessories and supplements et cetera to talk about over the upcoming months.
We’ll be trying as best as we can to rotate around between different varieties of tabletop games (board games, card games, dice games, TTRPGs) and various accessories and supplements for those games. This gives us more time to work our way through all the new additions to our collection so we can accurately talk about the games and our feelings on them.
Oh, and speaking of, if you missed our Gen Con Wrap Up post, you can find it here and see everything that we picked up, which will give you an idea of what sorts of posts might be coming up in future.
All right, let’s get started.
Tanto Cuore is a deck building card game for 2-4 players. The players take the roles of “master of the house,” employ a lot of cute maids, and are served by them while slowly filling out their house (card deck). But take care! The maids can become sick or get bad habits. When the game ends, the player who has the most victory point-gaining maids in his staff (all his cards) is the “perfect master” and the winner of the game.
This is the first game in the Tanto Cuore series. All games are “stand alone expansions” and can be played on their own or combined with any other Tanto Cuore game.
- Play Time: 45-60 minutes
- Recommended Ages: 13+
- Number of Players: 2-4
- Number of Cards Included: 280
We have picked up the original game plus several of the standalone expansions, but we only recently had the chance to play it…partly because of not having a lot of free time, and partly because we wanted to make sure we understood the gameplay and rules….and that is so easy to do when you find a game demo at Gen Con, which we did at the Japanime Games booth.
Because it was the end of Gen Con and we had the time, we actually got a full-game demo, which was pretty awesome.
This is not our first deck-building style game. They all have a pretty similar setup in that you can buy cards to add to your deck and that’ll change your gameplay and strategy.
So these are simple games with the potential for a lot of strategy and complexity. And of course, there’s also a little bit of chance/luck involved because it’s not like the cards of the deck stay in the same order. Every time you run out of a draw deck, you end up shuffling your discard and it becomes the draw deck…so sometimes you’re just hoping that the same cards come up at the same time when you need them.
Some cards give you more actions. Some let you draw more cards. Some let you hire more maids. Some give you more love (the currency you use to hire maids). Some are merely worth victory points. And some have to be sent over to your chamber to accrue bonus victory points.
We’ve played this original edition a few times, and we’ve also tried out one of the expansions.
What is cool is that you can actually mix and match the sets to make each game even more varied. We have not yet tried a game like that, but we will work up to it eventually. Each standalone expansion adds a new game element, so we’re currently trying them individually so we can understand the variations before we try and combine editions.
Our favorite games are ones that have immense replay value, and I think with the ability to use various editions together, this game certainly qualifies. Plus, depending on what you draw and buy in the first few rounds may affect your strategy for the rest of the game. So if you change up your goals, then it makes each game feel different anyway.
This is an easy to pick up game that is easy to learn and easy to play. You can just follow the rules and be happy, or if you and your friends are fun weirdos like us…then you can come up with backstories and voices for the maids and your household and everything else and turn it into a full-blown eventful evening.
All right, that is all from us for today. Thank you so much for stopping by, and we’ll be back soon with more geeky content.
Free State of Geek 