Welcome To

Welcome To is certainly one of the hottest games of 2018. With an essentially unlimited player count, Welcome To has been a big hit at conventions and meetups all summer long. Everyone who has played it (including myself) has had a great time. If you missed out on the initial release, Deep Water Games has brought the game onto Kickstarter for a second printing and included several new thematic neighborhoods. Read on to find out more or explore the campaign for yourself at WelcomeToKickstarter.com.

Welcome To is a roll and write game with no dice, described as a “flip and fill” game. Cards are flipped to create pairs of house numbers and bonus actions. Players select a house number to write into their neighborhood and carry out the paired bonus action. In the base game, these let you build parks, pools, fences, or use a real estate agent to increase the value of your estates (groups of fences of houses), among other things. The house numbers can be written anywhere in your neighborhood, but must be in increasing order along each street. Points are earned for pools, parks, estates of different sizes, as well as by completing the three city plan cards. Points can be lost for using the BIS bonus action which, lets you duplicate a house number on your street, and for turns where you were unable to write in a house number. I really enjoy games like Welcome To where all players have the same options, yet use them in different ways and all the neighborhoods turn out different.

Deep Water Games‘ new Kickstarter campaign for Welcome To includes a Halloween themed refill pad of neighborhood sheets, as well as potentially 3 more themed neighborhoods. The Halloween sheet includes additional city plan cards and has a trick or treat mechanic. Various houses in the neighborhood have trick or treat icons. When numbering one of these houses, you can choose to trick or treat. Tricks help unlock special rewards and treats earn points. Once claimed the trick or treat reward levels are not available to other players. New city plan cards will also work with the trick or treat theme, giving players the goal to collect all the candy or ghosts on certain streets, or build estates that have a specified number of ghost and candy icons circled in them.

Even when you are losing at Welcome To, it is still fun to just try setting a personal best score. You can play solo or with 99 of your closest friends. The base game is addictive enough that it will get played again and again, so additional refill pads will come in handy. The fact that Deep Water Games added new mechanics and different themes to spice things up is just going the extra mile. Playing in under 25 minutes, it is the perfect game to kick off a night of gaming or play over a lunch hour. I don’t know what the other neighborhoods have in store, but I’m expecting good things from what I’ve seen thus far. So be sure to get in on the campaign and help unlock stretch goals.