Wouter & Ymke 
Some board games are easy to understand after watching a single turn. Tolleno isn’t really one of them. It looks straightforward enough. Place a tile, build a few houses, score some points. Then you realise almost every action affects what you’re allowed to do next, and suddenly you’re staring at the board wondering why you placed that canal two turns ago.
Set in a growing lakeside city, Tolleno has players expanding canals, constructing buildings, claiming contracts and gradually filling the skyline with colourful towers. The city belongs to everyone, so every new tile changes the puzzle for the whole table. We came away with plenty to talk about after our plays, both the things we enjoyed and the parts that took us a little longer to get our heads around.
👥 2-4 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 15 minutes/player
📝 Designer: Gilles Turbide
🎨 Artwork: Anthony Moulins & Paolo Puggioni
🏢 Publisher: Sit Down! (Review copy provided by Geronimo Games)
Gameplay Overview
Everyone is helping build the same city while trying to finish with the most victory points. Each turn starts by adding a new city tile, making the map a little bigger and extending one or more canals. Those canals immediately decide where your first floor token can be placed, so the very first thing you do influences the rest of your turn.
After that first building step, you choose between placing another floor token or taking one of the available contract tiles. Contracts score immediately based on the surrounding area, while another floor token helps develop your buildings and presence across the city. The interesting part is that your second action isn’t completely free either. It depends on where your first building was placed, so planning ahead starts almost straight away.
Most buildings stay exactly where they began. Instead of constantly spreading across the map, you’re deciding whether to keep adding another floor to an existing building or establish yourself somewhere else. By the end of the game, those choices create a skyline of towers competing for valuable city tiles.
Your boat joins the game later on. Once unlocked, it starts travelling through the canals at the end of every turn. As your buildings grow, your boat becomes more flexible, eventually allowing turns instead of only moving in straight lines. Boats can even move one of your own floor tokens, but they also temporarily block the city tile where they stop, forcing everyone to work around them until they move again.
The game ends once someone has placed their final floor token. Everyone completes the round before final scoring, which combines contracts, the tallest buildings on city tiles, building valuation, personal player board objectives and bonuses from the city’s central district. You’re usually not relying on one scoring category alone. Instead, different parts of your game gradually come together over the final few rounds.
Artwork & Components
Tolleno immediately caught our attention with its colourful presentation. The Mediterranean-inspired setting gives the city plenty of character, with bright canals, warm stone buildings and little details scattered across the tiles. It feels inviting without trying too hard to impress.
The city gradually spreads across the table using thick modular tiles. By the end of the game you’ve created something that actually resembles a busy city rather than just another collection of square tiles. Even once the board fills up with buildings, contracts and boats, the icons remain easy enough to read.
The wooden components are probably our favourite part of the production. Stacking the chunky floor tokens into proper buildings makes the city look different every few turns, and by the end of the game you’ve got a skyline that’s simply satisfying to look at. The little wooden boats are also a nice touch. They’re much more enjoyable to move than plain markers, even if ours occasionally became accidental traffic jams because somebody forgot they were still blocking an important tile.
Player boards are practical without being complicated. Everything has its own place, making it easy to see how much you’ve built and what still remains. During our first game we spent more time looking at the contract reference sheet than the player boards themselves, but thankfully that only lasted a game or two.
Our Experience
Our first play wasn’t particularly quick. Not because the rules themselves are difficult, but because we spent quite a bit of time checking the contract reference sheet. None of the individual contracts are hard to understand, yet there are enough different scoring conditions that we regularly found ourselves asking, “Wait… what does this one score again?” By the second game those interruptions had mostly disappeared, and everything moved along much more naturally.
What stood out most to us was how connected every decision feels. Many eurogames ask what you want to do on your turn. Tolleno asks a different question: given what you’ve just done, what are you now able to do? Placing a city tile decides which canals you’ve extended. Those canals decide where your first building can go. That first building limits where your second action is allowed to happen, and a few turns later those same choices even affect how your boat can move. We never really looked at one action on its own because every decision seemed to feed into the next.
That also changed how we approached the board after a few games. We stopped placing tiles because they looked useful in the moment and started thinking more about what they’d do later. Sometimes we’d extend a canal because we had a plan for it three turns from now, only to watch another player use that exact canal before we could. Other times a foundation we’d been aiming for suddenly became much less interesting because somebody else’s tile changed the surrounding area. The city never belonged to one player for very long.
The choice between taking a contract or placing another floor token also became one of the biggest discussions around our table. Early on we mostly chased the immediate points. Later we realised contracts were really about timing. Taking one often meant delaying another floor, slowing the growth of our buildings and putting boat upgrades a little further away. Building again didn’t always score immediately, but it often left us with better options later. I honestly don’t remember many turns where one answer felt obviously correct.
By the final rounds, we weren’t looking for moves that only scored in one place anymore. The turns that felt best were usually the ones where a single floor token helped with several things at once. Maybe it made a building taller, improved our position on a city tile and also set up a better boat route for later. Those moments felt earned because we’d usually spent several turns creating them ourselves. Of course, there was still the occasional groan when somebody parked a boat exactly where we wanted to build. Apparently canal traffic can be surprisingly frustrating.
Our Thoughts
After several games, I think Tolleno is really about learning to work within the restrictions it gives you. You’re almost never choosing from every possible option on the board. Instead, you’re choosing from the options you’ve created through your own earlier decisions. That’s quite different from many other city-building games we’ve played, and for us it became the part we enjoyed most.
I also liked that the different scoring systems never felt completely separate. While deciding where to place a floor token, we often found ourselves thinking about building height, control of city tiles, future boat movement and possible contracts at the same time. The best turns weren’t the ones where we scored the most points immediately. They were the ones where one placement quietly improved several things we’d be looking at later in the game.
Our biggest criticism is still the contract system during those first few plays. The icons themselves make sense, but there are enough different scoring conditions that learning them takes a little time. We don’t think the game is especially difficult because of that, yet it does make the first teach feel heavier than the rest of the game actually is. Players who enjoy comparing every possible contract before deciding can also stretch the playing time more than the game probably intends.
The interaction is also worth mentioning because it won’t suit every group. Nobody is tearing down your buildings or stealing your pieces. Instead, you’re constantly changing the shared city around each other. Whether that’s by taking an important building spot, making a contract more attractive or temporarily blocking a tile with your boat, the interaction comes from changing the puzzle rather than directly attacking another player. For us, that was enough to keep us interested in everyone else’s turns.
I don’t think Tolleno is the sort of game I’d introduce to complete newcomers, but for players who enjoy spatial puzzles and don’t mind spending a game learning the contracts, there’s quite a bit to discover here. The more familiar we became with the different systems, the less we focused on individual turns and the more we started thinking about how one decision would shape the next. By the end of our plays we were already talking about what we’d try differently next time, and for us that’s usually the best sign that a game has earned another spot on the table.
📝 We received a review copy of Tolleno from Geronimo Games.
