Walking in Burano.

Walking in Burano is a 2018 game from Taiwanese designer Wei-Min Ling, who also designed the semi-abstract, chess-like game Shadows in Kyoto; and Mystery of the Temples. Ling owns one of the most important board game publishers in Asia, EmperorS4, which produced Hanamikoji and Realm of Sand, and uses Taiwanese artist Maisherly Chan for the majority of their games. With great art and a fairly simple set of mechanics, Walking in Burano is one of the best EmperorS4 games yet, not quite at Hanamikoji’s level but on par with their other top titles, especially given how quickly you can learn to play.

Players in Walking in Burano will acquire cards from the central market to create three-story buildings on their streets, ultimately filling out a 3×5 grid with five scoring cards, one beneath each house. These represent streets on the Venetian island of Burano, and the idea is to appeal to tourists and locals with various combinations of features on single buildings or streets as a whole. The catch is that building cards come in six colors, where each building (or house, they’re the same in this game) must comprise three cards of the same color, but adjacent buildings can’t share a color – unless you want to use one of your ‘rule-breaking’ tokens to break that rule and cede three points at game-end.

The market has three rows of cards, each of which corresponds to a specific floor of the houses you’ll be constructing. You may take one, two, or three cards from any column in the market, although you must start with the top or bottom row and can’t skip the middle card (e.g., you can take cards 1, 3, 1-2, 2-3, or 1-2-3). If you take an entire column, you don’t get any coins; if you take one card, you get two coins, and if you take two cards, you get one coin. You may then choose to build as many floors as you can afford, with the first floor you build on any turn costing you one coin, the second costing two coins more, and the third two coins beyond that. You get two scaffolding cards that you can move as needed, so you don’t have to build from the first floor up. You don’t have to build cards immediately when you take them; you can keep up to three from one turn to the next.

Once you complete any building of three cards, you can choose a scoring card from the available supply. There are four tourist cards that are worth four points each, and then give you additional points based on what’s showing on the three cards in the building you just finished – one point per flower pot, one point per plant, three points per cat, or two points per cat/awning/lamp/chimney. There are seven inhabitant cards in the base game, the supply of which is more limited, that offer very different bonuses that often apply to entire floors or to several adjacent cards. (I also have the one mini-expansion for the game, which adds three more inhabitants; you shuffle all ten types together and randomly choose seven to use in any single game.)

Once any player finishes their fifth building, it triggers game-end. You get points from your bonus cards, points from some first-floor cards that show shops, and 3 points for each rule-breaking token you still have. All players then count their “closed” windows on cards, those with X’s on them, and the player with the most loses one point per such window.

Even tough turns are quick, there’s quite a bit of strategy involved in Walking in Burano, as you try to collect certain symbols on cards to maximize your potential bonuses from cards you don’t yet have. You can end up losing out on a bonus card after collecting the house cards that would have granted you a huge bonus from it; you won’t end up with nothing, as you get another bonus card, but you’ll probably get fewer points than you’d planned. You are also betting on the availability of future cards, and future symbols, regularly during the game.

The rules also include a solo mode that works extremely well, almost exactly mirroring the two-player rules (where, after each round, you remove all cards in the rightmost column of the market, to keep it moving and create a bit more urgency), but also requiring you to remove one Character bonus card of your choice after each turn. This creates an upper bound on the number of turns you can take, as the game ends either when you complete your fifth building or when there are no bonus cards remaining, after which you score your street as you would in a multi-player game, deducting one point for every closed window you have, then comparing your score to the table in the rules.

Walking in Burano only came out in the United States in 2019, although the Chinese edition was released a year earlier, and I think the timing of the U.S. release during the flood of July/August releases last year led it to fall through the cracks. It’s pretty great across the board – easy to learn, quick game time, deeper strategically than you’d guess at first glance, with gorgeous art. Light-strategy games in small boxes that give you more to chew on than the typical short game are right in my wheelhouse, since it’s just easier to get people to sit for a game that’s short and that doesn’t require a long explanation of the rules; Walking in Burano is exactly that kind of game.