In this Shelfside review, we talk about playing Chinatown, a trading-focused tabletop board game where players will exchange cash and property assets like in the popular board game Monopoly. In the race to become the richest immigrant in New York City Chinatown, players will trade their money and property pieces like dim sum restaurants and factories with their opponents every round. No dice rolling and landing on spaces here though! In Chinatown, your property will passively generate income and cash at the end of rounds, meaning it's more of a frantic race instead of trying to bankrupt your opponents.
BIG emphasis on "trading" btw, because Chinatown as a game is a frantic marketplace where players will be trading with each other nonstop in order to grind out their own business chains. In fact, making deals and trading is easily the majority of the gameplay loop in Chinatown. Designed by Karsten Hartwig, this game seats 3-5 traders, and plays in about an hour, easily a medium weight board game.
Chinatown isn't quite a euro game though, managing your cards, resources and property is extremely easy, the complication comes from how you ultimately end up making deals with the other players! For reference, something that actually has you manage engines and builds would be Sidereal Confluence, which is basically just heavier Chinatown.
Now that Chinatown is no longer out of print, is it still a classic board game to add to your collection? Watch to find out!
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Table of Contents:
Intro - (0:00)
Overview - (0:55)
How to Play - (1:47)
Pros - (3:03)
Cons - (12:00)
Recommender Score - (14:01)
Daniel's Personal Score - (17:40)
Ashton's Personal Score - (20:00)
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Stuff used:
Movement Proposition by Kevin MacLeod
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License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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