PENNY PRESS

Introduction

Penny Press is a euro style worker placement board game. You are a 19th century newspaper tycoon (Pulitzer, Hearst…) and must send your reporters to cover news around the city to dig out scoops that will give you points. The news that are divided into 5 categories.

*The 5 news categories: War, Crime, Politics, NY and Sports*

The Game

The game starts with a number of events on the board that your media must cover. The number and type of events will vary as new ones are drawn and added throughout the game. The events are placed in their corresponding news category column. The more events, the higher the popularity marker will be for that specific news category. Covering popular news will get you more points.

*The events, in different sizes and shapes, act as articles once published on your newspaper.*

In their turn, each player can send reporters out to cover specific events, or relocate deployed ones to try and get new scoops.

*Reporters from different newspapers covering different sport events. Only the paper with the majority of reporters will get to print the news in the front cover of their next release.*

When a player finds it suitable, the print is contacted and the articles are sent to be published. But, players can only publish the articles of the events where they have a mayority of reporters. Players will then add points according to how popular the news were at the moment of publising.

*At this moment war news are very popular and give more points when published.*

At the print, players must fit the news articles in the front cover of their newspaper. But some news must be placed in the heading, blocking some of the spaces for the other artcles. Each published newspaper will score accoding to the news in it and the blank spaces left behind.

*The article tiles must fit in the newspaper front page leaving the least amount of blank spaces possible.*

Each player can go to print a maximum of 3 times. At the end of the game, an extra round of points is given out to the players with the most amount of news covered for each specific news category.

Esthetics

I loved it. Even the cards drawn throught the game to replace events have historical and humorous headlines with lots of great details. The rule booklet has thick high quality embossed paper and everything is very well theme oriented.

*When you publish your newspaper, you draw a new card that determines the new events to place on the board.*

Difficulty

It’s a very simple game, there is no difficulty in catching on. The mechanics by which the news popularity shifts back and forth can get tricky, but being organized it shouldn’t be a problem.

Will I play it again?

Definitely, as a matter of fact I’ve had the chance to try it again with 3 and 4 players. It worked great in both cases although the more players the higher the chances of having a scoop taken from right under your nose.

Games on Board, we do the reading, you do the playing.

Penny Press (EN)