Review – Tenby

Tenby is a card game about building a Welsh village. First published by indie studio Cosy Cub Games, it has been picked up by Mighty Boards for wider distribution. Let’s check it out!

Review

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but one look at Tenby and you know you’re in for a feel-good game. In Tenby, 1-5 players compete to build the best card-tableau village. The game is played over 10 rounds, and the goal is to earn the most points.

To set up, players create a central card market, which consists of terrace, pier, and landmark cards. (Collectively, these are called town cards.) Also dealt to the center are a number of night and day cards, which determine the order of play and the available actions, respectively.

Each round consists of 3 phases:

1. NIGHT: In order, starting with the player whose piece is on the “1” card, each player moves their piece to a day card.
2. DAY: In ascending numerical order, each player resolves all the actions shown on their day card. (More on actions in a moment.) Once a player has completed their actions, they move their piece to the lowest available night card.
3. CLEAN UP: Remove unchosen town cards and reset the tableau for the next round.

The main part of the game, of course, is the actions. There are 5 of them, and they will show up in different subsets on day cards. Most of the actions allow the active player to gain a card of the indicated type (terrace, pier, landmark, or resident). The other action allows the player to take a life preserver token, which can be used to purchase extra actions.

When placing a card, it can go at either end of a line of cards, or start a new line. The cards must fit together pictorially, so as to make a single, continuous picture. Each line of cards can only contain 1 landmark.

Most cards have 4 elements:

• A type, which shows the kind(s) of card it is (e.g. a business, a town card, a landmark etc.)
• Features, which are elements of the picture that offer scoring opportunities (e.g. clouds, seagulls, lamp posts, etc.)
• A scoring condition, which shows the feature/icon that will be scored
• A scoring range, which shows the distance for which the scoring condition will apply (i.e. how many cards away the player will count when scoring)

Players continue drafting and resolving day and night cards until the end of the 10th round. At that time, the game ends and players score. Scores come from town and resident cards. (Residents provide additional scoring opportunities, such as points for having a lot of shutters on a single street.) The player with the most points wins!

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I’m very impressed with Tenby. At its core, it is a simple drafting game, but the underlying puzzle is a lot of fun. This is one of those games with a bunch of cards that all score off of each other, and it’s up to players to synergize them as best as possible. The night and day system of action drafting reminds me of Kingdomino, and the actions themselves are easy to understand, since they all work pretty similarly.

The visuals in this game are delightful. Everything is warm and cheery — smiling clouds, bright colors, beach town vibes, it all just looks great. It’s fun to see the streets come together, and there is a sense of satisfaction at the end when players admire their tableaus and enjoy all the little details. The box is compact, about the size of a Carcassonne expansion, and everything fits nicely inside it. Overall, the aesthetics and production are high quality.

It’s always cool when a small, indie design manages to attract wider attention, and I’m hopeful that Mighty Boards’ involvement with this game will bring it even more traction. Tenby is a solid tableau-builder, relaxing and fun to play. If you like laid-back games that offer meaningful strategy, check this one out. It’s a highlight of 2025.