I’m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don’t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I’ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby, which is a little more complex.
Canal Houses is the first English version of a Dutch game first published as Grachtenpand in 2024, asking players to build pastel-colored houses along a canal in Amsterdam. Houses all start with a shop on the ground floor, any number of window cards you’d like, and ideally a roof on top. You gain points from the shop and roof cards if their buildings meet the criteria shown on those cards, while the window cards have the four features – cards, birds, flags, and flowerpots – that appear in most of those criteria. The game ends when someone plays their fourth roof card, at which point you score all shops and roofs you fulfilled, take 1 point for every flowerpot, and then give 4 points to the player with the largest contiguous block of cards of the same color.
It’s also a card-drafting game, so you’ll start with a hand of three cards, drawing one from the deck of your choice, then playing any of the four cards you hold, after which you pass your entire hand to your left. You must build upward; each building must start with a shop, and then windows (you could build without one, but it would score nothing), and then the roof. Once you’ve placed a card, you can’t move it, and a building with a roof on it is permanently finished.
I don’t like the term ‘cozy’ in board games or mysteries, but if you know what that word means in this context, sure, Canal Houses has it. It’s light, very fast (you place cards simultaneously), and the only player interaction within the game is when you pass the cards. There’s a two-player variant that’s more directly competitive, skipping the card-drafting aspect, where you also can’t build a roof unless the building fulfills its requirements; I haven’t tried it, but I think I might prefer that with two players. (Mysteries can’t be “cozy.” Someone’s been murdered. Maybe multiple people. That’s not “cozy.” That’s just shit writing.)
I do think Canal Houses is a great family game – it’s very quick (15-20 minutes), and quick to learn or teach. It does have a ceiling, pun intended, because there are so few ways to score, and the window cards have plenty of those icons on them. It becomes just a medium challenge to fulfill your shop/roof criteria, unless someone is able to get their fourth roof down quickly to speed the end of the game. I love the packaging as well – it’s a small, narrow box that will barely take up any space on the shelves. It’s a solid grade B for me, a filler game I’ll gladly keep and throw in the bag on trips.