{"id":11434,"date":"2026-09-24T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=11434"},"modified":"2026-09-23T21:39:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T01:39:39","slug":"canal-houses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/24\/canal-houses\/","title":{"rendered":"Canal Houses."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don\u2019t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I\u2019ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano<\/a> is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby<\/a>, which is a little more complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Canal Houses<\/a> 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\u2019d 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 \u2013 cards, birds, flags, and flowerpots \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n

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It\u2019s also a card-drafting game, so you\u2019ll 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\u2019ve placed a card, you can\u2019t move it, and a building with a roof on it is permanently finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t like the term \u2018cozy\u2019 in board games or mysteries, but if you know what that word means in this context, sure, Canal Houses has it. It\u2019s light, very fast (you place cards simultaneously), and the only player interaction within the game is when you pass the cards. There\u2019s a two-player variant<\/a> that\u2019s more directly competitive, skipping the card-drafting aspect, where you also can\u2019t build a roof unless the building fulfills its requirements; I haven\u2019t tried it, but I think I might prefer that with two players. (Mysteries can\u2019t be \u201ccozy.\u201d Someone\u2019s been murdered. Maybe multiple people. That\u2019s not \u201ccozy.\u201d That\u2019s just shit writing.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think Canal Houses is a great family game \u2013 it\u2019s 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 \u2013 it\u2019s a small, narrow box that will barely take up any space on the shelves. It\u2019s a solid grade B for me, a filler game I\u2019ll gladly keep and throw in the bag on trips.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a little bit of a sucker for games that have you building colorful houses. I don\u2019t know why they speak to me so; they might just remind me of places I\u2019ve traveled, including Italy and some places in the Caribbean. Walking in Burano is probably my favorite of these, and I just reviewed Tenby, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,455],"class_list":["post-11434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-boardgames","tag-family-games","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11434"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11435,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11434\/revisions\/11435"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}