The Market Row Clogs at Two Players and Nobody Warns You

I picked this up mostly to fill the twenty minute gap between the real games on family night, and it does that job better than almost anything else on my shelf. Full disclosure, I’ve got maybe fifteen plays in now, nearly all of them two player against my wife, so this is basically a two player review whether I meant it to be or not. Does it hold up at exactly two?? Mostly, yeah. The tiles are gorgeous, the little animal tokens are satisfying to set down, and the whole thing plays like a quieter cousin of Cascadia, tighter puzzle, way less table talk, mostly just staring at your own board wondering if you can pull off the mountain habitat before the good cards dry up.

Here’s the thing that actually bugged me though, at two players the card offer tends to clog. You end up staring down three tiles or an animal card nobody at the table wants, and since there’s no way to refresh the row you just buy the least bad option and hope. Somebody on BGG mentioned using dvoser’s extra boards to stretch a two player game out so it doesn’t stall as hard, and honestly that tracks, the base rules feel a little undertuned right at two.

Component gripe, my boards warped some on the shelf, nothing dramatic, but enough that cubes tumble off if the table gets bumped, a weirdly stressful failure mode for a game about building a peaceful little ecosystem.

Price wise mine ran right around thirty five bucks and I’ve already made that back several times over per hour of actual fun, this is a fifteen or twenty minute game so the math works out quick even played purely as filler. Hate drafting is technically on the table, there’s always a tile or card you could deny out of spite, but it’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts them, so nobody at my table bothers. Comes down as a genuinely lovely little design I’d recommend at two before I’d ever recommend it at four.