16th Jul 2026 - Grinivil
by Robin. Sat 18 Jul (Updated at Sat 18 Jul)Grinivil is a new game that's attracted some attention at the club lately. This is partly because of its nice uplifting backstory, having been developed, drawn and published single-handedly by its creator, Rudy Priecinsky. Predictably, the usual cohort of band-waggoners didn't back this one on Kickstarter, so it was left to Marko and Márton to own the only(?) copies at the club. Those two can hopefully feel vindicated now... certainly to me, this looks like one that was worth backing.
It is a city-builder with a good level of player interaction. As the blurb says, "Players compete and collaborate to build a modern town..." but I didn't see much scope for intentional collaboration. Not the way we played it, anyway. It's basically a rondel action selection, with various actions not appearing as frequently as you'd want to do them, so you end up building things half-and-half with someone else who landed on the action space before you could get back to it. So the collaboration is kind-of under duress.
You can put a lot of effort into keeping your buildings to yourself, if you like. But this felt like the kind of game that you would win by riding the tide of collaboration rather than being isolationist. Which is a mark of good player-interaction mechanics, in my book.
The main victory points in the game come from moving residents into the town: you start with a couple of prospective resident cards, and you gain points for finding them a home, or lose points at game-end for not having found them a home. Then the game itself consists of doing all the numerous things that are required before you can move them in. We can't all do all the things, so we end up unwittingly collaborating. "The things" are adding land areas, getting resources, getting money, building roads, building buildings, doing the estate agent thing of actually selling the houses, plus a few variants on these. So we all go round and round the rondel, doing all this stuff in our own time, pursuing our own agenda while inevitably collectively building something that looks like a nice town. It's a nice ecosystem to watch.
So far, so much like all the other city-builders. What's special about this one? Apart from the interaction, which I think is richer than most of the other city-builders I've seen, it's the variability of the setup. The setup of the city itself is trivial, as there's almost nothing there to begin with; but the rondel setup has enormous scope for variation, and its outcome has a huge impact on the game. And there is also a vast array of different ways for you as a player to tackle the rondel (ie. going round it quickly or slowly - there are advantages to both). So, while I have a couple of reservations about this game, I am definitely hoping to play it again, just to try one of the many many different setups and rondel tactics.
Mechanically, the game that this this reminded me of was Vladimír Suchý's Shipyard. Not just because of the rondel. And there's a lot more interaction in this one than Shipyard. But also because, while it can be a lot of fun playing your own game with the rondel(s) to maximise your points, it hurts a bit that the initial seeding can have such a big impact on your score. In Shipyard, it's the Contract cards - and at least you get to choose 2 from an initial deal of 4 cards. In Grinivil, it's the prospective-resident cards...
Resident cards basically contribute the vast majority of the points in Grinivil: there's the huge negative points for not moving them in, and also the points that they contribute to the builder(s) of specific municipal buildings once they are moved in. Example: I have a resident card with a police station on it. If I don't find him a house in the town by the end of the game, I lose 10 points; if he is in a house at the end of the game, he gives everyone who contributed to building the police station at least 5 points. So, at the start of the game, I know I need to build a house for the resident, but also that I want to build as much as I can of the police station. If I do all that, then great - I'm getting positive points. But if Marko's also got a resident in his initial deal that wants a police station, then bingo! Double points for me. Wasn't I clever! Well no, I was just lucky. Because residents seem to move in mainly at the end of the game, by which point most of the municipal building spaces have already been filled. So if I managed to fill one with a police station, that was only with knowledge of my own initial hand, not his.
There are ways around this - there is an action to swap a resident from your hand with one of the publicly visible alternative options. To be fair, Marko did this and profited from the police station more effectively than I did. So this isn't necessarily flawed.
What is flawed is that, in order to move the resident in at all, they sometimes have requirements. Maybe my resident will only buy a house in Grinivil if there is a coffee shop within 3 spaces. Thematically fine, but other residents aren't fussy. In our game, Dave was dealt two non-fussy residents, who would move in as soon as you offered them a house. The rest of us had fussy residents, whose requirements we had to satisfy in order to move them in. As Marko did, we could exchange them for other residents from the display; but as it happened those were all fussy residents as well.
The upshot was that, from the start, Dave was able to focus on building the (eg. police station) buildings that would score points when he moved his residents in, while the rest of us needed to build other (eg. coffee shop) buildings that were required before we even could move our residents in. So Dave won, Marko and I did what we had to do to move our residents in, and came 2nd and 3rd; Tim sacrificed one of his residents to build the point-scoring building, and came 4th. Maybe we had a really weird initial deal, but this feels a bit unfair.
The suggestion would be either to do the deal 4, discard 2 initial seeding as in Shipyard; or just eliminate the non-fussy residents altogether. But according to Márton, Rudy did all the playtesting with his own family, so I didn't manage to get that suggestion in before publication. Never mind. I will still be playing it again, though may suggest the aforementioned house rule (deal 4, discard 2, shuffle the discards to make the display) next time.
So Marko and Márton, if you're thinking of bringing it again, please let me know, I will definitely book myself a spot. And I'd recommend it to others. Above all, Grinivil is a positive story: a lone-wolf designer persevering through kickstarter to get a good idea to the market, just the way it's supposed to be. While Capstone are busy doing reissues of past hits, there's hope for the independent designers yet.