Review: Copenhagen (Queen Games)

Welcome to Copenhagen’s historic Nyhavn ( or “New Harbor”) district. It’s home to a 17th-century waterfront and canal. It’s also where author Hans Christian Anderson lived back in the 1800s. It’s best known for its colorful townhouses — townhouses that apparently need some serious maintenance.

In Copenhagen from Queen Games, players are tasked with assembling new facades on those historic townhomes. The winner scores the most points by completing rows and columns in their individual townhouse board. But getting there requires keen hand management, clever tile placements, and strategic decision-making.

So grab your work gloves, and let’s take a look at the top five things you need to know about Copenhagen.

Exploring Your House Board

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Player get identical house boards marked with nine rows of five squares each. The boards also include seven“coat of arms” spaces, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The board represents the facade of the house that you’re creating. As you play, you’ll add tiles to the board from the ground level toward the roof. It’ll feel a bit like Tetris at first, but don’t focus too much on that similarity. Yes, you need to make complete rows or columns, but that’s just the beginning.

Colorful Tiles and Matching Cards

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You’ll build the facade from 62 double-sided tiles in classic pentomino shapes, ranging in size from one to five squares. Each tile shows a mix of blank wall spaces and windows. The tiles are split into five color groups, with each group containing a slightly different mix of shapes.

There are 10 tiles of each color: three each of the two, three, and four square tiles, and just one of the unique five square tiles.

To draw tiles, you collect and play sets of facade cards that match the color of the tile you want. You need to play one card for each square in the tile.

Placing Tiles and Scoring Points

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On your turn, you either draw two new cards from the face-up display or you cash in cards from your hand to buy and place a facade tile. You can also activate special ability tiles that let you bend the rules a bit for one turn. (More about those in a moment).

Seven cards are available each turn, laid out in order around a harbor board. The challenge is that you can only draw two cards that are next to each other. This restriction, combined with a hard hand limit of seven cards, creates a wonderful strategic tension in the game.

Placing tiles in your facade earns you points. You get one point for a floor (row) of five squares or two points for a 9-square section (column). You can double those points by arranging the tiles so that a floor or section contains only windows. If one facade tile completes both a floor and a section, you score both immediately.

Triggering a Coat of Arms

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Each house board has seven coats of arms on it. Four are in squares of the facade; the other three are next to the second, fourth, and sixth floor.

When you place a tile that either covers a coat of arms or completes a floor next to a coat of arms, you immediately get to take one of three special actions: place a single-square tile, draw an ability tile, or reset all of your ability tiles. (We cover ability tiles in the next section.)

The single-square tiles fill in those frustrating holes in your facade. They contain a window, so they can trigger some great scoring opportunities.

A coat of arms space lets you either take another ability tile to use on a future turn or flip over all of your used ability tiles and make them active again. This is another of the strategic tension moments that makes Copenhagen so much fun.

Bending the Rules with Ability Tiles

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Ability tiles are like miniature super powers, letting you temporarily break a rule in the game. Once you use the tile’s ability, you flip the tile face down to show that it’s inactive.

Everyone starts with a tile that lets you take any two cards from the harbor display. Other ability tiles let you draw an extra card, spend one card less to buy a facade tile, treat cards of one color as any other, and do both a draw and place action in one turn. You can activate more than one tile on the same turn, creating an amazingly powerful combination if you time it right.

The Verdict

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Copenhagen combines set collecting and tile placement with spatial reasoning and a dash of old-fashioned luck to create a very engaging experience. Somehow it does all of this while staying very accessible to players in all age ranges.

Since the game plays quickly and ends immediately when either one player gets 12 points or the end-of-game card turns up from the draw deck, Copenhagen has what we call the one more game factor — that moment when the game ends and you immediately want to play it again. Right now. Because you were that close to winning.

So have fun playing your new favorite family game. Copenhagen is really that good.