In the vein of games like Settlers of Catan, Six-Sided Streets is a treat for the thinky gamer. Gone are the days where you lose sleep over a missing tile that may or may not have been eaten by your dog. Chris Klimowski presents this as a short, yet snappy game about putting together your very own town as made for the Eggplant Podcast Community Game Jam.
As a child, I truly enjoyed placing blocks into holes. The satisfying clunk that resounded made me want to do it over and over. Whilst Six-Sided Streets is a tile-laying game that tasks you with creating the best possible town out of a limited set of pieces, it does call back to the notion of figuring out where to place your next piece.
Each time the game loads, a random map and accompanying pieces are generated. The pieces must be rotated and placed on the map to gain points, making it a never-ending quest to place the perfect piece at the right time. This not only lent to a degree of replayability, but also a fun way to learn more tricks. Six-Sided Streets comes with several terrain types, each scoring in their own unique way. Brick roads radiate outward from the town center, parks provide shade, and wind turbines upon hills spin. Six harborfronts allow for brick roads to connect, ratcheting up a player’s points.
Connecting wind turbines together deducts points, because the wind energy has already been captured by one, and thus, there isn’t any for the adjacent turbine to capture.
Getting a higher score isn’t always about skill, but any skilled player can score high. With each randomly generated map, I find myself taking lessons from past playthroughs and applying them into a largely new environment. With different ranks for specific ranges of points, getting that “A” was a celebratory moment for me.
Each playthrough of Six-Sided Streets is a fun little package. Despite its inherent simplicity, I find that each map is a challenge that begs the player to consider their moves and not rely upon pre existing patterns learned before. Sure, certain tricks work most of the time, but Six-Sided Streets’ true ace is that one can truly never be too careful.
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