Welcome To... applies the theme of a 1950s housing development to the genre. If that sounds a bit technical, well, it is if you distill the game down to its elemental level. Each player is given a sheet that shows three neighborhood streets. In each round of the game, you fill in an address number on one of the houses, and use a special power for a secondary action -- installing a swimming pool, building a park, or skirting around the game's central rule that all houses on a street must be placed in numerical order.
Each round, three options are presented to all players, each one a pairing of a specific house number to be written in, and a specific power that goes with it. Each player picks one of the three pairs. Then three new pairs are revealed. Repeat the process until the game ends. Because multiple players can choose the same pairing, and each player is simultaneously making a choice for their own housing development (worksheet), the game shouldn't take much longer for a larger number of players. Indeed, the box cheekily promises you can play with any number of players up to 100 (the number of worksheets included in the box, I assume).
Essentially, the game is probability management as strategy. You're often faced with the choice between taking a power you really want that comes with an address number you really don't, or vice versa. If you're a veteran gamer, the rules don't seem that complex. There's a lot to remember at first, and reminder cards summarizing the various effects would have been nice, but you do quickly catch on to what you're being asked to do.
But beneath the surface, I felt the game had a number of flaws. Well, not "flaws," perhaps -- but my feelings about the game dropped measurably as we marched toward the end. First of all, it's actually not as easy as it should be, if the true intention is to support a large group of, say, 10-ish players. Different players will always need reminders of how different things work. Some players will quickly take to the spatial puzzle; others will need more time. That's totally fair, and yet the pressure you feel if you're the one person making nine others wait for an explanation? It's stressful.
Even if everyone is on roughly equal footing, there's a deeper issue I have with the game. Though it includes randomness, it's actually 100% deterministic. Each round, three random choices are presented -- but all players get the same three choices. That never changes. Now sure, a game like chess is 100% deterministic too -- but one player's choices there are not the same as the other player's choices. The unsatisfying conclusion of Welcome To... is that there will be a winner, and every other player will know that if only they'd made the exact choices that player made, they could have shared a tie victory. It strips away the already thin fiction on the game, making it feel like competitive "filling out a spreadsheet." I'd much prefer restricting the game to just 2-4 players, and having each player make a choice in sequence (so that each player's options are different each round).
Would I rather play Welcome To... than Yahtzee? Absolutely. But I wasn't especially enamored of it. I'd give Welcome To... a C+. If I owned a copy, I doubt I'd ever exhaust the 100-sheet pad it comes with.
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