“Hire artists and offer performances to become the most famous circus in the US.”
Link: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/371947/3-ring-circus
Playing Time: 45-75 minutes
Weight: Medium
Genre: Set Collection & Territorial Control
Designer: Remo Conzadori, Fabio Lopiano
Players: 1-4
When I assemble these lists annually, I feed a list of candidate games into Pubmeeple a few times to flesh it out. And I was quite surprised to see this game keep popping up in the top 100, but on reflection, maybe I shouldn’t be.
3 Ring Circus is a game about assembling a circus act and touring the country. The core puzzle is a set collection game meets country journey. You play small shows to earn the money to play midsized shows to attract the talent to play the big shows, which score big victory points. And there’s a tad of a territorial control game.
But the meat of the game is the set collection. You have three ‘rings’, each of which contains cards that increase in ascending order, and which often grant points based on the other cards in their ring. While playing big shows is a huge goal to guide you early on, the real points come from creating a 3-ring act where each ring has perfect scoring synergy with each other.
On top of that, the game has a wonderful aesthetic, from the circus-poster style aesthetic to the tiny little circus tents that are your meeples. And it’s cheap – you can pick up a copy for forty bucks. This, along with games like White Castle and Red Cathedral are really cementing Devir’s status as a premier board game publisher.
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