Campanile (1996)

Overview

Very nice combination of tile placement and betting. Players lay long tiles to build 5 towers taller and taller, whilst betting on which will be the tallest to shortest. The trick is that when you lay a tile to raise a tower one, two or three stories tall, this controls how much you can bet (1,2 or 3 tokens) and crucially, which draw pile you take from (pile 1, 2 or 3). Since the draw piles are face-up, I might want to draw from pile 3 to get a tile which will boost a tower I've bet on, but that means I have to lay a card three stories, and so I might have to play a tile from my hand that helps the other players! A very nice mechanism which gives those simple, frustrating choices we all enjoy. The scoring gives points to the first and second majority backers on each tower.