Given the number of home revamp and decoration shows that fill the daytime TV schedule it's surprising that home decor hasn't been commonly used as a board game theme. Of course Floodgate Games brought us Décorum, but interior design has otherwise yet to emerge as a prominent board game theme. Enter Matthew Dunstan and Brett J Gilbert, whose design for Happy Home has been published by Alley Cat Games. Art is by Ekaterina Boguslavskaya.
In Happy Home, the 2-5 players have boards representing the floor plans of their (all similar) four-room homes. Players are moving their meeples around a rondel circuit track of cards to pick up the polyomino furniture piece to place on their board. As in Jokkmokk (Wizkids) and Glen More II (Funtails), you can move your meeple as far as you like on the circuit track but the further you move the fewer turns you are likely to get because play is always with the player in last place on the track.
There's a puzzle optimisation element in working out where to position your polyominoes in order to make the best use of the space in each room: once placed, polyominoes can't be repositioned. That said, the level of challenge over polyomino placement is quite light, tho' there are bonus points available for maximising furniture adjacency. There are set collection bonuses to be won for having a set of three different furniture icons on the cards for the polyominoes in a room, and for having furniture of the same colour in multiple rooms. You can also pick up points for potted plants; these are not room specific and they score extra if they have an adjacent unfilled space.
Happy Home is a light accessible family-friendly game. Playing time varies with player count but you can expect to complete a two-player game in a filler-length 20 minutes; allow around 50 minutes if you're playing with a complement of five players.