Cities

In Cities every player builds his own 3x3 tile city using components claimed from a central game board. There are four types of components, and every round you will take one in each type. The game is played for exactly 8 rounds. That is when everyone will finish his city. 

The most basic component you claim from the central board is a city tile, which consists of four spaces. They can be building, park or water spaces. You can take building blocks in four different colours to place or stack on building spaces. You can take feature tiles like trees, boats and dolphins to place on park or water spaces. Finally you can take scoring cards. They specify criteria you can fulfil to score points. 

You gradually build your own city

A scoring card

Players take turns claiming items. There is often some angst in which item to take first. When there are two things you want, the one you don’t take now just might get taken by someone else before your turn comes again. Another twist is one item in each type is unknown. It might turn out to be exactly what you need, or it might be completely useless to you. 

There are three public missions. They are similar to the personal scoring cards, but they tend to be hard to fulfil. If you manage to fulfil the conditions you score points. The earlier players score more points than the later. There is a race element. 

You will end the game with eight personal scoring cards. You want to build your city to fulfil as many of them as possible. When you pick them, you also try to pick those that work well with your city. 

Cities is a typical Eurogame. It is peaceful and gentle. You mostly focus on your own city. You don’t interfere much with others. The public missions drive players to build their cities in certain ways. It’s interesting to see how different the cities can be from game to game. This works well as a family game and an introductory game.