Description
The city council has entrusted you with the plan to transform an entire neighborhood: new housing and office buildings, parks, and leisure spots by the water. In Cities you put your district together from tiles, stack colorful buildings on it and chase the goals set by City Hall. You play in one of eight cities: Sydney, Venice, New York, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Mexico City or Buenos Aires.
How to play Cities
The game lasts eight rounds, or four with two players. The board has four rows: scoring cards, city tiles, small tiles for parks and water, and building pieces. On your turn you take one item from the board and place a worker on the space next to it. You may place only one worker in each row per round, or two in a two-player game. The order is up to you.
You add the city tile to your neighborhood, which may never be larger than 3 × 3 tiles. Building pieces go on spaces of the same color or on top of one another, up to four stories high. At the end you add up the points from your scoring cards, from the city achievement board, for parks and water, and for monuments. Whoever has the most wins.
Why you will like it
- Every round you get something from each row; the only question is where to go first. Whatever you take is no longer there for the others.
- In each of the first three rows, one item lies face-down. You can take it blind, but you may not look at it beforehand.
- City achievements are a race: whoever meets a requirement sooner places their ring on a higher number of points.
- The same building or the same park can count for several scoring cards at once, so it pays to collect cards that go well together.
Who is Cities for
Cities is for 2 to 4 players aged 10 and up and takes about 45 minutes. It is medium-light: the rules fit on four pages, yet there is enough to think about for the whole game. Players on BoardGameGeek recommend it most with four. With two, each player has eight workers, and for a longer game the rules offer a variant with seven rounds and a neighborhood of 3 × 5 tiles.
This is the English edition: the rules and the text on the scoring cards are in English. The game is not for those looking for direct conflict. You never interfere with each other’s neighborhoods; you only compete for the same tiles and achievements.
What is in the box
- game board
- 4 double-sided city achievement boards
- 32 city tiles and 4 starting tiles
- 48 small tiles for parks, water and building spaces
- 32 scoring cards
- 4 player aid cards
- 100 building pieces (25 each in red, blue, green and yellow)
- 32 workers (8 each in four colors)
- 12 achievement rings (3 each in four colors)
- 4 scoring tokens
- star token for the first player
- cloth bag
- rules in English
