We Built This City…Again

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“Card City XL”
Designed by Alban Viard, published by AVStudio Games

The Quick Summary: With the cards at your disposal, you are in charge of building the highest scoring city. With a crafty card drafting system, where the first player creates small decks of partially hidden cards for other players to choose from, “Card City XL” requires some long-term planning to optimize your town by fitting the best cards within a 5×5 or 6×6 square. You can place cards to grow your city, but optimal card placement can allow some districts to develop by themselves and grow without actually using cards from your hand! The key feature of the game is that it comes with 240 different ways of playing. Some of them are pretty similar, just easier versions of the same game, but it does have a lot of possible variations.

The Awesome:

  • A lot of potential variety when it comes to winning conditions and objectives.

The Good: 

  • Many different levels of difficulty.
  • Will appeal to both casual gamers and more strategic gamers.
  • Comes with a solo variant that allows you to try to create your own metropolis.
  • The nice combo of tile placement and organic growth of your city makes for interesting decision-making.
  • Fast setup.

The Bad:

  • The many different levels and winning conditions can be confusing at first glance.
  • A good insert to store the cards would have been nice.
  • Solo variant only measures your success based on your score. You can’t lose. You simply compare your score to the chart in the rulebook.

The Ugly:

  • The size of the city, once you reach a certain amount of cards makes it very hard to manage. You need a BIG table (or a lot of moving your city around) for 3-4 players games.

Keep it or leave it? This is a keeper since the more hardcore gamer can be satisfied because of the long-term planning required and it will also attract more casual gamers (just lower the difficulty).

Review by Sébastien

 

 

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