Cities is a city building abstract strategy game that uses open drafting, tile placement, and worker placement. Cities is designed by Steve Finn, and Phil Walker-Harding, and this title is published by Devir Games. The game is designed for 2-4 players and takes 30 minutes to play. Devir has been publishing some great titles and in 2024, Cities has been the talk of the industry. If you want to figure out why the game is so popular, read on!
What’s in the Box?
- 1 Game board
- 32 City tiles
- 4 Starting tiles
- 48 Feature tiles
- 4 City Achievement boards (double sided)
- 32 Scoring cards
- 4 Player aids cards
- 1 Star token
- 100 Building pieces (25 each of red, blue, green, and yellow)
- 32 Worker pawns
- 12 Achievement rings
- 4 Scoring tokens
- 1 Cloth bag
How’s It Play?
The game is 8 rounds long, or 4 rounds in a 2 player game. You use your workers to collect 1 scoring card, 1 city tile, 1 or 2 feature tiles, and 2-4 building pieces. Tiles are made up of park, water, and building spaces. Building pieces are placed on building spaces that match colors to form buildings, which can be from 1 to 4 high. The scoring cards and city achievement boards provide objectives for players to complete to place their components to score points at the end of the game. Whoever scores the most points, wins the game.
Whoever has the star token begins, and play continues in a clockwise direction. Each turn, you take an item from the board and place one of your workers in the designated space next to or under the item you have taken. After the first round, the star token is placed on the bottom right space on the board to be gained by whoever goes there.
You can choose to place your worker in any order, but other players will be taking other items, so you should take what you really want first, or try to guess what other might go for first, so you can eventually get things you can benefit from as you draft or place your workers to take the different items available.
Each row provides a different resource. If you go to a place to gain a face down item, it is turned face up and taken. But, you cannot look at the item until you decide to take it, so choose wisely.
You will choose a city achievement board to use each time you play, which also has objectives to give you an idea of what you might want to plan toward. These might have goals like having a certain number of buildings next to water, or water that touches 2 different edges of the board, or 3 pairs of buildings of the same color with water in-between.
Those are all example for Venice, but Rio de Janeiro awards you for having water with 7 spaces together, building 4 buildings of different heights, and 4 yellow buildings of any height next to water space. New York City requires 7 park spaces together in a group, 2 horizontal or vertical lines of 6 building spaces, and 4 buildings of 3 or more buildings of any color. The first one to complete to objective places their ring to take the higher amount of points listed, with others completing the same objective later receiving less points.
Having those goals in mind, there are also scoring cards that might want you have buildings 1, 2, 3, or 4 high buildings of a certain colors. Some award points for large parks or lakes, or points for separate parks and lakes. Other cards might award points for sets of different color buildings of any size.
At the end of a round, when all workers have been used, the player with the worker closest to the star space (the rightmost worker in the fourth row) takes the star token to become the first player for next round. New items then fill the board to be taken again. After 8 rounds, the game ends and you score points for your rings on the city achievement board, for each water and park space, you score for each different feature in that area. Monument feature tiles score 2 points a piece. Scoring cards are scored for requirements that have been met. The player then with the most points wins the game.
The Verdict
Cities was a hit for 2024 for a reason. It’s a puzzley game with open drafting, worker placement, tile placement, and completing goals. It’s a game with light rules, so you can teach or learn it quickly, but then you will find many different combinations to continue to enjoy it. So there is some open information that lets players face off against each other, but there are also personal objectives that come out as the game progresses that makes each city unique.
You might decide that for you, you want a lot of small parks or small water areas, while maybe someone else decides on a large water or park area for their city, or buildings all close together or spread apart. The goals determine a lot of this, but even without those goals, you want to place unique features in those areas, you want to build buildings to score points.
The draft is fun because eventually you take one type of item from each row, but your first turn you probably want to grab something that no one else has taken from to get the best item there. This can be implemented differently with different player counts, but you essentially don’t want to take from a row that you know what you’re stuck with before grabbing from a different row where you have a choice.
The game has great components, with 3d plastic houses to use to building upwards. The rules are simple but the game provides depth within those rules. The scoring is changed each time you play with a different city board, plus you will collect different scoring cards each time, too. The game is great for all player counts and doesn’t take all that long to play either. So, you can see why Cities has been such a hit for Devir, and for my gaming table.
Images via Devir
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