Hi Richard. Thanks for play through and review. I'm glad you liked it. I'd like to give credit to Phil for his idea of giving names to the city cards and for the achievement boards. He was the main reason that the thematic elements were incorporated into the game, though we worked together on making the achievement boards more thematic.
Just last Friday I had the opportunity to play it and I was delighted. I really like games of this type, but I often prefer them tighter (for example, I prefer Calico to Cascadia). Cities is more in line with open games, but the theme, as you mention, gives it a charm that caught me instantly.
Thanks Rhado for the review. From the players' point of view, what I like the most is that it is very accessible to new players, and they will discover a lot of new game mechanics for them after a 5 minutes explaination. It’s a great gateway
maybe it's better with 2p? getting to grab 8 items for each round, trying to prioritize what you need most and what you think you might be able to get after is pretty exciting :)
Hi Rahdo, have you ever played the other game called Cities by Martin F published by Z-Man games? Seems like it would be in yours and Jens wheel house. One of the greatest chill, puzzly tile laying game I’ve ever played and criminally underrated. You get a stack of tiles with numbers on the back and you call them out bingo style and each player places them down connected to another tile (even corner to corner) until you make a 4x4 tableau. Which actually becomes an 8 x 8 tableau because each tile has four smaller squares on it. It scales amazingly well from 2 to 4, and I’ve bought two boxes so up to eight for me! Anyways I could gush on and on about the game and go more in detail but if you have not tried it I highly highly suggest you do and think it will be one of your faves. (I know, big assumption but I stand by it lol!) It’s currently out of print but there’s plenty of copies for cheap on the secondhand market that I just saw.
That's impressive. There is basically a 5% chance that any one person has some kind of color deficiency. The odds of over half the group with the subset of red/green deficiency have to be astronomical. Unless they are related or it's an actual club for the colorblind.
@@BrandonGraham yep. I’m the only non-colorblind male in the group. We even have a colorblind female, which is even rarer. PS I don’t know if all of them have the same red/green colorblindness, I just know that they all have some form of colorblindness
The Dice Tower review of this indicates it wasn’t good for two which worries me. Obviously it worked well for you at two. Would you have anything to add to make the case for the 2 player game?
i would say the game is absolutely best at 2 because it's a crunchier and more tension filled experience! since you know you're going to take 2 things from each row, you can make much more meaningful plans and take more gambles about how to most efficiently draft, if you can anticipate where your opponent is going to go.
@@rahdoah the classic more control at 2 angle that we tend to agree with you on. Thanks for that! You’re not providing content on Rock Hard 1977 soon are you? So much Devir stuff to consider these days!
yup, exactly that. 2p is more strategic, 3+ is more tactical :) re: rock hard, i'll be talking about it in my roundup at the end of the month. we played it, and we're the biggest fans (too gateway-level for us... lighter than lords of waterdeep. plus it's 2p is not as good as higher player count)
@@rahdogood to know you feel that way about 2 player, as I preordered it and play mostly at 2, then saw that dice Tower dismissed it as a 2 player game.
Having them the same colours but different building designs like "Skyrise," That would probably help with colour blindness. Great looking game though. Can't wait to give it a go.
it doesn't have the interplay of residental/commercial/industrial, and there's no traffic management which is such a big part of sim city, but it's still a great city building game. i did a top10 sim city style games list 4 years ago ruclips.net/video/2hoEDB_gtQs/видео.html and this beats all of them! :)
Excited! (Because, I also loved SimCity). Also, I have been waiting for an immersive city building board game. I have not played on that properly scratches the itch (Suburbia, Lisboa, Quadropolis, etc. - close but no cigar). Thank you!
How did you get those 10% being color blind? This just by common sense sound like a huge exaggeration . And a quick google search shows that it is up to 4,5% of the population. That is not to say that publishers should not care about that- they definitely should. But we should not be making up the numbers just to prove our point.
10% of men are color blind atlanticeyeinstitute.com/symptoms-of-color-blindness-are-you-the-1-in-10/ and the majority of potential boardgame players are men (an unfortunate truth of the hobby at the moment though things are improving) so it's way closer to 10% of potential players than 5% i'm afraid, and i was just rounding up :)
@@rahdo Agreed - Very few, if any women, are colorblind. The colorblind gene is passed on by a woman, not a man. Not picking on women, just a medical fact.
@@rahdo 1. iit is not 10% but rather 8% of man are colorblind (you should search for more reliable sources) 2. so you assume that 0 women will play that game? yes, I agree that there are more guys playing board games than gals. but it is not 0! Instead of making up your numbers by making wrong assumptions (that no women will play this game) just give objective numbers (which is 4,5%) and you will sound much more serious.
there's plenty of sites that say approximately 10%, and besides, if it were only 7% of men, i'd probably round down to 5%. even at it's 8% (bear in mind these are all approximate... it's not like all people on the planet are tested for this at birth) well then i rounded up. that's how rounding number works :) www.colour-blindness.com/general/prevalence/ www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140403084243.htm www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/color-blindness www.unr.edu/ndsip/english/resources/tips/facts-about-color-blindness also re: percetnage of men vs women who will play, the only hard number i have for you there is that 98% of people who will watch this video are men, according to youtube analytics, and if you go to any major convention and simply look around the floor at who's playing games, the OVERWHELMING majority of what you see will be men. clearly women play games, and a lot of them, but i think it's pretty safe to say that the majority will be men, and since we're doing simple quick easy to remember numbers, rounding to 10% seems perfectly "serious" to me when trying to make clear to publishers how much of their audience is affected by their oversight. ymmv of course, you might note though that elsewhere in these very comments, one player reported that over 50% of his playgroup is color blind!
Hi Richard. Thanks for play through and review. I'm glad you liked it. I'd like to give credit to Phil for his idea of giving names to the city cards and for the achievement boards. He was the main reason that the thematic elements were incorporated into the game, though we worked together on making the achievement boards more thematic.
that was time well spent! :)
Great to hear your thoughts. I pre-ordered this on a whim based on the designers and now I’m really looking forward to it. Thanks!
Just last Friday I had the opportunity to play it and I was delighted. I really like games of this type, but I often prefer them tighter (for example, I prefer Calico to Cascadia). Cities is more in line with open games, but the theme, as you mention, gives it a charm that caught me instantly.
Thanks Rhado for the review. From the players' point of view, what I like the most is that it is very accessible to new players, and they will discover a lot of new game mechanics for them after a 5 minutes explaination. It’s a great gateway
On the surface it initially looks like it has elements of Rolling Heights which I love.
Hey Rahdo, have you tried the 2-player variant in the rules that lets you build a 3x5 city? If so, did it make it too easy to complete objectives?
nope, we didn't try it... not looking for a longer game, when it's pretty much spot on as is :)
Glad it worked for ya'll. We played it at Mega XP (Mexico), felt like the game never took off and was really repetitive and played itself.
maybe it's better with 2p? getting to grab 8 items for each round, trying to prioritize what you need most and what you think you might be able to get after is pretty exciting :)
Devil really can’t miss these days
Hi Rahdo, have you ever played the other game called Cities by Martin F published by Z-Man games? Seems like it would be in yours and Jens wheel house. One of the greatest chill, puzzly tile laying game I’ve ever played and criminally underrated. You get a stack of tiles with numbers on the back and you call them out bingo style and each player places them down connected to another tile (even corner to corner) until you make a 4x4 tableau. Which actually becomes an 8 x 8 tableau because each tile has four smaller squares on it. It scales amazingly well from 2 to 4, and I’ve bought two boxes so up to eight for me! Anyways I could gush on and on about the game and go more in detail but if you have not tried it I highly highly suggest you do and think it will be one of your faves. (I know, big assumption but I stand by it lol!) It’s currently out of print but there’s plenty of copies for cheap on the secondhand market that I just saw.
nope i never got that one to the table!
Over half of my play group is color blind, so I’ll have to pass on this one due to accessibility. Looking forward to trying it at some point though
a sharpie can easily fix it (just put a big dot on every red thing for instance) but it's a shame that would have to be done for your group :(
That's impressive. There is basically a 5% chance that any one person has some kind of color deficiency. The odds of over half the group with the subset of red/green deficiency have to be astronomical. Unless they are related or it's an actual club for the colorblind.
@@BrandonGraham yep. I’m the only non-colorblind male in the group. We even have a colorblind female, which is even rarer.
PS I don’t know if all of them have the same red/green colorblindness, I just know that they all have some form of colorblindness
Just ordered my copy.
The Dice Tower review of this indicates it wasn’t good for two which worries me. Obviously it worked well for you at two. Would you have anything to add to make the case for the 2 player game?
i would say the game is absolutely best at 2 because it's a crunchier and more tension filled experience! since you know you're going to take 2 things from each row, you can make much more meaningful plans and take more gambles about how to most efficiently draft, if you can anticipate where your opponent is going to go.
@@rahdoah the classic more control at 2 angle that we tend to agree with you on. Thanks for that! You’re not providing content on Rock Hard 1977 soon are you? So much Devir stuff to consider these days!
yup, exactly that. 2p is more strategic, 3+ is more tactical :)
re: rock hard, i'll be talking about it in my roundup at the end of the month. we played it, and we're the biggest fans (too gateway-level for us... lighter than lords of waterdeep. plus it's 2p is not as good as higher player count)
@@rahdogood to know you feel that way about 2 player, as I preordered it and play mostly at 2, then saw that dice Tower dismissed it as a 2 player game.
Having them the same colours but different building designs like "Skyrise,"
That would probably help with colour blindness.
Great looking game though. Can't wait to give it a go.
Different shapes might make it easier to pick the type you want from the bag when refreshing the board.
Does this capture "Sim City" in boardgames form?
it doesn't have the interplay of residental/commercial/industrial, and there's no traffic management which is such a big part of sim city, but it's still a great city building game.
i did a top10 sim city style games list 4 years ago ruclips.net/video/2hoEDB_gtQs/видео.html and this beats all of them! :)
Excited! (Because, I also loved SimCity).
Also, I have been waiting for an immersive city building board game. I have not played on that properly scratches the itch (Suburbia, Lisboa, Quadropolis, etc. - close but no cigar). Thank you!
Find it interesting that the Dice Tower didn't recommend this at 2 player
i would say they were very wrong, but that's just my 2cents :) this will be in my top10 of the year, and i've only played it as a 2p game :)
@rahdo thank you! That's why you're the go-to in the industry for a 2 player perspective
Cities remember California
How did you get those 10% being color blind? This just by common sense sound like a huge exaggeration . And a quick google search shows that it is up to 4,5% of the population. That is not to say that publishers should not care about that- they definitely should. But we should not be making up the numbers just to prove our point.
10% of men are color blind atlanticeyeinstitute.com/symptoms-of-color-blindness-are-you-the-1-in-10/ and the majority of potential boardgame players are men (an unfortunate truth of the hobby at the moment though things are improving) so it's way closer to 10% of potential players than 5% i'm afraid, and i was just rounding up :)
@@rahdo Agreed - Very few, if any women, are colorblind. The colorblind gene is passed on by a woman, not a man. Not picking on women, just a medical fact.
@@rahdo 1. iit is not 10% but rather 8% of man are colorblind (you should search for more reliable sources)
2. so you assume that 0 women will play that game? yes, I agree that there are more guys playing board games than gals. but it is not 0!
Instead of making up your numbers by making wrong assumptions (that no women will play this game) just give objective numbers (which is 4,5%) and you will sound much more serious.
there's plenty of sites that say approximately 10%, and besides, if it were only 7% of men, i'd probably round down to 5%. even at it's 8% (bear in mind these are all approximate... it's not like all people on the planet are tested for this at birth) well then i rounded up. that's how rounding number works :)
www.colour-blindness.com/general/prevalence/
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140403084243.htm
www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/color-blindness
www.unr.edu/ndsip/english/resources/tips/facts-about-color-blindness
also re: percetnage of men vs women who will play, the only hard number i have for you there is that 98% of people who will watch this video are men, according to youtube analytics, and if you go to any major convention and simply look around the floor at who's playing games, the OVERWHELMING majority of what you see will be men. clearly women play games, and a lot of them, but i think it's pretty safe to say that the majority will be men, and since we're doing simple quick easy to remember numbers, rounding to 10% seems perfectly "serious" to me when trying to make clear to publishers how much of their audience is affected by their oversight.
ymmv of course, you might note though that elsewhere in these very comments, one player reported that over 50% of his playgroup is color blind!
Tiny Towns on Steroids.