Point City moves fast but feels just right, and its
foundation is a tableau of resource/city cards. One side of each card has
resources (energy, industry, economy, community, ecology, and ingenuity), which
are used to build cities. Ingenuity is a wild resource that counts as any other
one. The other side of each card shows buildings that need resources to be
built. After construction, buildings
provide a fixed number of game-end points, permanent resources that help
construct other buildings, and some let you choose civic tokens, which reward
players with game-end points when players meet specific goals.
What is in the box? A deck of 160 double-sided resource/building cards, broken down into 3 tiers, indicated by the number of dots shown on the bottom left corner of each building side. Also included are four starting cards, civic tokens, market tokens, and reference cards.
Game Setup: Separate Resource/Building cards into tiers and
randomly remove a specific number of them from each tier based on player count.
Assemble the deck in tier order from 1 to 3. Draw 16 cards and form a 4x4 grid to create the starting market, with
the resource side of all cards facing up. Randomly select civic tokens and display a number based on player count.
Each player receives one wild “ingenuity” resource card, and then it is time to
build!
Play the Game: On their turn, players can optionally turn
over any resource card to its city side if the row or column it is in has only
the resource side up. What you must do on your turn is take two cards either
from the deck or from the tableau. The rules for this are: 1) If you take cards
from the deck, they remain on their resource side and are saved in front of you
to be used to construct a building on another turn. 2) You may take two
orthogonally adjacent cards from the market tableau. You may use resource cards immediately or place
them in front of you for the future. City cards must be built immediately using
resource cards in your play area and/or permanent resources furnished by
constructed buildings. Once resource
cards are used, they are discarded. Resources on played city cards are permanent
and are reused throughout the game. If
you construct a building with a civic symbol on its top right side, choose a
civic goal token.
After each turn: Replenish any cards taken from the market.
If the card taken was on the resource side, replace it with a card on its city
side, and vice versa. The two market tokens (one marked resource and one marked
city) are helpful to put in the spaces you take cards from to remember which
side the cards you took were facing. Once there are no further cards in the
draft pile to replace cards in the tableau, the game ends.
You Built this City! Time to score: Players tally up scores
from buildings and civic tokens, and whoever has the most points wins the game!
I like many things about this game. I like the card design and bright colors. Because I like the engine-building game mechanic, particularly with card drafting, the gameplay resonated with me. I liked its simple rules, quick play but straightforward strategies. Because the card resources distribute evenly throughout the card deck, there was not a “skewed” path to victory or sense of shortage of specific resources, which helps it play well at all 1-4 player counts. The gameplay is only 15 to 30 minutes but seemed full and rewarding. ~Marsha