Ready to see who can create the best city? Point City from Flatout Games and published by AEG is the perfect simple competition for you and your friends. Designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, and Shawn Stankewich with art design from Dylan Mangini and Shawn Stankewich, Point City has players competing to create the biggest and best city possible with a limited amount of resources to go around.
What’s In the Box?
- 160 Double-sided Resource/Building Cards
- 4 Ingenuity Starting Cards
- 1 Game Reference Card
- 22 Civic Tokens
- 2 Market Tokens
- 1 Rulebook
How To Play Point City
Point City can be played alone as a single player, or with a group of up to 4 people. For the purposes of this review, we played a two-player game. The Game Reference Card sets the game’s parameters based on the number of players there are. For a two-player game, players will build a deck of 40 Tier 1 Resource/Building Cards, 24 Tier 2 Resource/Building Cards, and 18 Tier 3 Resource/Building Cards to create a Draw Pile and pick 10 Civic Tokens at random.
To create the Draw Pile, place the Tier 3 cards on the bottom of the pile, the Tier 2 cards in the middle, and the Tier 1 cards on top, resource side facing up. Draw 16 cards from the top of the deck and place them in a 4×4 grid to create the Market. Each player will then take an Ingenuity starting card, and whoever has the card with the player symbol will go first.
To start the round, you may flip over one of the Market cards to reveal what building is on the back. You may then take any two horizontally or vertically adjacent cards to gather resources for your city, or draw two new cards from the Draw Pile. Each building costs a certain amount of resource points; Ecology, Community, Industry, Energy, or Economy. You may also use an Ingenuity card as a wild card, which will take the place of whatever single unit of a resource you may need to purchase a building.
If a player draws cards from the Market, they must replace them with two cards from the Draw Pile with the Building side facing up. If a building is drawn by a player, they must replace the card with one from the Draw Pile with the Resource side facing up.
Once a building is owned by a player, it provides a permanent unit of a resource for the remaining rounds of the game. For example, if a rain garden provides an Ecology point, then that point may be used once per round to help buy another building. There are some buildings that don’t have any permanent resources but do offer a civic token. When these buildings are acquired, the player draws a civic token that will be used when calculating the final score of the game.
The game ends after 17 turns when there are only 14 cards left in the market and there are no more cards left in the draw pile. Players will then calculate their score by adding up the points from their constructed buildings and any Civic Token advantages. The player with the most points wins, and in the event of a tie, the player with the most unspent resource cards wins.
The Verdict
Overall, Point City is a quick and fun game that is easy to learn and enjoyable for tabletop gamers of all ages. All of the instructions are straightforward, and the quality of the cards and game pieces is great. Two-player mode was great, but there’s always a special place in my heart for games that have a single-player mode. Only children rejoice!
The only shortcoming of the game is that it ends, and that’s remedied easily enough by the ease of playing it over and over again.
You can pre-order Point City now at your FLGS or keep an eye on the AEG shop, where it’ll go for $24.99!
Images and review copy courtesy of Flatout Games
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