New City

New City
Rob LeGood
2 or 4 players
30-40 minutes

(1) Give Me the Brain bid card #32: "I forgot how to wear a baseball cap!"
(2) The New City board.

The winner of the third piecepack game design contest was New City by Rob LeGood. Here is Mike Schoessow's description of New City from the announcement of the contest results:

New City is German-style game of city building. As with many German games, it is played in "rounds", with various actions (including an auction, a district-building phase, an improvement-building phase, an income collection phase, etc.) taking place in order each round. It displays the typical elements of an excellent game; there are difficult decisions almost every turn and there is a lot of player interaction on a couple of different levels. The game also has good depth and excellent clarity, as well as the right sort of randomizing element to insure good re-playability. As with many excellent games of this genre, thoughtful play is well rewarded, and in my opinion the balance between luck and skill is just where it should be with enough luck to keep things interesting but not so much that a skilled player will be unjustly robbed of a deserved victory. Rob lists the game as strictly 4-player, but we happily discovered at one point (when there were only two of us present and we wanted to play New City again) that it plays very well with two players if each player takes two oppositely positioned city quarters and then at the end of the game scores only the income of his or her lower scoring quarter. The rules to New City are also well written, with a nice dose of wry humor. I do have one very minor criticism. The scoring track, although workable, is inconvenient compared to just using some coins to keep track of income, and after the first game we always used coins for money.

New City is a GermanStyleGame for the piecepack in which players attempt to build the most prosperous quadrant in a city. To this end, they build residential areas, entertainment districts, slums, and so on (all tiles), each of which has advantages and disadvantages. For example, Parks only generate one gold piece per turn, so I let Tim obtain two or three for next to nothing in the auctions -- but it turns out that if parks receive certain "improvements" (coins), they generate a lot of revenue because they have a high tile value (5). The player who has the most gold at the end of the game is the winner.

New City is normally a four-player game, but there is a two-player variant in which both p layers take two quadrants of the city, and the player whose lower-scoring quadrant scores higher is the winner. Just about everyone except Tim left game night around 11:30, so we called the game after the end of Turn 3, around 11:55. Tim's lower-scoring quadrant (Red) scored higher than mine (Green), so we declared him the de facto winner. We agreed that next time, we would try to play with four players.

Scores

Note: New City, in an attempt to get the most out of the components of the piecepack, uses a weird base-8 scoring track. We quickly switched to using Cheapass Money instead.

--Ron_Hale-Evans? (based on SeattleCosmicGameNight20030315)

Rules for New City at piecepack.org

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