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Players 2-5 Times Played: 2 (five player) Initial Impression
As an added bonus to the glamour, La Città even plays out as a decent game, and has received a pretty unanimous skyward thumb pointing from our group. When you first set up La Città and read the seemingly thorough and error-free rules, it is easy to be reminded of other games. The placement of terrain tiles is reminiscent of Settlers of Catan, the development of the cities and the variety of functions of individual buildings has the flavour of the Civilisation computer game (and the Settlers card game). I suspect I am in a minority of one here, but the conflict between individual cities reminds me of the kingdom conflicts in Euphrat & Tigris. If you really search hard for comparisons, there is even a nod to Die Macher in the matching of city ‘agendas’ to the voting preferences of the citizens – although it might now be time to put a call in for the whitecoats. While there is nothing wrong with borrowing mechanisms from such illustrious titles, fortunately these similarities are superficial at best – La Città is most certainly its own game. The quest for victory is straightforward: develop your cities so they attract and support more well-fed citizens than anyone else. Apart from a bonus for developing balanced attributes in each of your settlements, that is it. There are no strategy-channelling point boosters on offer here for the largest building, or the biggest city, or dominance in particular spheres – something I applaud wholeheartedly, since any one of these facets will almost certainly already contribute to the victory point total. The game is played in six rounds, with each round consisting of several steps. Most of these are automatic and straightforward, and include the collection of gold from quarries, adding one citizen to each city to represent internal population growth and calculating whether you have enough agricultural production to feed your people. The heart of the game occurs during the five-round action phase where players perform one action in each turn around of the table. Because most of these actions are relatively quick there is usually not too much downtime between turns, although, particularly in the later game, there can be some head-scratching decisions to be made. It is during these rounds that the cities develop. Players start with two hexagonal castle tiles on the board, each containing three of the plastic citizens, and build out from these by placing new building tiles along paths of empty hexes which snake between terrain tiles representing mountains, farmland and lakes. These terrain tiles serve to both provide certain buildings with resources (quarries next to mountains receive gold, farms next to farmland produce food, fountains and baths must be built next to lakes) and to restrict the amount of land available before opposing cities become close enough for migration to occur. To maintain this competition for space, certain areas of the board are unplayable when less than four players are involved. Surprisingly, both the four and five player versions uses the same board area. This must mean the four-player game probably plays out quite differently to the five-player. I am guessing here. City development relies on two key principles – the player must play an appropriate action card to create the proposed building (often combined with the payment of some gold) and he must have at least one citizen available for each building created. For small buildings one of the three identical action cards possessed by each player can be used. For the larger structures action cards taken from a central pool must be played. This common pool of seven available political cards is kept at a constant number, as each card played from it is immediately replaced from the top card in the face-down draw deck. These cards come in a variety of flavours, allowing you to place the larger buildings in your cities, to temporarily boost one of your city’s attributes, to gain some extra citizens or to get an insight into the population’s demands. Often the card you want will not be available in this selection, only to appear later in the round, or possibly not at all. City growth is restricted unless certain buildings are present – the initial limit of five citizens per city will be increased to eight when the market place is built, a limit which will be removed when a fountain or a public bath appears. Of course, with each city only gaining one citizen per turn through procreation, city growth could become somewhat slow and dull. The heart of the game lies in boosting your population through persuading the citizens of nearby settlements to sell up and move into your urban paradise. Most buildings are rated in one of three colour-coded areas – culture, health and education. Each building will have one, two or three arches printed on its tile in one of these colours (one building, the hospital, has one arch in each of two colours). Those buildings with three arches in a single colour being the most expensive to build. So each city will have a score in these three areas according to the total number of appropriately coloured arches. Now comes the clever bit. At the beginning of each turn, four ‘voice of the people’ cards are dealt out onto the board – one face up, the others face down. The face of each card will show one of the three colours, and there are more cards than will be played in a game, to work against card counters. When revealed after all actions have been completed, these cards will determine which of the three services the people most desire. (Occasionally two services will tie, in which case players decide which one will apply on a case-by-case basis). Once the will of the people has been determined, each player compares his total in this area with nearby cities and will gain a citizen from each adjacent city with a minority of the relevant arches. The migration can result in significant population swings. This has the added impact that if a city loses enough citizens so that he has more buildings than people, then buildings must be destroyed until the balance is regained. Should one of the buildings be a farmhouse, then food production will also be affected, which may result in more citizens dying through starvation, and even more buildings being lost. That city on which you have lavished your attention for hours can be reduced to a mere collection of huts in a matter of minutes. As you can see, the voice of the people phase is critical, but you do not enter into it blind to the people’s likely desires. With one of the cards face up there is at least a fair indication of what the result is going to be. Added to this information, one of the more common political cards allows a player to secretly examine two of the other face down cards (or all three at a cost). After migration has been settled, each player calculates whether he can actually feed his people by matching his total population in all of his cities to his total agricultural production. If you cannot feed your people, the penalties can be severe. As well as losing the surplus citizens to starvation, you also lose an action in the following round and, in the final round, you will also pay a penalty of five victory points. Since the final victory tallies will tend to be tight this could easily make the difference between winning and coming in last. Despite the game’s size it is not too complicated to teach and the time taken to play matches the estimate on the box. With five players new to the game we got through the game in just under three hours, including the time taken to go through the rules. I can see no reason why five experienced players who plan their play while others are taking their actions could not finish it close to the two hour mark. The game presents many potential strategies, from concentrating on equal development of your cities to throwing all of your efforts into building one huge citizen magnet. The game also tends to be close when the points are counted up and there is potential to catch up in the later rounds if you have suffered a migratory disaster. The supply of the critical resources of money and food is tight, as is the competition for them. The fact that the terrain on the board will vary from one game to the next (unless you opt for the symmetrical setup provided for beginners) should increase its replay value and avoid the pitfalls of ideal initial placement. Tactics also play their part, and these can be quite sophisticated: restricting the growth potential of other cities by cutting them off from expansion space; taking one of the political cards from the central pool simply to deny it to another player; bluffing others into expending their last reserves of cash into useless buildings after polling the people and building something in a different colour; deliberately allowing citizens to be attracted to an opponent’s city in the knowledge that he is not going to be able to feed them all…It can get quite nasty. So what is the downside? Much of it is a matter of taste. It is quite a long game, which may put off a few people. It can also suffer from an element of luck in the distribution of the political cards combined with turn order, which could help others a great deal more it helps you. Probably the main complaint is the game's fiddle factor. Calculating the migration to population to food equation is crucial and can get a bit mind-numbing and long-winded, particularly in the later stages. Also, counting up the different coloured arches in each city, often obscured by the hordes of plastic citizens all over the place, can lead to that horrible combination of eye-strain and backache as you stand over the board peering down at the building tiles. For me, these aspects just about come down on the tolerable side of the fence, although I could imagine others getting frustrated by it, particularly if they are blessed with the presence of slow players. Anyway, I like it, the group like it, and I hope to get the chance to get my investment back by playing it a few more times. Rating: 8
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If there is a better-looking game to come
along in the near future then it will be truly gorgeous. Laid out on the
table, this take on Renaissance city building really looks the part.
Sprawling towns, a colourful board, pretty playing cards, a mass of little
plastic citizens and a wide selection of terrain tiles which can change
the look of the game from one play to the next. You would need plenty of
sticks to shake at these bits and for anyone shallow enough to be
impressed simply by the quantity and quality of a game’s components
rather than its design – like me – you are in for a treat.