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Point City
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Description
From the team that brought you the smash hit Point Salad, Point City is a card-drafting, engine-building game with more than 150 unique building cards, giving you the opportunity to create a completely different city each time you play!_x000D_
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The rules are simple: Take two adjacent cards from the dynamic city grid and add them to your expanding city. Use your resource cards and bonuses to construct building cards that require specific combinations. Build special civic structures to multiply your city's points and be the top urban planner!_x000D_
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Point City takes the same simple concept of drafting cards and building the best combinations, then adds new layers of resource management and engine building to the mix — making the game easy to learn, but challenging for everyone!
A simple card game that is a stand-alone sequel to Point Salad. Point City is an engine building game where you use accumulated resources to construct buildings into your city.
How To Play
Point city includes a big deck of double-sided cards. One side depicts resources such as energy, industry and ecology. The reverse shows the building that could be built using your resources. These buildings could be a playground, a shipyard or a market stall, for instance. When you construct these buildings, some grant an ongoing resource to you. Some confer a few points. Occasionally both permanent resources and points. Others result in the award of a civic token, which has endgame scoring possibilities.
The game starts with all of the initially available cards displayed in a four-by-four grid, showing their resource side. On a player turn they must take two cards that are adjacent. If the cards taken were resource cards, they will be replaced from the deck with cards showing their building side, and vice versa. You can only take a building card if you can exchange resources to pay for the building immediately, but you can use the resource collected in your first selection to pay for the building in your second selection. The player with the most points at the end of the game wins.
Rule book: Point city is a simple game that is very clearly explained in a well-designed rule book. It contains nice scenarios of play and scoring. There is a useful rule summary on the back page. Once you have read the rules once you rarely need to refer back to them.
Production
If you have played Point Salad you will recognise the art style, which is bright and cheerful. The graphics used are very easy to understand and can be easily read from across a table. The cards have a gloss finish and should withstand quite a lot of wear. The cards are standard playing card size so you can easily sleeve them if you want. The civic tokens are made from thick card. The box has an insert to keep things in order.
The cards in Point City come in three tiers. The building sides of these cards have backgrounds with three different shades of blue. This is a simple touch, but it makes sorting them at the end of the game so easy. A quality production.
Playtime
The box suggests that Point City plays in 15-30 minutes. In my experience, especially for your first few games, is that this is quite optimistic. I think that ten minutes per player is more likely. If your game group contains players who are prone to analysis paralysis (deep thinkers who want to consider every possibility before they take their turn) this could be longer.
Complexity
This game can be taught in about one minute. If players have played Splendor, this is a very similar game and so will take about thirty seconds to teach. Nevertheless, Point City does involve some interesting decisions. When do you stop collecting resources and start concentrating on buildings that grant points? Do you focus on civic buildings which come with endgame scoring possibilities? Do you focus on one type of resource or get a spread of all five?
Point City is an engine building game that has increasingly interesting decisions to make along the way. It has clear graphics and instructions. It makes a nice travel game.
Point City is in some respects a spiritual successor to the massive hit that is Point Salad. From the same designed team (Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin and Shawn Stankewich) and publisher AEG/Flatout Games, Point City takes simple card drafting mechanisms and adds some additional complexity to deliver a game that promises to be as successful as its predecessor.
Point City is a card drafting, tableau/engine building game in which you are gaining resources to construct various buildings. A “market” of 4 x 4 cards is available to draft from. When drafting players take two adjacent cards from this market. Cards are double sided, with one side having a resource and the other a building. Depending on the face that is displayed will determine if you draft a resource or a building. Buildings can only be drafted if the player has the resources to construct it. New cards are added to the market and depending on what you draft will determine which side the new cards are placed on. Draft a resource and a building is placed face up. Draft a building and a resource is placed face up. Buildings may give players permanent resources (and points) or, in the case of civic buildings, civic tiles which are in essence end game scoring cards.
The game ends when the deck of cards is exhausted and points awarded for civic tokens and points on buildings constructed. The player with the most points is the winner.
Final Thoughts
There is no getting away from the fact that this is going to be compared to Point Salad. Point Salad was great for a specific audience, it was a small accessible card game that could be played with just about anyone, great artwork and quick playing. So is there a space for a more complex Point Salad? Lets find out.
Point City has a lot of good stuff going for it. I really enjoy the fact that you are building something which has a purpose. The initial stages of the game can be quite slow as you slowly collect resources to construct your first building, but the pace does pick up. Many of the buildings have permanent resources on them meaning you can begin, quite quickly, to construct two buildings per turn (assuming you have the right resources). Although not huge, the sense of progression is welcome. Add on to that the Civic tokens which can give you some good end game bonuses and there is a sense of purpose to what you are doing.
The way the market is refreshed I find very interesting and gives players some clever choices to make. With the cards flipping from resources to building and vice versa you need to be careful with what you are taking. Taking two resources might be what you need to do but that leaves two new buildings for your opponent to construct. Likewise constructing two buildings per turn gives your fellow players more resource options. The market is dynamic and ever changing and I do enjoy this mechanism. It does mean, however, that you can struggle to plan for your next turn at the higher player counts as the board could be significantly different. It does not really add to the down time as turns and the overall game length is pretty quick.
There is some added complexity but it is only a small step up from Point Salad. If you are looking for something with a little more, then this would be a good option. It is still accessible, quick playing and I would not hesitate to introduce this to non gamers.
There is a solo mode for Point City which works very well. The AI will take two cards in a predetermined manner (the junction of two tokens and the card below). This gives you a lot of control over which cards the AI is going to take. I think this mechanism is fabulous and is very easy to implement. You can, to some extent, force the AI player to take resources, giving you two new buildings to complete. If the AI player takes a card with a civic token then you take the first available token from those displayed. I have racked up over a dozen plays of this solo and it is one of my staple solo games now. It is so easy to set up and play.
Overall, Point City is another hit for me. For solo play it is fab. Multiplayer works just as well. It is quick, adds enough decisions to make it interesting yet still keeping with streamline rules and easily accessible. Just remember to use those tokens to remind you what to replenish the market with. I apparently have a very poor short term memory.
Zatu Score
You might like
- Clear graphics and rule book make this game easy to teach and understand
- A filler game that has a bit more depth than most
- Has a solo mode that plays nicely in about ten minutes
- Point city fits in an A5 box and is composed of a stack of cards and a few tokens. It makes a good caf/travel game
- A nice increase in complexity from Point Salad
Might not like
- Remembering which card you took from the display was a resource/building, and in which position, can be frustrating. The game comes with tokens to remind you of their positions, but this aspect of the game is rather clunky
- There are an interesting range of decisions to make each turn but as the game develops some players can take long periods of time evaluating every possibility if they are prone to over-thinking
- It can be difficult to plan your turn as you are selecting from a shared display of sixteen cards. If another player takes the cards that you were looking to scoop, then you need to start over again. Some people find this frustrating