Happy City Review

How small can a city be? How happy can a city be? If HAPPY CITY is anything to go by, a city can be pretty small! And do you know what? As a country girl at heart, that makes me very HAPPY!

HAPPY CITY by Gamewright and Coiledspring Games is a lovely, super-fast playing small box, engine cranking, set collecting, tableau building filler game for 2-5 players. As you might have guessed from the title, it’s all about building the happiest city of all! And here, to ensure maximum smile mileage for as many cardboard city dwellers as possible, you are going to need to get rich quick. Yes folks, you need money to buy the best buildings!

So how do you coin in the…coins? Read

How To Play

After setting out the 3 draw piles (separated by building cost: 1-3 coins, 4-5 coins, and 6-9 coins), the residence cards, special buildings, and coins, players pick a market card and gain a coin. The market cards are double sided and either have a colour (to help with gaining special buildings) or are white.

Each turn, you may discard any one face-up card from the market pool.

Then you must draw cards and place them in the rows next to the draw piles until there are just 3 cards on show in the market tableau in total

Finally, you either have to buy a card from the market tableau using your income coin(s) or you buy a residence card using your income coin(s) or you pass on a building and just take 1 coin.

If your own tableau has the required combination of colours then once per game you may take one of the available special buildings and trigger its immediate effect/benefit from its ongoing power throughout the game. Note that special buildings come in basic (pink) or advanced (red) varieties.

As soon as a player has added the 10th card to their tableau (including the starting card and any special building card acquired), the game ends and its time to score!

Scoring Cities

Scoring in Happy City is what will keep you deliberating over which card to buy every turn in this short, fun, colourful game. You see, each building card has a number of icons; heart(s), meeple(s), and/or coins. Coins represent income so each turn, you’ll gain coins to the value of your running income total. And income is important during the game because that’s the only way you’ll be able to afford those more expensive 3rd row buildings. And if you hadn’t noticed yet, those ones are where all the hearts and people hang out!

Why is that important? Well, your final score in HAPPY CITY is going to be total collected hearts x total collected people! So, for example, gathering 7 hearts and 5 people across your tableau will give a final score of 35! But gaining 8 people and 4 hearts will only get you 32!

Balancing Buildings

This game is all about balance; getting sufficient hearts and peeps to maximise happiness! But you can’t just worry about your own smile factor. When discarding cards and adding cards to the market rows, you need to think about everyone else. What can they afford? What colours do they want in order to access special buildings? Adding cards to rows you know they can’t afford is a neat strategy but it’s also one that they’re likely to use on you too! Passing can feel like a big hit when there’s only a potential 8 or 9 turns in each game. But money makes the world go round and getting mo’ money faster in this game gives access to the big happiness hitters.

Final Thoughts

This game is light, colourful, super-cute, and fun and plays fast. It’s a game you can teach anyone to play as it is really accessible in terms of understanding how to maximise scoring and keeping your mini income engine running. Setting out all the teeny cards can take a minute, but the illustrations are utterly charming and will keep you occupied!

Gaining early access to generous income and those special buildings are both crucial in this game. And the price in terms of drafting the coin heavy yellow buildings and/or the required colours for the special buildings generally keeps their effects in balance; sacrifice v reward in step. The real crunch in terms of strategy comes when playing with the advanced special buildings. And that tactical jump is definitely worth 60 seconds of shuffling! Some of those powers will keep on paying out (Hot Dog Stand giving reductions in price for all cards) whereas others give an instant hit (usually if you have the required elements in your tableau already – see Eiffel Tower which gives coins based on blue cards).

For such a small, fast playing game, there’s a really satisfying play in HAPPY CITY. And my city indeed fills me with happiness when I can balance my hearts and meeples just right! I’m not the best at maths, and sometimes I go for max hearts when I should have upped my meeple quota, but it’s over so quickly that there’s always time to squeeze in one more game. It also scales well – with limited cards in the pool and discarding/seeding happening each round, it’s generally easy to cycle out the cards that aren’t offering much regardless of player count. After our first few plays we levelled up to the advanced special buildings and they make our cities very happy indeed!