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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.
Note: Kickstarter copy reviewed.
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.
