My City was a great experience. The rules are simple. You shuffle a deck of cards, with each card’s face showing a different Tetris-like piece that you possess. You flip the deck card-by-card to learn which piece next needs to be placed on your personal player board.
However, you’re juggling multiple conditions at any one time, which is what creates the puzzle. I paused a few times during our first games to marvel that there’s more going on that I had initially realized. Conversely, it’s not an unbounded playpen, which fortunately means the options, while myriad, shouldn’t lead many people into analysis paralysis. Given that you can expect to play nearly every piece that you have, you can pre-plan moves, which also expedites the gameplay. Yet, since each play must be contiguous to a piece you’ve already placed, the timing of when a card arrives may not fit your plan. Fortunately, most games allow you to skip most pieces at the loss of a point, so even in a damnable situation where you truly don’t want to play a given shape, you often can forgo doing so.
What’s genius here is that your final score is calculated after twenty-four games, with the winner of a game securing points toward the final score, alongside there often being additional ways to accruing such points as well that don’t require you to have won the game. Meaning, it’s no big deal if you get blown out in a given game since the final score isn’t based on differentials from the individual games that you play, and you don’t need to win the majority or plurality of the games either. Also, the winner of a given game typically receives changes to the personal game board that make it a touch harder to win future games whereas the loser gets benefits to increase the score of future games.
Given that this is a legacy game, in that it evolves and continues across a span of games, each game tweaks the rules, with some changes being somewhat trivial to some changes being rather intense. Intense being proportionate to a game that involves placing polynomials in a landscape grid; nowhere did the rules say to smack your opponent or cut oneself as penance for losing three successive games, which is something that I definitely experienced, the losing not the hypothetical penance.
So, I’m familiar with legacy games. Some friends and I played Pandemic Season 1. We grew bored. Which feels like sacrilege to confess given how loved the game is by the community. Yet, we abandoned it after completing about three fourths of the game. Most of the games felt like straightforward wins. Inevitable. Foregone conclusions. Perhaps we should have recruited a fourth, with three-player Pandemic simply being a touch too easy, or maybe we missed some integral rule or rules. But, assuming all went as it should have gone, it just wasn’t all that engaging – we had more fun trying to win vanilla Pandemic with six or seven epidemics.
A different group of us completed Gloomhaven and Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, though due to various happenstances we never quite finished Forgotten Circles. We’re still mid-scenario traveling upward within what had been feeling like an ever-rising tower. Holidays, travel, covid, and my relocation to Seattle effectively taped that box up, perhaps for good. Sometimes it’s hard to sleep at night knowing that my character remains entombed mid-stride, nearly exhausted, all while surrounded by cardboard standees. We all took photos of the game state. On dark stormy nights as I drink a dark and stormy, I’ll sometimes load up the images, text my friends, and imagine one day we’ll be forced by the fates to reunite, perhaps to save humanity, with it turning out that cardboard adventures reverberate in import across the mortal plane that is our actuality.
But, while I am still working through my relationship with unresolved legacy games, as well as my unrelenting desire to play The Rise of Fenris legacy version of Scythe – one day — Kelly had not yet played any game that evolves. I told her multiple times: “Yes, you can write on the board.” “No, you won’t be teleported to hell.” “It’s ok.” Oddly, though, applying stickers seemed like less of a shock for her. Pens are indelible. Glues, merely sticky. I don’t claim to be immune to morality or sympathy or whatever sparked the concern she demonstrated. For, upon being instructed to rip up cards in Gloomhaven, I’d set them aside. Until, one day, after realizing I had spent innumerable moments sorting through materials to set up and tear down gaming sessions, that destruction meant incremental liberation freed me from my hang up. Heaving game components into the trash, freed us ounce by ounce from what was and remains, even after such cardboard carnage, a ridiculous box brimming with nearly unyielding content.
So, yes, legacy games replicate the evolving nature of life, teaching us to evolve as much as to let go. And, beauty of My City is that the modifications are invariably incremental, with the accreting and dissolving of rules as you apply stickers and then sometimes proceed to cover such stickers. The rules keep moving, and I won’t label every particular change to be stellar but none of the modifications were off putting. You keep flowing, and that the game is generally engaging alongside the excitement to see what changes next and how it influences your decision-making kept us going.
The other thing to note about a competitive legacy game is that there’s the terror that a participant will crush the competition, or that someone will simply get trounced and get dragged through dozens of games, ever reminded that life is meaningless with each accruing defeat. Fortunately, and I cannot speak to whether this arose from the evening-out mechanic of clipping the wings of an individual game’s winner while boosting the losers’ boards or our similar abilities at the game, but we kept our overall scores close throughout the experience, with Kelly winning on a tie breaker at the end. Which is the best outcome of such an extend series of bouts.
My City supports up to four players, and then it includes a backside on each board to provide a non-legacy version of the game. Since we played the game as two players, we’ll be able to go through the 24-game cycle again. It’s not something I’m clamoring to do in the near-term, and I don’t know how often, if ever, I’d be excited to play the non-legacy version of the game, given how much more engaging the full experience is, but perhaps three, six, or more months from now I suspect we’ll give it another go, and if Kelly trounces, me, I suspect I could make it through the entire series. If not, even eeking out a handful more plays before placing it within purgatory alongside Gloomhaven Forbidden Circles isn’t a terrible fate.