London

EvEvanstar5,9

This is an intense and very deep city builder. The way it works is, each turn you draw a card. Then you decide what you want to do on your turn. You can build a building, by paying money and placing your house on an empty spot. This draws you cards. You can play cards, but each card you play you have to discard a card of the same color to the available pool of cards that other players can grab from. Your third option is to activate the cards you played on previous turns. When you do this, you get the cool benefits of your cards, but many are one time use, and it also generates poverty cubes for you based on the number of card "stacks" you have plus cards in hand, minus number of cities built on the board. At the end of the game, being stuck with a lot of poverty cubes punishes your score significantly, so you have this fascinating tension throughout your turns while you try to balance efficiency vs safety. ★ Art, Iconography and components functional ★ Clever or interesting mechanisms ★ Reasonably low downtime between turns with mildly AP players ★ Multiple plays stay interesting ★ Low or mitigatable luck elements ★★☆☆☆ Raw enjoyment