The Forgotten City

EvEvanstar4,6

In this game players have one primary player marker that starts in the center of the hex grid. On their turn they can place a worker on a hex in or next to a piece of their color, and then either produce resources matching the space, or spend resources to build a special building tile. The special building tiles can also be activated, but they require the same cubes to use that it takes to build, and their presence also removes a resource production space from the map, so things get tight very quickly. To add to this tension, it costs money to place where workers already are, and you give your opponent a victory point for using a building they constructed. Ultimately victory points come from placing pillars on cards at the end of the round, which you are required to do if you have workers standing on spaces matching the colors of those cards. The cards are communally placed on in turn order, and usually the first few placement locations on the cards produce no points. This makes for a difficult balancing act of determining which cards you want to encounter, making sure you are on the matching colored space, and then also trying to get the correct turn order so that you get the best spaces without discouraging other players from placing on the cards, as cards not full just sit there holding onto your scoring markers, preventing you from using them on other cards. The game is really good, but has a number of component problems. The worker pieces are too large for the hexes, one component has the wrong iconography according to what the rulebook says the tile does, and they use the same components for both scoring markers for the cards, and claim markers for the buildings which leads to confusion over how many markers each player can spend on the scoring cards. That being said, I think it's worth pushing through the problems for the game underneath. For us, we used mini meeples in place of the workers the game came with, and that was a huge improvement. ☆ 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