05/18/2016
GAME OF THE WEEK: Week of 5/16/16
Every day we take our lives, and the community we live in, for granted. At the end of each workday, we look forward to relaxing, be it in our homes or maybe going out for dinner at a local restaurant. On weekends, we go shopping in our downtown shops or take part in activities in our town parks. We don't really give much thought to what makes all of this tick on a daily basis. We don't really need to. That's the mayor's job. Some mayors do their jobs better than their counterparts and, as a result, some communities thrive more than others. Quadropolis, by Days Of Wonder, gives you the chance to run a city and see how you would fare against your friends as you vie for the title of most prestigious mayor!
Days Of Wonder describes the game as follows: “After a hard day’s work, you take a break to admire your city through the large windows of your office… at this hour, most of your citizens are going back home, heading for the tall buildings that you see in front of you. Some others are still wandering in the parks and gardens with their kids, and others decided to go shopping in the new mall that you opened a few weeks ago. In the distance, near the harbor, you can see smoke rising from factories’ chimneys. Somehow, the city never sleeps… In Quadropolis you enact the role of the Mayor of a modern city. You will need to define a global strategy to build your city according to your Inhabitants’ needs and outmatch your opponents, sending your Architects to have various buildings erected in your city. Each building allows you to score victory points. There are various types of buildings with different scoring patterns; many of them may be combined for better effect. Will you be able to meet the challenge and become the most prestigious Mayor in history? ”.
The following is a review of the game from the Unplugged Games website: “One of the greatest things about board gaming is the sheer variety of experiences it offers to players. Using nothing more than some cardboard and plastic, a game can transform your humble kitchen table into a bloody battlefield, a monster-infested cavern or a hostile alien planet. Board games let you step out of your day-to-day life for a couple of hours, dropping you into the role of a fearless warrior, a notorious pirate or a rampaging 50-foot monster. Or, if you’re really lucky, a mid-ranking civil servant.
Nothing, it seems, excites gamers quite like a bit of civic administration. In the digital world, the likes of the SimCity and Caesar franchises have long given fans the chance to run their own sprawling metropolis. And in the tabletop realm, players have a wealth of different takes on the theme to choose from: the cerebral planning of Suburbia, the dice-chucking charm of Machi Koro, the Tetris-like puzzle of New York 1901.
City building ranks alongside dungeon-crawling adventure and zombie survival horror as one of gaming’s most enduring motifs. And now we can add one more to the list of titles that attempt to capture the thrills, spills, action and excitement of local government.
Quadropolis, from first-time designer Francois Gandon, sees up to four players take on the mantle of small-town mayors with big aspirations. It’s published by Days of Wonder, the studio behind titles including Ticket to Ride, Small World and Memoir ’44, and that in itself is enough to generate some buzz behind its release. The company famously produces just one new game per year, and while some have fallen flat, others have become perennial favorites, selling tens of millions of copies and reaching audiences far beyond die-hard gaming geeks.
Each player starts the game with a blank canvas – a four-by-four space grid on which you’ll build houses, shops, factories and all the other buildings that make up your growing municipality.
These all come from a shared pool of tiles laid out randomly on a board in the center of the table. On each of your turns you’ll claim a building using one of your four numbered architect tokens, laying it down on an edge of the board. The number of the token you use determines the tile you’ll take from your chosen row or column – and if that all sounds like a bit much to get your head around, see the example below. Here we’re choosing the fourth tile in the top row.
You’ll add your new tile to your city, but you won’t be able to place it wherever you’d like, and this is where Quadropolis starts to get interesting. Different buildings reward you with points based on their position on the board. Harbors want to be adjacent to each other in a continuous line; factories want to be next to shops that will stock their goods; municipal buildings want to be spread across the four sub-sections of your board, their bureaucratic tendrils reaching into people’s lives in every corner of town.
But you’ll only be able to place your newly acquired buildings on a row or column of your city grid that shares the number of the architect you used to claim it, meaning you’ll need to make some compromises with your development plans.
To make matters more complicated, you can never place more than one architect token at any point on the board. Once a spot is taken, it’s closed off to all players, and this means that positioning your architects can be as much about frustrating your rivals’ plans as advancing your own. Each turn also sees you move the Urbanist token across the board – an ominous black pawn that further restricts the choices open to players, serving simultaneously as a neat additional tactical element and an abstract representation of the mire of regulations and complicated planning forms that threaten to overrun any building project.
All of this combines to make Quadropolis a surprisingly sharp-elbowed game, and while there’s no way to directly affect your opponents’ cities, denying them access to the tiles they need is always a consideration, like passing someone a box of biscuits, smug in the knowledge that you’ve already removed the nice chocolate orange ones to leave them with a few bits of soggy and unappetizing shortbread.
You’ll repeat this process for four rounds before calculating your final score. But the game isn’t finished with you yet. You see, with almost every building you construct over the course of the game, you’ll get some resources: citizens and energy. Your buildings will require certain combinations of these to be placed on their tiles to activate them, and any buildings you can’t activate won’t count when it comes to scoring points.
It might seem tempting to grab as many citizens and as much power as you can get your hands on, but that’s not a great idea either. Any unused resources will cost you points at the end of the game, and the penalty for getting too greedy could be enough to cost you victory.
This means that on top of everything else you’re doing throughout the game – planning, scheming, building and blocking – you’re performing a delicate balancing act that could come back to bite you if you get it wrong. It’s a deep, thoughtful, multifaceted process – but here’s the thing: at its heart, Quadropolis is really a very simple game. Its complexity doesn’t come from a convoluted instruction book, but from a smooth, slick, intuitive set of rules that create a huge number of tactical possibilities every time you play.
It’s an impressive achievement, and it’s not the only one in the game. It’s refreshingly quick to play, cramming a genuinely rewarding competitive puzzle into a half hour of game time. In fact, it’s so fast-paced that when we rattled through our first game in half the time we’d expected, we wondered whether we’d got something wrong. It scales beautifully to different player counts, with some building tiles removed from the board for two or three-player games, and there’s as much challenge in a head-to-head match as there is with a more crowded table.
In fact, it’s difficult to find fault with Quadropolis. It’s straightforward enough for a family game night, but it packs enough depth to appeal to more seasoned gamers. And if you ever find yourself hungry for something a little meatier, you can flip over your player boards to reveal an “expert” mode with larger cities, new types of buildings and a shared pool of architect tokens for players to fight over.
Its one shortcoming might be that despite its cute urban artwork, it’s still an inescapably abstract game. You won’t be dealing with transport, sanitation or angry citizens calling for your blood because you’ve shut down their local library. But that’s not what Quadropolis claims to be.
This is the kind of game that Days of Wonder has built its reputation on – appealing, accessible, absorbing – and it’s an early contender for game of the year”.
Quadropolis is playable by 2-4 players in approximately 60 minutes.
