City Building Games Vol III. - Small City and CitiesUP

In these upcoming articles we will take a further look on city building games and how CitiesUP differs and creates a special value for city simulation loving boardgames.

When you start to think about city building board games, you have not that many games which offer a rich and fun enviorement of having the right feeling and look as you expect from a city building game.

Some city building games use cards, some don´t , and some combining the card and token game play.

In this article we will take a look at the city building board game Small City and will contrast it to CitiesUP.

Small City is a 1 - 4 players game by Alban Viard and was published by AVStudioGames in 2015. The average play time is 60 - 120 minutes. The recommend age is 12 and upwards.

Small City makes each player a mayor of a borough in one and the same city. Small City is about to be elected as the mayor of the whole town. So every player tries to secure enough votes over eight rounds to be re-elected. The players have to attract citizens, ensure an accurate growth in residential, commercial and industrial sectors. Small City most influence variable is the pollution. The pollution rises while the players expand their areas. The pollution variable makes Small City pretty unique. Over the round the players collect victory points and votes to win the game. Small City brings up an unique mixture of political aspects and placing patterns. It is not that cheap, but comes in a great quality and a lot of tokens.

In contrast to Small City, CitiesUP does not have implemented the political aspect directly. In CitiesUP Field Cards encourage the players to act wisely and prospective. The open developed arrangement of how the players interact is dictated by the players themselves. In CitiesUP the current demand of residential, commercial, industrial, bank and farm buildings must be satisfied and the buildings must be supplied with services and resources to gain tax income and score points. CitiesUP encourage the players to build and interact by bonus patterns, which can offer a great additional income in tax and score points. In addition and contrast to Small City, the city in CitiesUP actually grows. The players placing their building tokens, which are specifically attached to a building card. These building tokens differ in height and width. The result is a growing skyline. There is no stacking cubes in CitiesUP. All cubes of one building are attached permanently.