I liked this one. Played my copy from Gen Con today at 3-players. Turns were quick, especially in the first half of the game. Rulebook states you can take your turn as the last player places their chosen tile, road, or wonder. Makes it go faster if you play this way. As far as any rules clarifications go, Mundas has responded to every inquiry to date on BGG with excellent details. I would simply take a picture of the card in question and post the pic with the question to BGG and they respond very quickly. The rules state that as long as one or more of the pieces meets the placement criteria at the bottom of the card, then the other pieces can be placed adjacent to any of the other monument pieces. So, if one section of the Great Wall is meeting all three criteria for placement then the other two pieces just have to be adjacent to the other Great Wall pieces in some way. I found the cards self explanatory otherwise. For instance, the cards with asterisk next to the placement criteria show what type of area the building or wonder must begin and end on. I thought the AP came in more toward the last quarter of the game when space got tighter. At that point, we pivoted to warring over getting the 1st player marker and surrounding placed buildings with roads to gain victory points at the end of the game. There is some luck to the game. The monument cards can flip just at the right time for a player based on what they already have placed on their boards. This happened twice in one game for my group. But, I don’t think it was unfair because by game’s end I thought everyone had roughly the same amount of monuments placed on their player boards. For a game that takes about 5 minutes to teach I loved how crunchy the game was when playing chicken with other players over buildings and monuments. There was some space for hate drafting just to force another player to have to spend quicker to get their monuments or not have enough coins to get the color building they would need. I’m not a teddy bear player, so I found this to be fun.
Spot on review, thanks. One additional point: Beware, this game can make your brain hurt with its restrictive tile placement rules. Nonetheless, it’s terrific fun.
Was able to snag a copy at Gen Con. Looking forward to playing it. We tend to play at lower player counts, so that fits this well. Thanks for the review!
I haven’t actually played foundations of Metropolis but I’m assuming it will just be tiles. Even with that I think the gameplay is better in that than World Wonders. Much more interaction with other players.
