When you’ve used up your allotted space – or decided that you can’t balance your books any further – you’ll pay to advance into another block of territory, scoring your happiness (minus the aforementioned penalties). You may be unable to play further cards, or the game might immediately end in defeat! If these sliders get too high or too low, your happiness will take a significant hit. In total, you have seven sliding gauges to try and level out before expanding the board, which is even trickier than it might sound.

Various cards will decrease your water and energy supplies, or increase crime and traffic. However, you’ll often be left with tough decisions that mean you have to forego one benefit to prioritise another – or potentially prevent the downfall of the entire city!Īfter all, city planning is about carefully managing the needs of your metropolis. This can lead to a long string of developments that skyrocket your money and happiness.

This tactical puzzle serves as the lion’s share of Cities’ gameplay – delaying specific actions so that you can reap the benefits of laying those plots adjacent to something else. This might mean you first need to place that school strategically to increase the value of the residential area you’re holding, or wait to build your Commercial zone once you’ve built up the industry in one of your districts. You see, almost every card in Cities will provide an added bonus if it’s built in the same district of land as another type of building.

You can only achieve this if you work together and analyse your strategy carefully. You’ll all be performing these actions separately on your turns, but the ultimate goal of Cities is to reach the highest overall happiness for your city. Your time is split evenly between playing construction cards and placing the corresponding Tetris-shaped tiles onto a board that represents your city. Now that we’ve got the board game jargon out of the way, how does a “co-operative polyomino tile-laying game” actually play, and what are our objectives? Well, Cities: Skylines – The Board Game (Cities, for simplicity) puts you and up to three of your friends and family into city-planning roles, trying to micromanage the needs of an ever-growing city as it expands and develops. But can the board game adaptation reach the same lofty heights? Or does it get bogged down in arduous zoning politics? Let’s take a look and find out. It received almost 100,000 positive Steam reviews and ports for every console in the current generation. Inspired by the beloved city-building PC series SimCity, the Cities: Skylines video game rejuvenated the genre, achieving critical acclaim upon its initial release in 2015. Cities: Skylines – The Board Game blends polyomino tile-laying with co-operative action-based card management.

Cities skylines review