disclosures: I know nic (designer and director), and I have played lots of games with nic, and that makes me familiar with their sensibility. I am not a city-builder player.
edit: nic’s bluesky thread of all of the people who worked on the game is a good corrective for my glossing over of all of the folks who contributed in my disclosure above; it wasn’t nic in a vacuum!
- It’s (four or five hours in on one city, at least) so chill. The city doesn’t feel like any threat is particularly existential, which makes sense since this is a city that is going to last a long, long time. Thinking about Rome, I guess, ebbing and flowing.
- Sometimes I’ll just choose dice that will cause an event to occur, so I can see more events.
- I like that I am making some decisions that constrain randomness to a specific set of areas by choosing which building-dice to roll. Then having to deal with the outcome of that randomness. I limit the dice, then the dice limit me. But I still get to throw them.
- The stubbornness of the residents! “Damn I wish this residential area wasn’t here because I’d like to build”, I think, making me understand and dislike developers and Urban Renewal even MORE. You can’t clear them out! You’ve got to work with them. It essentially turns the residents en masse into a group you HAVE to work with! This is great.
- Time from clicking icon to being in-game is small, making it easy to jump into for a few rounds (and then it’s an hour later oops)
- I wish I could zoom out further, both to see the whole city at once and also to have a better idea of where my dice are usable. Or maybe if I double clicked on a rolled-die it could center on the building? Oh no. Oh shit. That’s me wanting more omniscience, more god-like ability that is promised by the isometric view from above! I guess that I could just focus on one area at a time…
- It frustrates the fantasy of the urban planner / property developer / etc as god. This god does play dice with the universe!
- Everything, building and destruction, feels…small? In the way that cities are an accumulation of everything that has ever happened in and to them. That gets abstracted into the randomness of the dice.
It’s not a city building, it’s city accretion!