City Building

Talented Urban planners and architects rival each other to construct luxury, elegant buildings of glass and steel, defying the laws of balance. Who will eventually impose their style to leave an indelible trail in the history of the city? The answer is in your hands!

The players are urban planners in quest of prestige. Over the course of the game, players will try to construct their buildings in the best locations. As soon as a player has placed all of their buildings, the game ends. The player with the most prestige is the winner.

Each turn a player will pick a space on the board and place one of their buildings (bidding markers) into the space, with the bidding number shown. Each following player can then either pass or raise the bid by placing a higher numbered building into an adjacent space. The eventual winner of the bid flips his building number side down and all losing bids are returned to players. A new round commences.

Spaces on the board are differentiated by Metro spaces, which are worth points and reward the player with the most at game end; archaeological sites, which are worth minus points and penalize the player who most recently built on one; and fashionable locations, which are just worth extra points. In addition, each player has up to two hidden agendas that they are secretly trying to achieve, such as trying to surround water fountains or occupy both sides of bridges.

London was Treefrog's 2010 Essen release.

(Inspired by the history of the city from just after the Great Fire until 1900, the game has evolved since the description originally listed on the Treefrog website).

London is a 2-4 player game with a playing time of aproximately 90 minutes. Players select cards with varying powers of cashflow, victory points, and poverty penalties, and compete to manage them most efficiently.

"London lies devastated after the Great Fire of 1666. This is your opportunity to build a new city on the ashes of the old. It is up to you how you employ the talents of the people of London to this end. Will you favour the business classes, who will earn you money? Or would you prefer to spend more money than you can rightly afford on grand monuments and sumptuous palaces? You must also deal with the problem of rising poverty and how to employ the many paupers of the city. Throughout the game you will be forced to make tough decisions. To achieve one aim you must sacrifice another, which may open an opportunity for a competitor."

Nearly 250 years of progress is glimpsed in this game. Famous buildings and monuments of the era as well as engineering developments such as streetlights are illustrated on the cards.

The publisher calls London "a relatively simple game that can be played easily within ninety minutes."

Description below is quoted from Kris Hall's BGN interview with Martin Wallace:
http://www.boardgamenews.com/index.php/boardgamenews/comments/kris_hall_...
(Note: Some elements of the game described below have changed as shown in the final rulebook available online)

As with a lot of games, London is about scoring the most VPs. Players manage their hand, selecting cards to play into their building display by laying them out in a line. At some point a player will choose to run his city. They can activate their buildings in whatever order they prefer. The resulting actions can generate money and VPs, reduce poverty or have some other effect specified on the card. Some cards have an entry cost which must be paid before the action can be performed.

An auction game where income and resources are automatically gained at the beginning of each turn. Then the money is used to bid on more resources, then the resources can either be used (along with money) to build cities, or "displayed" to qualifying for "roles" (like political appointments) which gain influence/VP-graft plus a special power such as income boost, resource boost, VP-boost, or resource re-display.

Building a city gains the player VP but also gives VP to the opponent(s) with matching role/graft color.

The board does triple duty, containing the scoring track, a map of some part of Italy, and staging area for the "role" tiles.

Each player represents the leadership of a 17th century Scottish clan looking to expand its territory and its wealth. The success of your clan depends on your ability to make the correct decision at the opportune time, be it by establishing a new pasture for your livestock, growing grain for the production of whisky, selling your goods on the various markets, or investing in the cultivation of special places such as lochs and castles.

Glen More offers a unique turn mechanism. Players take territory tiles from a rondell. Picking a tile has not only influence on the actions you get by the surrounding tiles in your territory, it also determines when you'll have your next turn (and how many turns you will have in the game). But having a lot of turns is not always the best strategy for a successful chieftain.

Glen More is 6 in the Alea medium box series, and is rated a 4 on the alea complexity level.

Note: This game is available by request only and requires having a membership to play.
See game associate for details.

Game description from the publisher:

Scofflaws are brawling in the streets of Deadwood. The railroad is being built, and to you and the other gangs in the badlands of South Dakota, this means one thing: cold, hard cash. As a cowboy on the wrong side of the law you know just how to take control of this shanty-town: threaten, fight, and kill off your rivals.

Deadwood is a wild-and-wooly board game with a quick and deadly twist on classic worker placement games. Your gang consists of three different classes of cowboys with different strengths: greenhorns, gunslingers, and trail bosses. Cowboys ride into town to gain control of (annex) buildings and fight other gangs' cowboys in shootouts.

At the beginning of the game, the town of Deadwood consists of the Town Hall, the Church, the Sheriff's Office, the Saloon, and four other randomly drawn buildings. Additional buildings are constructed whenever a cowboy annexes the Town Hall. Each building has at least one unique ability that is used immediately, with some buildings offering more long-term advantages.

A cowboy accesses these advantages by controlling the building. To gain control a player simply places one of his gang on a building tile, "annexing" it. Other gang leaders can try to gain control of your buildings through shootouts. The player that instigates the shootout receives a Wanted Poster token; the more cowboys you try to kill off, the more Wanted Poster tokens you collect, and the higher the fine you must pay at the end of the game.

Deadwood can end one of three ways: the Train Station is placed on the board once the railroad is built and completed, there are no more Wanted Poster tokens in the Crime Pool, or any player has no more cowboys alive. The player with the most cash at the end of the game is the winner!