Quinn Swanger
United States
Holly Springs
North Carolina
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First of all, I ordered Cities about a month ago and I've been playing the heck out of it ever since. It's a great game ... well made and well designed. Thank you Martyn. Cities scratches a lot of my many different gaming itches. Mostly I have been playing on Boiteajeux where they have a great implementation including solo play, competition against up to 9 opponents, scoring w/ all three levels, and a rating system. I speak no French, but navigating doesn't take more than a little trial and error. I've also come to appreciate the feature (or oversight, whatever the case may be) they've implemented of having more restrictive tourist deployment (i.e., there is no "jump" option available). This makes the game even more strategic, and probably should have been written in as the standard way of playing the "advanced" game. Now that all of that is out of the way ...
Face-to-face I have only played Cities solo or with one other person. My box comes with enough tiles to accomodate 4 players. However, since I've only been playing 2-player games I got to wondering if there was any way I could leverage all those other unused tiles by essentially doubling-up on them to create a longer, more meatier gaming expereince. I've not tried it out or play-tested this yet, but what do you all think about taking 2 sets per player (still keeping one master builder of course), shuffling the tiles and choosing 36 tiles (blindly discarding 12) for a 6x6 city rather than a 16 tile 4x4 city? You could use two sets of tourists (color being irrelevant and in fact showing your city's ethnic diversity) for a total of 14. The random factor would only be *slightly* reduced (uses 75% of the available tiles as oppossed to 66%), but not so much as to make a huge dent on the bigger game's replayability. I'm tenatively calling this variant "Mega Cities", or perhaps more appropriately "Metropolis".
Comments? Would this be feasable? Enjoyable? Or is there something in this that would somehow "break" the game?
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Hi Quinn,
Thanks for your compliments!
Your idea sounds very interesting. The only way to find out if it works is to test it. It is the only way to ever find out if things work with games. 
I am working hard on my new game and expansion for Wadi, right now, but I will try to make some time for this. If you have any test results, please let me know.
Cheers,
Martyn F
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Posted Tue Sep 1, 2009 6:57 pm
