Underwater Cities

Pretty boring. Everyone is just worrying about their own board, the game may as well be played solitaire. No drama or excitement, just exchanging cubes for chits, and chits for other cubes.

3rd

A medium to heavy game with some interesting ideas and mechanics, great components and very clear iconography but it left me feeling that it provided the same sort of experience as Terraforming Mars does - both are good; but I'm not sure I need both

BGG Trade November 2020

Cooper Promo Extra Resource Tokens (BGG Store) Flexible Friend Promo New Discoveries

"Worker placement" game with an interesting twist and a fairly original and interesting theme.

The game is about building an underwater city/civilization, which is similar to terraforming say Mars. It plays 2-4 players (but really it's best with 2 I think, you even run out of almost all of the components with 4 players, ridiculous). There are 3 eras, during each era, you always have a hand of 3 cards, and on your turn you play a card while simultaneously selecting an action space. The twist here is that there are 3 colours of action spaces (yellow, red, green) and the same corresponding card colours. If your card colour matches the space, you get to activate the card, which is ideal as you get much more out of your turn. You can always use a space, but if the card colour doesn't match, the card is meaningless. This provides interesting turn angst, as you will sometimes choose a sub-optimal action in order to trigger a card or vice versa.

You are trying to continuously build up your city (build your engine) as at the end of each era, your city will generate resources for you (and possibly points). Each player has a player mat on which to build their city (the original game came with flimsy cardstock, but the expansion greatly fixes this), and there are some minor asymmetric aspects to their player board such as small one time bonuses and bonus and scoring tiles that trigger if you build to them.

There a huge amount of cards, with iconography that is fine once you get used to it, as the text is very small to read. The game is generally easy to play and learn and length isn't too bad. A fine game overall definitely one for fans of games like Terraforming Mars.

Own the [boardgame=276104]New Discoveries[/boardgame] expansion and the [boardgame=263920]Biodome promo[/boardgame], [boardgame=323114]Cooper & Flexible Friend[/boardgame], [boardgame=359053]Building Box[/boardgame], and [boardgame=392844]mini-expansion[/boardgame] promos.