Chicago 1893: The City Beautiful Tile Game

I love this game. So simple to learn and play, with a bit of strategy about how to place tiles for point scoring, but ultimately tied to a luck of the draw mechanic as to what you'll get.

It's absolutely an enthusiast game, love of the fair, the time period, and city will drive you to this game - all of which are true for me.

First game took a bit longer, and the scoring was something I had to catch myself on. Score as you go and use the score sheet to remind you how and when to score, but once you get it, it's super quick.

A great addition to my collection!

This is basically Carcassonne: Chicago, with a few very minor rule changes from base Carcassonne. The artwork is fantastic, and all the visual and terminology details feel very authentic to Chicago. Since I live in Chicago and Carcassonne is one of my all-time favorites, theoretically I should love this game. And I had a perfectly pleasant time playing it.

But a few things left a bad taste in my mouth.

1. If a game adheres so close to an existing game's ruleset, I think it should at least acknowledge that it was built upon that game's framework. Otherwise, it feels like light plagiarism. (Note: Happy to stand corrected if this was called out in the rulebook somewhere; I didn't notice it when reading for the initial teach and I no longer have access to the game or rulebook)

2. Very early in our game, a space was created in between a rail tile and a boulevard tile (two of the most common tiles in the game), and it turns out there was no tile that could fit in this space for the rest of the game. Now this can also happen in Carcassonne, but typically only when 4 sides of a space are filled (occasionally when 3 are filled). For there to be situations when 2 tiles can frequently cause a permanent dead space seems like a pretty big design/playtest miss.

3. We played with the optional Monument cards, and one of my cards gave bonus points for a situation that I'm convinced could not possibly occur (I believe the trigger was completing a particular feature type, but only during endgame scoring when incomplete features are scored). Again, seems like something that should have been caught during playtesting.