How to play Cities

Cities is a 2023 game by Steve Finn and Phil Walker-Harding, published by Devir, in which the city council hands you a waterfront neighborhood and asks you to make something wonderful of it. Each round you send workers out to claim what's on offer — a scoring card, a city tile, feature tiles, building pieces — and fit them into a personal grid that never grows larger than three tiles by three.

That tiny footprint is the whole design. Space is desperately scarce, so every tile you take must earn its place, and the buildings grow upward — stacks of matching colors up to four stories — because there is nowhere else to go. The board tours real cities (Sydney, Venice, New York, Barcelona, Rio, Lisbon, Mexico City, Buenos Aires), each with its own achievement board of civic goals.

Never played a drafting game? The core loop is simply: look at what's laid out, take one thing, and give up the rest — but taking also places a worker, and your workers are limited each round. So every pick answers two questions at once: what do I want, and which row can I still afford to visit?

What's in the box, and what each piece does at the table:

• 1 game board — the offer display, laid out in four rows: scoring cards, city tiles, feature tiles, and building pieces. Each row is a different kind of resource, and each item has a worker space beside or beneath it.
• 32 city tiles — the land itself. Every tile mixes three kinds of space — city (buildable, colored), park (green), and water (blue) — and you may rotate them freely when placing.
• 4 starting tiles (colorless backs) — one per player, the seed your neighborhood grows from.
• 48 feature tiles — the decoration that scores: they go onto matching space types (blue-backed on water, green on parks, grey on empty building spaces). Some are monuments worth flat points; one special grey-box tile is a wild that turns any space into any color.
• 100 building pieces (25 each red, blue, green, yellow) — chunky blocks placed on building spaces of their own color, or stacked on pieces of the same color up to 4 high. They're drawn blindly from the bag, so the offer is never predictable.
• 4 double-sided city achievement boards — the eight cities. The chosen board lists this game's public goals, each with a descending column of point values. New York or Rio de Janeiro are the recommended first-game boards.
• 32 scoring cards — private objectives. Each pays out every time its pattern appears in your neighborhood, which is why a single well-chosen card can carry a whole game.
• 32 worker pawns + 12 achievement rings (8 pawns and 3 rings per player color) — pawns claim offers; rings are stamped onto the achievement board when you fulfill a civic goal, and only three fit each achievement.
• 1 star token — marks the first player; it moves each round to whoever claimed the last building-pieces space.
• 4 scoring tokens, 4 player aid cards, 1 cloth bag — score track discs, quick reference, and the bag that hides the building pieces.

Play begins with the star-token holder and proceeds clockwise. Each turn is one simple exchange: take an item (or set of items) from the board, then place one of your workers in the worker space belonging to it. Face-down items are only revealed once you've committed to taking them.

The crucial constraint: with 3–4 players you may place only 1 worker per row each round, so your four workers must visit four different rows. With 2 players you place 2 per row. Order is free — you can start in the third row if that's where the prize is.

What each row gives you: - Scoring cards — take the card and set it face up beside your neighborhood. It's a private objective that pays every time you match it. - City tiles — place the tile face up, fully adjacent to a tile you already have, rotated however you like. Your neighborhood may never exceed 3 tiles by 3 tiles — nine tiles is the absolute ceiling of your city. - Feature tiles — place each on a matching space type: blue-background on water, green on parks, grey on building spaces that carry no pieces. One feature tile per space, maximum. - Building pieces — place each on a building space of its own color, or stack it on a piece of the same color, up to 4 stories. The last space of the row instead lets you draw 2 random pieces from the bag — and it's also the space that wins you the star token.

Can't legally place something you took, or don't want it? It's simply removed from the game — the worker still gets spent.

Claiming achievements. At the end of your turn, check the city achievement board. For each goal you now satisfy, drop one of your 3 rings onto the highest vacant number in that column — first to arrive scores the most. You may claim several in one turn, but each achievement only once per game, and a ring never comes back off even if your city later stops qualifying.

A turn, played out. Ana wants the red building piece in row 4, but her red stack is already 3 high and she also needs the corner city tile in row 2. She takes the city tile first — placing it so its water edge lines up with her existing canal, extending a water area she's growing for the "connected water" scoring. That worker is now spent on row 2 for the round. Later, with only rows 1 and 4 left, she takes the last building-pieces space: 2 random pieces from the bag, a gamble that pays her a green (stacked to 4 stories, completing an achievement — ring placed on the 6) and a useless yellow that gets discarded. She also picks up the star token, so she leads next round.

The round ends when every worker has been placed; whoever placed the rightmost worker in the building-pieces row takes the star token and leads next round. (With 3 players, leftover offers are removed rather than carried over.) After the 8th round — 4th in a two-player game — the game ends and you score four things:

1. Achievement rings — the number printed beneath each ring you placed on the city board.
2. Water and park areas — for each orthogonally connected area, score 1 / 3 / 6 / 10 points for having 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 different feature tiles in it. Each area scores only one such set, so a single sprawling lake is worth far less than the same water split into two well-decorated ones.
3. Monuments — 2 points per monument feature tile.
4. Scoring cards — each card pays out for every occurrence of its requirement, and the same tile or stack may count for several different cards at once.

Most points wins; ties break toward whoever earned more from achievements. (For reference, the rulebook's worked example finishes on 57 points.)

The strategy that separates good neighborhoods from cramped ones: nine tiles is nothing, so decide early what your city is for — a tall-buildings city, a garden city, a waterfront — and let that answer every draft. Because scoring cards pay repeatedly, one card matched four times beats four cards matched once. And watch the achievement columns: they're first-come-first-served and the top number is often double the bottom, so a good-enough claim taken now usually beats a perfect claim taken two rounds late.