City of Iron (2nd Edition)

Greetings everyone! This evening Hector, Amanda and myself gathered to dig into Ryan Laukat’s back catalog with City of Iron, 2nd edition, which is the first game in the Arzium setting, which is home to “Near and Far”, “Above and Below” and the upcoming “Now or Never”. Although I am a fan of both Laukat’s game design and art style, I was only introduced to his games in the last couple of years, so I did not play City of Iron upon it’s original release. Second edition was what was available when I was buying, so that’s what I got. How does this stack up against some of his later work? Well without spoiling much, we certainly preferred it to our initial impression of Sleeping Gods.

As usual I will begin with the components, and as usual for a Red Raven game, they are solid. If you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you already know I love Ryan Laukat’s art style. It’s like he somehow manages to capture the essence of a Saturday morning cartoon show in painting form. It’s great, and how he manages to paint so many individual pieces of art while still designing and pumping out quality games is honestly pretty staggering. The cards are good, the cardboard is chunky and durable and with one exception everything seems well in order.

That exception my friends, is the main board itself. While it is home to a most excellent panoramic painting of the stting, showing where each of the resources are to be found, it’s almost entirely unnecessary. The main board tracks 3 things and 3 things only; player resources, the round number/action number and the number of cards to place out, for this it fills a space nearly twice as large as a standard board game board. This is not acceptable to me. In a game where each player’s board already has a substantial footprint and expands as it goes, it’s no good for the main board to be filled with 70% empty space. It’s size could have easily been cut in half without losing any artistic or gameplay value. At least it looks great, sitting there, filling up the centre of the table and stuff.

On to the gameplay itself. In City of Iron, the players are competing to have the best civilization, which is done primarily through controlling various resources (though ironically, iron is not among them). Unlike many games where resources are spent to produce other things, in City of Iron they are primarily used as a means of scoring victory points and bonus money by controlling the most or second most of each type. The main thrust of the game is gaining production of them through various means, including purchasing buildings and conquering towns.

Although building various structures appears on it’s face to be the simplest way to victory, it gets more complicated as the game progresses. More advanced resources require land types not available in the starting cities, forcing players to explore new lands to settle (and potentially earn bonus points), or conquer towns. This is done through the player’s experts, which is a sort of deckbuilding side game that integrates with the main game. At the end of each players turn, they get an opportunity to hire either civilian or military expert cards. These cards are using during the player’s regular turn for either bonus special abilities or to explore and conquer more territory. Conquered towns give the player more income and resources (and can be conquered from other players with an increased military cost), and new territories provide opportunities to build more and different types of structures.

At it’s heart, City of Iron is an engine builder which requires a balanced approach. It’s not so much a “multiple paths to victory game” as it is a “you need to do some of everything” game. Pure builders will find themselves quickly out of lands to build upon and those who rely entirely on experts will find the ability of their economy unable to supply them with enough cards to accomplish their goals. The game also encourages diversification in resources, it seems far more viable to either win or be competitive in many different ones than to try and focus on a few.

The biggest weakness of this game is, in my opinion, playing it with two players. The competition for any given resource, which is the heart of the game, is lacking with only two players, everyone simply takes half or so of them as you will get more bang for your buck by being the only person in half the resources than trying to compete in all of them. Since the number of available resources doesn’t really scale to the number of players, this is definitely a weak point. In addition, conquering towns from the only other player on the board seems petty and spiteful and just turns into back and forth take that. This sort of thing certainly does not seem in line with the euroish nature of City of Iron. Most of these issues seem likely to be solved by adding a 3rd or 4th player.

Overall I would give this game a recommendation, although not a strong one, to players who like engine builders with beautiful art, or a good mashup of euro mechanics with deckbuilding. This game is certainly not for everyone, but I don’t think there are any games out there that quite do what it does either.

Note: Someone took my squid. Rude. I think this would likely be much better with more players, but it was cool. I definitely felt like if you had a strategy and realized you weren’t going to accomplish what you’d been fighting for there really is no way to change or do something else to attempt to do a big point grab.

The Teal Deer

Game: City of Iron (2nd Edition)
Designer: Ryan Laukat
Price: Out of Print, goes for anywhere from $40 – $120 on secondary markets. I got it for $60 after shipping.
Players: 2 – 4
2 player Scaling: Not very good. Sucks the competition out and makes what remains very spiteful.
Playtime: 90 -120 Minutes
Estimated Lifespan: 5+ Games
Expected Average Play Frequency: Quarterly, and only at gatherings
Complexity: 4
Components: 4 (Would be 5 without the ridiculous board)
Bang for Buck: 5
Value for Time: 3.5
Fun Factor: 3.5
Overall: 3.5