City: Expensive village. Race to buy. Empty another pile - turbocharged.
I highly disagree with this one. I'm finding City really difficult to sum up, but my best try is:
City: Ignorable unless pile(s) empty
quickly. Better with more players. Groupthinky.
City is just an expensive village until a pile empties, which is not a trivial requirement. It's often overestimated and highly susceptible to group-think; if everybody is going for Cities and they drain the pile quickly,
of course it's going to matter. But if only one player is going for Cities with no support (University, maybe? Eh...) then their deck won't be doing much until 10+ turns later. By the time they level up their Cities, the game is almost over. And even then, the Cities aren't much better than a Lab if they haven't gotten other payloads to play with all their +actions.
Part of the group-think arises from the fact that groups often play with more than 2, in which case piles will empty more quickly. Cities are thus better in multiplayer, which feeds into groupthink and makes Cities even better than they should be.
City is best if there is some other pile that is likely to run out and good payloads. Run out Curses or Ruins, maybe, or a popular cheap pile like Peddler. Use Cities to draw and play a bunch of Bridges or Goons, perhaps.
But yeah, that's a lot to summarize in 10 words. It's not usually a "race to buy" card though.
On a more general note, I think a lot of the recent summaries are just that -- summaries of the card text themselves. But just stating what the card does isn't helpful; I can just read the card itself for that.
(Edit: formatting)
