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Author Topic: City of Iron -- first impressions with a different kind of deck builder  (Read 1457 times)

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eHalcyon

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A few months ago I received my kickstarter copy of City of Iron, 2nd edition.  I'm a big fan of Ryan Laukat, both for his art and his particular style of euro games.  At this point, I am backing pretty much all of his kickstarters even though it would be a lot cheaper for me to wait until the games hit retail.

I finally got a chance to play City of Iron for the first time yesterday.  Since it's a deck builder, I thought I'd start a new thread and share my first impressions.

Game Overview

City of Iron is a 2-4 player area control game that also features tableau building and deck-building.  The game plays in 7 rounds of 3 turns each and scoring in rounds 3, 5 and 7.

The primary method of scoring victory points (referred to in the game as "Influence" or "Prestige" or something, I've already forgotten) is by having the most of certain "resources".  As a game mechanism, they're actually areas for area control rather than actual resources (you never spend them for anything).  Throughout the game, you will be gaining more and more of those resources.  Having the majority for a resource earns you more money at the end of each round, and will also score you VP on scoring rounds.

There are two ways to gain more resources: building and attacking.  This is the tableau-building aspect of the game.  One of the actions you can take is to Build a card that is available for sale (or that you've previously stored for building later).  Cards cycle out each round and later cards are stronger.  Most buildings provide more resources, many provide additional turn-end money income, and some provide other bonuses like turn-end card draw.  You only have a limited amount of space for buildings, but if you run out you can build or upgrade your city districts or explore to establish new lands (more on that when we get to the deck building).  Buildings have costs in coins and science (which you can gain by taking a Research action and paying 4 coins, or as income from some buildings; you also gain 1 Science at the end of each scoring round).



Another action is to Attack a town.  There are three piles of Town cards, each pile with a different power rating.  You can attack any of the face-up Towns if you are able to meet requirements listed on them (again, more on that in the deck building discussion).  You can also attack towns that have already been conquered by other players, though they are stronger at that point.  Towns all provide resources and money income.

The Deck-Building

The deck-building in CoI is unique in several ways:

1. You have two decks (Citizens and Military).
2. They start especially small -- generally just two cards in each deck (one faction has a third Citizen card to start).
3. There's no shuffling.  When you would shuffle, you just turn your discard pile over and continue on.
4. Card draw is very limited.  By default you get to draw 1 Citizen card at the end of each round, and you may draw one card from one deck as your action for a turn.  You can get additional turn-end draw from other sources (like buildings) but those seem to be rather limited.
5. Rather than buying cards from a common source, each player has their own faction-specific buy pool.  There is asymmetry here, though in my one game I saw a significant amount of overlap as well.



Like the building cards, citizen and military cards have costs in coins and science.  At the end of each round, you can buy as many such cards as you want that you can afford, adding them directly to your hand.  Some cards provide special effects and most (or all?) of them also provide banners.  Citizen cards tend to provide blue Hammers, Military cards provide red Guns, and both provide green Distance.  Guns and Distance are needed to attack Towns -- when you take an Attack action, you discard cards from your hand to meet those requirements on the Town.  Hammers are often needed to fuel Citizen cards for their special effect when you take an action to play a card.

From what I could tell, all the cards you can buy are unique (each faction has only one Junkbot, one Magician, one Tax Collector, and so on), and many had very specific effects.  For example, you need the Explorer in order to explore new lands (which needs enough Distance to reach the desired land, and maybe a ship or an airship).  You need the Regent to upgrade your starting Capital District into an Imperial District (which can only happen once per game!), or a Mayor to add new districts to your starting land or any land you've explored.  (Districts provide more space for buildings and turn-end card draw, but you only get a few.)

Overall the deck-building is very open and pretty much always niche as you buy specific cards to support your strategy on the rest of the board, e.g. "I really need some more Science next turn so I'm going to buy my Scientist", or "I want to Attack that 3-star town but need more Guns and Distance, so I'll buy this Iron Dragon".  The card play is much more restrictive because card draw is so low (at least to start), cards and actions tend to use up your cards for their banners, and you only get to play a card if you take that as your action for a turn.  It makes for a very different experience from Dominion.

My First Game

It was a 2-player game.  I forget their names but I used the green faction and my opponent used the silver faction.  I have no idea what our faction specializations were; the only one I really know is that the red faction is more inclined toward attacking.

I ignored military entirely, while my opponent pursued it from around mid-game.  I also focused more on building cards for resources than getting more card draw, which also meant I didn't really get into the deck-building aspect early on.  I diversified early with resources, which gave me a lead when it came to coin income for most of the game.  My opponent scooped most of the buildings that provided card draw, which gave me the resource (area) majority edge but allowed him to do a lot more with cards. 

For my part, I picked up a little bit more card draw by getting some more districts later in the game, focusing entirely on Citizens.  Even without that though, getting new cards right into your hand allowed for some highly tactical purchases.

Unfortunately, my opponent's card management was sub-optimal -- there were multiple turns where his relatively high turn-end card draw was wasted because he was still holding all of his Citizen cards.  Moreover, he probably should have gotten into attacking towns a lot earlier because the income and resources would have had more impact then.  As it happened, I managed to gain a moderate points lead in the first scoring round thanks to diversification and then maintained the lead through to the end.

Overall Impressions

I really liked it.  The deck-building aspect was overwhelming at first, because there were so many choices for such specific effects.  I guess Dominion can be like this too, if you're unfamiliar with the entire kingdom, but that's still just 10 cards (usually) whereas City of Iron is... well, a lot more.  That said, the wide range of abilities also allows for strategic diversity within each faction, and I also think familiarity with those cards creates a high skill cap for the game.  Since this was our first game, there is no doubt that we made many sub-optimal choices.  One aspect that seems especially difficult to me is managing the discard order.  I mostly tried to discard "stronger" cards on the bottom, so they would appear sooner after the "reshuffle", but I found at the end that I had not properly managed my card order to ensure I had hammers to fuel the cards I wanted to play.

The area control mechanism was not great with only 2 players.  I buy a Turnip Farm, my opponent just goes for a different resource instead.  We clashed a couple of times, but mostly we just stuck to our own things.  I expect that the game is much more exciting with more players competing for majorities.  Each round also begins with a bid for turn order which isn't all that exciting with only two players.

I hope I'll get a chance to play it again with more players.  If any of you have had a chance to play it, let me know what you think!
« Last Edit: June 21, 2016, 12:07:54 am by eHalcyon »
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popsofctown

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I would consider the shuffle fundamental to how I categorize something as a deckbuilder or not a deckbuilder.  This game sounds great, I'm just not sure it's a deckbuilder.

It sounds like it might convey some of what I liked about Through the Ages with less of what I didn't like so the game sounds cool.
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eHalcyon

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I would consider the shuffle fundamental to how I categorize something as a deckbuilder or not a deckbuilder.  This game sounds great, I'm just not sure it's a deckbuilder.

It sounds like it might convey some of what I liked about Through the Ages with less of what I didn't like so the game sounds cool.

That's interesting.  What else do you think is absolutely fundamental to being a deckbuilder?  For me, the only key thing is that you buy cards to build up a deck over the course of the game.  Shuffling isn't required, though that's a natural thing to have in a game involving a deck of cards.
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Seprix

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It looks fantastic. I'll have to get it sometime.
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popsofctown

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There also needs to be some mechanic by which you are choosing which cards are added to the deck over the course of the game.  For instance, a game where you play minigames each turn, and the prizes for winning them is always a Fireball, then an Ice Ball, then a Waterball, in that sequence, added to your deck, does not constitute a deckbuilder, because you don't have any degrees of freedom on how your deck is built.  However, wonky or weird ways in which you get to decide which cards will get added to your deck still count as long as there is some way to prefer Xes get into your deck instead of Y's.  Forced gains, but intelligent, directed trashing a-la Lookout would satisfy this criteria instead.  (City of Iron passes that criteria of course)

I would say your deck has to change over the course of the game.  The total card count doesn't need to increase for me to consider it a deckbuilder.

At least some of the deckbuilding has to happen after the game begins, of course.

To expound on the shuffling notion: I consider shuffling a core element to deciding whether the game is within that genre or not.  I feel like it fits linguistically, I think of a deck as being shuffled before it is presented to me as an object called a "deck", the Oxford dictionary might very well side against me on that.  But much more importantly I think adding items to the deck with uncertainty and disorder involved in how those tools will match up with your needs, and uncertainty and disorder with how those tools will collide with eachother, creates a dynamic that will make deckbuilders feel like eachother, enough so that it seems appropriate to make it a classification criteria.


There's no right or wrong here by the way, it's just me kicking the hackeysack around about which boxes I like to put things in.

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