City Planner review - Rolling into mediocrity

City Planner is the second in AVStudiogames’ Nano9games series, which consists of small box games that use exactly nine cards, nine dice, and nine cubes as their components. These games have so far been released in 2 “waves” of three games each, with the first wave capable of being combined to form one larger 2-player game that I’ll be reviewing later. This particular game is for one to two players, though the rules difference is minimal, and it’s like another of designer Alban Viard’s games, Town Center. Unlike the previous game in the series, Railways, this one was co-designed with Todd Sanders.

Rules & Components

The rules are incredibly simple for the most part, as the game consists of rolling a die for each card and possibly adjusting it afterwards. However, resolving the buildings to gain points or money requires doing math with multiple multipliers that feels counter to the game's simplicity. The math of each building seems like it could be easy to misinterpret, so I'll admit that I had to check online to ensure that I wasn't doing anything incorrectly. There are a few scoring examples in the back of the rules to help, but even after reading them, I wasn't confident enough to play without checking.

The components are essentially the same as the previous game in this line, Railways. Some cubes, a handful of dice, and several oversized cards. The only thing I have to note differently here is that the City Dice Block cards are all numbered, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanical reason for this. At setup, they're placed in order, but that order doesn't affect the building resolution nor the dice adjustments at all.

Gameplay

Like I said, the game is simple. Each round, you'll roll one die for each City Dice Block and place it on the corresponding building. Once every card has its building selected, you can spend money to adjust up to three dice up or down a space. Purple buildings activated last round also grant the ability to re-roll a die, but only in the round immediately following their activation. The only restriction is the locked card. Every round, after adjusting the dice, you place the red cube on a rolled building to lock it for the next round. You won't get to activate the locked building this round, and in the next round, you aren't allowed to manipulate its building die at all.

After you finish rolling and manipulating dice, and you've locked a new card, you gain your points (Green buildings) and/or money (Blue buildings) by adding up the generating buildings you've activated and applying any gained multipliers. It's important to note that the point multiplier actually starts at 0, so you are required to gain either the Red (point-specific) or Black (point or money) multipliers in order to actually gain anything. Black buildings can also deactivate rolled buildings to gain a flat money bonus, but I never utilized this.

After eight rounds, the game ends, and you convert any leftover money into points. It's a bit anti-climactic, even more so because the gameplay decisions aren't that interesting. Each feels pretty much the same, with the only variation being a particularly bad set of rolls where you take what you can get, or if you get low on funds and need to get more cash for die adjustments (though you'll probably only do this once, maybe twice). It can be relaxing to run through a game that doesn't require much thought, but I wouldn't describe it as much of a game at that point.

The two-player version of the game is better, but only slightly. Everything is exactly the same, but the locked City Dice Block is locked for your opponent instead of your next turn. So there's some slight take-that if you lock a card onto a "bad" building. I tried to consistently lock the cards with several point multipliers onto the Blue money buildings instead. But this again falls into the same issue where none of the decisions felt meaningful, as there was always an objectively best play. The only saving grace is that the game isn't broken in any way, and its fast, simple play could make for an okay filler game if there's nothing better available.