CHENNAI: In 1666, the Great Fire of London made a spirited attempt to burn that city to the ground. It consumed the old St. Paul’s Cathedral and destroyed the homes of more than 85% of the population. Once the ashes had cooled, the King gave the order to rebuild London anew in defiance of the devastation - and that’s where you come in.
In London, 2-4 players are tasked with building up London’s glory once again, from the 17th century right through the 19th. At its heart, this is a hand management card game where you’ll play cards to your personal tableau in order to create an engine of sorts.
Let’s go through London step by step — the first action (the one you’ll do fairly often) is to play cards from your hand into your tableau. You can play as many as you like, but there’s a lot to consider here. First, you’ll have to discard a card of the same colour to the central board; meaning that your opponents now have access to it. Second, some cards cost money to play as well, and money’s tight in this game. Third, each card you play into your little corner of the city is a commitment to how large your city is going to be — this will make more sense in a second because the next action you can take once you’ve built up your city a bit is to actually ‘run’ it.
Running your city simply means you get to activate each card that you’ve played down in front of you. Maybe the grocers will get you a bit of money, for example, and that museum might fetch you a point. So far, so good; but now for the bad news. Most cards in the game are one-and-done — you resolve their effects, and then you flip them face-down. If that weren’t enough, you also receive one poverty token for each stack of cards in your city (face-up or face-down) and for each card left in your hand.
What is poverty? It’s the bane of your existence. During the game, everybody’s going to wind up with some poverty — it’s unavoidable, but it also doesn’t hurt you...until the end of the game, when the player with the least poverty gets to sit back and laugh as everybody else loses points based on how much more poverty they have in comparison.
Of all the clever little gears that are driving London, this is easily the best. Poverty’s fine as long as everybody’s got roughly the same amount; the minute one player manages to dump a large chunk of the poverty they’ve accumulated, you can just hear everybody else around the table begin to sweat nervously. London rewards efficiency in a cheerfully ruthless manner like no other game I’ve seen.
There’s a phenomenal sense of escalation as well. In the beginning of the game, you’ll be scrounging around the various guilds in order to make a bit of money. Later on, you’ll think nothing of playing cards like the East India Company or the London Underground, which can have potentially game-changing effects. Meanwhile, the constant cycle of building an engine, running it and watching it fall apart, and frantically building another one — that’s pure genius. One player might stick to a lean and mean city with as few stacks as possible, while another player might go all-in with a sprawling metropolis that spews poverty and points in equal measure — they’re both equally viable routes to victory.If everything I’ve said up to this point didn’t make it clear, I think London is a magnificent game. It’s smart as a whip and it boasts some lovely artwork too (at least the Osprey Games edition does!). It’s not for everybody, because it can be punishing and it doesn’t suffer fools gladly; but, if you’re fine with games that have a bit of a bite to them, there’s none quite like London.
What’s New?
The Boldest
And the award for ‘Box Art of the Week’ goes to...The Boldest! There’s not a lot to go on just yet, but that artwork is stunning. Designed by Sophia Wagner (who debuted with the well-received Noria last year), it’s making me think of Horizon: Zero Dawn - and that can only be a good thing.
Ragusa
How about another sophomore effort from another designer who made waves in 2017? From Fabio Lopiano of ‘Calimala’ fame, Ragusa looks to be a much more typical Euro-style game - but there’s some interesting stuff going on beneath the surface.
Whitehall Mystery
Letters from Whitechapel is a hugely popular game, and so there was some surprise when Whitehall Mystery was announced — why fix what wasn’t broken? However, having cut some complexity and trimmed the time required, Whitehall is inarguably more accessible than its older sibling!
Arjun Sukumaran
http://goo.gl/uNBWN3
(Arjun is a gamer, book lover and an all-round renaissance man)