Two Rex Plays #21 - Point City
In this edition of Two Rex Plays we’re discussing Point City, an engine building card game designed by Molly Johnson, Robert Melvin, Shawn Stankewich and published by Flatout Games. Using a single deck of cards, you create a marketplace where players choose from five different construction resources and a variety of buildings. These buildings either provide permanent resources for future construction phases, score end game points, or earn special civic tokens that act as personal scoring objectives.
Here are the design features we enjoyed:
Two-sided cards – Rather than have two separate decks for resources and buildings, a single deck is used but it’s two sided. On one side are resources required to construct buildings, on the reverse are the building themselves. As well as making efficient use of the cards, this choice helps support other design features in the game.
Seed money - A clever mechanism means that the marketplace starts with all cards flipped to their resource side, ensuring that players have access to the resources needed to get their engine started. Players also start with a wild card resource and the ability to flip a single card to its building side, all of which help to get the first building secured early in the game.
Evolving market – Ther are two features which give the marketplace in Point City a sense of evolution and escalation as the game progresses. Firstly, when you pick a card, you replace the card with the next one from the deck, but with the opposite side showing. This means that the market evolves from showing only resources, to becoming a mix of resources and buildings (reflecting your changing needs over the game). Secondly, the deck is setup so that more powerful cards emerge towards the end of the game, again matching the growth of your engine.
Civic tokens – One of the decisions you need to make is whether to construct buildings that don’t enhance your engine, but provided a civic token which means you can gain a personal scoring objective. These scoring objectives are visible from the start of the game, which is a great design choice as to fully make use of this route to victory you will need to commit to it from an early stage.
Focussed engine building – A two player game lasts 17 turns or around 30 mins, by which time your engine will have grown but still feels like a manageable size. The balance is perfect, giving a satisfying strategic experience but the output from your city still feeling constrained and appropriate for the stage of the game.
Point City is currently live on Kickstarter, and as part of the campaign the game can played for free on Tabletopia which is where played it.
An early version of our first design also included engine building mechanics, and we quickly found that balancing the growth of the engine was incredibly tricky. The default position is the player starts out with no or limited resources, and that can mean it takes too long to establish your engine and get going with the game. That one is relatively easy to fix by giving one-off rewards to the player at the start of the game, in this case it’s a wild resource card, in ours we gave our equivalent of a building for free at the start of the game. Point City goes one step further by ensuring the market is weighted towards giving you the resources you need at each stage of the game, ensuring that the market place isn’t cultured with cards that aren’t needed.
Interested in Point City? Find out more here:
Board Game Geek Page
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/368017/point-city
Publisher Flatout Games
Kickstarter Page
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flatoutgames/point-city-deep-dive