City Square Off

A great way to Major Fun’s heart is through his stomach. Unfortunately that’s due to a gastric bypass surgery gone horribly wrong. BUT another great way to his heart is through elegant design. We at Major Fun reward games that are easy to learn, and that means that some types of games and some game mechanics come back to the party in many different outfits. Nothing wrong with this. Fun is fun.

Gamewright’s City Square Off is a competitive tiling game for two people (or two teams). Each player starts with a board, 21 tiles (much as you would find in Tetris variants), and a starting tile that is shaped like a city (each city tile is different). The city tile goes in the middle of each board and a deck of 21 cards (a card for each of the tiles) is shuffled. The top card is revealed and each player places that tile on their board. The player who runs out of space on his or her board loses.

We’ve seen games like this before, but City Square Off is compact, sturdy, and visually stunning. The game gives you 4 city tiles to use as starting pieces and each is unique AND they seem to represent 4 different periods of time and architecture. The nine-by-nine grid is sturdy, rigid, grey plastic, which admittedly sounds less than appealing and yet the bright orange and green tiles fit perfectly into the grid where they almost fluoresce against the grey surface. Everything fits into a compact box.

Games are quick, intuitive, and easy to learn. The designers also include several variants that shake things up. Start with the city tile ANYWHERE on the board. Don’t use the cards and each player races to see who can fill up all the squares on his or her board first. The variants suggest many other possibilities. Each game is fun and immediately replayable.

It’s Major Fun. Check it out.

2 players or 2 teams. Ages 8+

City Square Off  by Ted Cheatham. © 2011 Gamewright.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Scroll To Top