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Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Metropolys Metropolys Price: £39.99 Board Game; 2-4 Players; Ages 8+ by Rio Grande Games The awe-inspiring Metropolys is in effervescence! Talented Urban planners and architects rival each other to make luxury, elegant buildings of glass and steel defying the laws of balance grow from the ground. Who will eventually impose their style to leave an indelible trail in the history of the city? The answer is in your hands! The players are urban planners in quest of prestige. Over the course of the game, they try to construct their buildings in the best places. As soon as a player has placed all of their buildings, the game ends. The player with the most prestige is the winner. GAME REVIEW BY COUNTER MAGAZINE Ystari 2-4 players, 60 minutes designed by Sébastien Pauchon reviewed by Ben Baldanza Games from Ystari have become a staple of any gaming year. Their output has been surprisingly consistent, and while each game cannot be considered excellent there is certainly not a dud in the group. Keeping this track record must be increasingly challenging, but fortunately it holds up this year with Metropolys. This second Ystari release from the designer of Yspahan is a fast-playing placement game where all the strategy is on getting your buildings placed into the right places of the city. The ``right places\'\' are defined the same for all players for certain scoring features but each player is also working toward a secret goal or goals that will certainly bias their play. There are two versions of the game in the box. The rules suggest thinking of these as two different games, but in practice one can be thought of as a more sophisticated scoring mechanism that will change the strategy but none of the actual placement mechanics. The board shows a mythical city with five areas each divided further into neighborhoods of five different types. Rivers define the area boundaries and rivers also extend within some areas. At the beginning of the game, special scoring tokens are placed into certain neighborhoods. Each player gets a set of 13 numbered buildings in three heights. On each turn, exactly one building will be built as players compete in an auction to get their building constructed. The lead player places a building in any open neighborhood, meaning that no other building has been placed there. In succession, players can outbid the previous placement by placing a higher numbered building in an open neighborhood adjacent to the building being outbid. At some point this process ends: either all players pass by choice, are forced out because they have no higher value building, or no open adjacent neighborhood is available. In any case, the last building offered stays on the board and the others are removed. River bridges make areas adjacent, meaning that bidding can start in one area but extend into other areas as long as each successive bid is adjacent to the prior one. If there is a scoring token in the neighborhood of the winning building, the player takes the token. The game plays like this until any one player has placed all 13 of their buildings. Scoring then takes place, as players reveal their secret objectives and score for these plus any common scoring. The common scoring includes fixed values for the neighborhood tokens earned plus two ``longest road\'\' awards. One of these is a positive award for earning the most subway tokens (direct access to the subway is prized by the building associations), and a penalty for building in an archeological site. The subway is award is treated as in Settlers; once earned, someone must overtake you to get the card. The archeological penalty card changes ownership each time someone builds in a neighborhood with an archeological token. In the basic game, each player has a single secret objective that gives them points for buildings placed next to bridges, next to city statues, next to a lake, or on the city border. In a four player game, it tends to become obvious what people may be going for but usually your strategy is best focused on getting your buildings placed where you want them rather than knocking someone out of an area they want if it doesn\'t particularly help you. The advanced game is more interesting, as players each get two secret goals, one for the neighborhoods and one for the areas. The neighborhood goals give a bonus for each building constructed in a specific type of neighborhood. The area goals reward strategic placement of a series of buildings such as building on each side of a bridge, surrounding a statue or lake, concentrating in single areas, or linking the buildings in a chain. These bonuses take longer to develop and are correspondingly worth more, therefore identifying them and thwarting them can be worthwhile. If I see that you have built in two of the three neighborhoods surrounding a statue, for example, finding a way to build in the third spot could be well worth it and this idea is more powerful if that neighborhood supports my goal. The game board is well designed to create these natural competitive situations. The advanced game also values the building height feature, as the tallest building in each area earns bonus points. These scoring features make the advanced game meaningfully more satisfying and most Counter readers will have little use for the basic version unless playing in a more social game setting. The goal to place in specific neighborhoods combined with the adjacent neighborhood bid rules combine to make a powerful strategic combination. If you are the start player, the decisions of where you begin the auction and with what value building must be made while thinking through what others might do and where the building for that round may get placed. When reacting to a bid, this also holds and with each player having the same value buildings to start, the bidding is often tight. In addition, the number of adjacent neighborhoods is neither limitless nor fixed. As the game evolves, it is possible and useful to find locations that can\'t be outbid or where the options are very limited. There is even strategy in deciding to ``move\'\' the bids away from an area you think others want it to go even if you don\'t plan to win that round. This is good stuff that is very nicely implemented. The building bidding idea extends the ``walking\'\' mechanism that Rüdiger Dorn introduced in Traders of Genoa and applied again in Goa, each with good success. In Traders, players place tokens in a walk to reach desired spots. In Goa, players place tokens in succession as with Metropolys, though of course in that game each player acts on their placement. Sébastien Pauchon gives credit to Dorn in the rules, stating that the idea for Metropolys germinated while reading the rules to Goa and seeing the ``walking\'\' illustration. I don\'t know if Pauchon has played Traders of Genoa or knows if Dorn introduced the idea first in that game. The game packs a good punch into about an hour, making it one of the more satisfying recent releases. The Ystari production is fully up to par with their earlier releases, and the rules are short but clear with excellent examples and a separate sheet that outlines the secret objectives for both the family and advanced game. Definitely recommended. More ...     WE ALSO RECOMMEND...   Mykerinos £23.99 Olympos £39.99     Main Catalogue |  Board Games & Card Games |  Rio Grande Games |  Metropolys **sRecentPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Horizontal recent item list HTML --> <br/><br/> <div class="recenththeader"> <input class="recenthtbuttonright" id="scrollbackrecent" type="button" value=" Next >>" onclick="ScrollBackRecent();"> <input class="recenthtbuttonleft" id="scrollforwardrecent" type="button" value="<< Previous" onclick="ScrollForwardRecent();"> <div style="text-align:center">Recently Viewed</div> </div> <br clear="all"/> <table id="recenthtitem"> **sRecentImageRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to image row --> <tr><td class="recenthtitemspacer" rowspan=4> </td> **sRecentImageItem** <!-- Image item --> <td class="recenthtitemimage"> <a rel="nofollow" _HREF_="_SSURL_?PRODREF=_PID_&NOLOGIN=1" > <img border="0" width="75" src="_THUMB_" alt="_NAME_" title="_NAME_"  /> </a> </td> <td class="recenthtitemspacer" rowspan=4> </td> **sRecentImageRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to image row --> </tr> **sRecentDescRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Description row --> <tr> **sRecentDescItem** <!-- Description item --> <td class="recenthtitemdesc"><a rel="nofollow" _HREF_="_SSURL_?PRODREF=_PID_&NOLOGIN=1" >_NAME_</a></td> **sRecentDescRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Description row --> **sRecentPriceRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Price row --> **sRecentPriceItem** <!-- Price item --> **sRecentPriceRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Price row --> **sRecentDeleteRowPrefix** <!-- Prefix to Delete row --> <tr> **sRecentDeleteItem** <!-- Delete button --> <td class="recenthtitemdelete"> <a href="javascript:DeleteRecent('_PID_', true);"> <img src="xit.jpg" border="0" /> </a> </td> **sRecentDeleteRowSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Delete row --> </tr> **sRecentSuffix** <!-- Suffix to Horizontal recent item list HTML --> </table> **sRecentEmptyList** <!-- Code for empty list -->

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