Board Game Analysis – Citadels + The Dark City Expansion

Introduction
We were tasked to analyze a Board Game for a course; Advanced Game Design. We had earlier been divided in to groups of around 6 people each. We got to choose what game we wanted to play ourselves, wither from a big selection of games that the school owned or we could choose to play a game we owned ourselves. We selected a game called Citadels together with an expansion for the game called The Dark City.

Citadels + The Dark City Expansion
Citadels is a turn based card game for 2-8 player (2-7 seven without the expansion). The main game contains eight Character Cards numbered 1-8, and the expansion adds new Character cards form 1.8 that you can swap out two the main ones of your choosing, as well as two extra cards numbered 9.

Before the game starts one player will become the King and receives the Crown, a small wooden piece whose only purpose is to mark who is the King at the moment. The Kings job is to Shuffle the Character Cards after each turn and place one card face up and possibly discard some cards face down depending on how many players there are.

The players decide what combination of Character Cards they want to put in the Character Card Deck during this game, there can only be one card tagged with a  ‘1’ and one card that is tagged ‘2’ and so on. Each player also receives two gold from the bank.

There is also a District Card Deck that is shuffled at the beginning of the game, and each player receives four District Cards. The cards are divided in five categories/colors, Millitary, Religious, Noble, Trade and Special. All colors except Special Districts for have some form of interaction with the Character Card abilities. To make up for this the Special Districts have their own special ability. You are also allowed to add two to three extra Special District Cards from the Expansion to the District Deck

After the King have discarded these cards he is free to look through the remaining cards and select the character he wants to play as this round and then he passes the remaining cards over to the next player clockwise.

And then the player will just repeat this until they reach the last player to choose a card. Because of the lack of cards left he is allowed to pick up the card that was placed face down in the beginning of the round.

If you are playing with two or three players these rules differ a bit, the first player discards a card and then picks one for herself, and then the second player does the same thing, and then this repeats one time, which means that each player will have two characters each.

It is now time to the next stage of the game. In this stage the King announces who’s turn it is by counting up from 1 to 9. For example, some cards are balanced and their ability is tailored in a way that only works if they are played in a certain order, therefore the Assassin or the Witch* who’s number is 1 is always played first.

“1 – Assassin – Announce a character you wish to murder. The Murdered character misses his entire turn.”

1* – Witch – After you take an action, announce which character you wish to bewitch, the immediately end your turn.

If your Character card does not imply otherwise every players turn will be structured like this:

1. Take an Action. In this game Taking an action means that you either receive two gold from the bank or you are allowed to look on the two top cards if the District Deck then discard one of them and put one in your hand.
2. To build a district the player pays the amount of gold that is displayed on the District Card and places his card in hos city. The player may only build one District each turn unless it the player have Character Card or District Card that says  otherwise.
3. Character ability. Each Character Card has their own ability that they are allowed to use.

Then the turn is over the current King will shuffle all the Character cards again and they start over from the Character Card selection phase.

The game ends when one player has built eight Districts. After the game has ended each player calculates their final score by adding the cost of each district

The Good Parts
The mind games and the planning which are present when choosing your Character Cards are one of the best parts of the game, and the reason I had as much fun as I did with this game.

Because you aren’t stuck with the same character for every round of the game every round feels fresh and two rounds are rarely the same.

Playing the game with two or three players is very different than playing with four or more.

The Bad Parts
The Assassin, is way less fun to play with or against than the Witch. The Assassin is simply a boring card on all accounts, the only thing you as a player gain nothing from using it, the only thing it does is that you remove one player from this turn. And while this often is very effective there is very little reason to play a game using the Assassin than replacing it with the Witch from the expansion we played with too. The reason The Witch is an interesting card is because it has no build phase on its own and the only way to get to build anything is to successfully steal another players build phase and ability and then you can use their power too, and even then the victim can still take their action, that is draw a card or take two gold.

The first few times we played the game we played it the wrong way, we made our own character deck with the characters we wanted to play with instead of choosing two characters from the expansion and replacing the existing ones with the same number with them. When we started playing it the correct way it felt like every character deck was pretty much the same.

One other thing that we also did wrong is that we used all of the expansion District Cards as well this resulted in a lot of Special District Cards, which in my opinion made the game interesting, it even became more of a challenge to build one District of each color because the Special ones were so common.

Some of the Special District Cards are designed to work or counter a specific Character card, which means that the card is basically just good for the point it is worth or you will have to decide what kind of relation this card will have with the Character Card you use instead of the Card the District Card mentions.

The Most Interesting System.

While the game has pretty simple rules the most interesting part in this game is choosing part where the players are choosing characters each round, which is driven by predicting what characters the other players would choose, which often results in mind games.

This is due to the presence of the Witch or the Assassin, which role in the game is to punish the other players for being predictable by either removing their turn (Assassin) or taking their build phase and ability from them (Witch) by announcing that they will bewitch or assassinate another character in the beginning of the round.

Every character in this game have very situational abilities and by predicting what character a player would choose by looking at what they need to improve their place in this game during this turn.

For example; one player have no gold left with a couple of cards in their hand and several Trade District Cards in their city (on the board) they would likely benefit the most for picking the Merchant.

6 – Merchant – Your receive one gold for watch trade (green) district in your city. When you take an action you receive one extra gold.

But by knowing that there is a Witch or an Assassin in play they can either take the chance  and still pick the Merchant and hope that the current Witch or Assassin would expect you to not pick the Merchant because or would be too obvious and they would expect you to play the next best choice instead of taking the risk.

Demographic

Due to the fact that the game doesn’t contain any violence or other mature themes games rules isn’t very complex at its core, without that much to keep track of until you start to have a feel for the game so I would say that this game has a pretty broad age demographic starting at age ten.

I’d say that this game is specifically directed to people who like to predict and play around other people’s decisions, and always try to stay one step before the rest of the players.

Summary

In the end I really enjoyed my time with this game, sure it’s rules are pretty straight forward but its character selection still makes it a joy to play. I would have liked the game to have less strict rules about how many expansion cards you were allowed to use at a time because I felt the game was way more enjoyable when you could tailor the gameplay to suit your preferences even more and add a bit more variation to it. We had some really intense matches where several players ended up heling each other just to bring hinder the player that was just about to win and drag him down in to the dirt.

Filed under: Programming, School-stuff Tagged: Analysis, Board, Campus, game, gotland, Laban, Melander, Universistet, University, Uppsala