Friends
Alter
Spezial
City Development with cards
LONDON
Don‘t forget the population!
London by Martin Wallace was published by Treefrog Games 2010 on the occasion of the Spiel at Essen and was sold out on the second day of the Fair. Three members of our group, too, bought the game that sold like mad immediately after a trial game. If you want to have London, you must wait for the new edition announced for end of March 2011.
Starting with the Big Fire in the 17th Century the tale of London’s development is told in the shape of a card game. In a box in the “Brass” size you find 110 cards and on top of that quite a handful of components – card board tiles, wooden pieces, plastic chips and a board showing a map of London, subdivided into boroughs. The Chips represent money – just as in „Brass“, black wooden cubes and disc symbolize so called poverty points, those will cost you points in the final scoring and might even hinder you to win, just as in real life: fast-growing towns attract many new inhabitants who hope for work and affluence and finally end up in the badly paid underprivileged classes living in poverty. Each player is well advised not only to build monuments, palaces or shop, but also to install facilities for services to the population like public transport, street lamps or a sewage system. The card board markers, last but least, represent victory points, loans, subway station (here is the touch of railway flair which is a must for Wallace) and markers for the boroughs in the 4 player colors.
You can take out a loan any time, they only need to be paid back at the end of game albeit with rather heavy interest; if you cannot pay you lose substantial amounts of victory points.
The composition of the game is exceedingly well done and fits the topic – it shows the genesis of the metropolis as we know her today; the chronology is embodies by three stacks of cards that must be played in sequence; the re-living of an epoch has been designed – as in Brass, this is the 3rd mentioning of this game where the topic was the development of industries in the northwest of England around Manchester – nearly flawlessly, and yet London has completely different game mechanics:
After drawing a card at the start of his turn a player has a choice of 4 different possibilities to act:
1.) Build in the town – you place any number of cards from your hand face up on the table in your so-called building display, either next to cards already there or on top of cards already there – but you pay for placement of a card by discarding another card of this color into the display on the board, in some cases you have to pay money for building, too.
2.) Govern the city – you can activate face-up cards in your display and use their abilities (bonuses depicted by text or symbols), which earns you money and victory points or lovers your score of poverty points (some cards offer other additional advantages), usually the card is turned over after it has been used so that a card normally can only be activated once. In some cases the activation must be paid for with money or by discarding a card from your hand.
3.) Buy land – you use money to buy a district of the town and place your marker on it – this earns you victory points (different amounts, depending on the borough) and several new cards for your hand, and your poverty score is lowered, too. In each district only one marker can be placed and the buying of boroughs must always start at the center, and you can only buy adjacent districts. Bridge symbols on the river turn boroughs on the other side of the Thames into neighboring districts.
4.) Draw 3 new cards for your hand, this is all you can do in this 4th choice, which is selected rarely and when then only near the end of the game.
If you have more than 9 cards in hand at the end of the action you did choose you must discard the surplus to the card display on the board – this is not the discard pile! – only when the 10 spaces of this display are filled and more cards need to be added you clear out the top row of the two rows and put those cards on the discard pile – the cards in the lower row are moved up. Yes, just as in St. Petersburg, of which London sometimes brings to mind.
The game ends when the last card is drawn from the draw pile, the active player takes his turn and then each player has one more turn. There is no possibility to “pass” in this game, in each turn you must take one card and choose and implement an action. But each player can choose anytime if he takes the building card from the face-down draw pile or from the open display on the board – this, for instance, is a possibility to acquire the necessary second blue card which I need to pay for building a blue card if I did choose „building” (as already mentioned, you must pay for a building by discarding a card of the same color). By the way, there are four colors of buildings: brown for financial buildings, blue for social and science affiliation and pink for political use. Gray is the color reserved for the poor, paupers, which are rather useless unless you can use them for lower job (for instance, in jail) or discard them as payment for the activation of some buildings.
After a somewhat complex final scoring (you should carefully do it step by step) the winner is the player with the highest total of victory points.
Now let me describe the core elements of the game, the building cards, in detail: Each card has a name (Stock Exchange, Merchants Guild, St. Paul’s Cathedral, Docks, British Museum, Nelson’s Column, Street lighting, Underground, even Buckingham Palace and many, many more), an illustration (very prettily done by Mike Atkinson) and – with very few exceptions – a three-part stone plinth; this plinth is necessary for using the cards for a building. In addition to that some of them show text above or below the illustration which gives you certain bonuses, income or activities in the game.
The stylized plinth in its left part shows if and what it costs to activate this card in the action “govern the town”, this cost can be money or discarding a card. The middle part of the plinth shows symbols for the result of the activation: A round mark with number and Pounds symbol for money, numbers in a hexagon for victory points or cubes for poverty points – white cubes if the card reduces your amount of poverty points, which is good, and black cubes if the card rises your poverty points, which of course is rather bad. An eventual text beneath the pictures explains additional functions of the card or bonuses that are activated in the „govern the town“ action. For instance, “Omnibus” earns you money for each district you own.
And, finally, the right part of the plinth on the card tells you if you need to turn the card over after activating and using it or not; if not, you can activate it again later. If a card shows text above the pictures, this is an ability that can be used from the moment the card is played, without separate activation. If the picture shows a symbol for victory points, this card earns you victory points at the end of the game, they are scored for all those cards, regardless if they are face-up or face-down. Remaining cards in your hand do not earn you victory points, but poverty points at the end of the game.
At some points in the game you should try to keep the amount of cards in your hand as low as possible, as they rise the values of your poverty score: At the end of the action “govern the town”, when activation has been don and you have received all money, victory points and possibly bonuses poverty is determined: The card stacks in your display are counted. Each card is a stack, regardless whether face-up or face-down and also regardless of the number of cards in the stack, 1 card is a stack! To this number the number of your cards in hand is added, the total is the number of black cubes (poverty markers) that you must take, albeit reduced by the number of districts you own.
An example: I have 6 stacks in my display and 3 cards on hand, the resulting total is 9. I do own 4 boroughs, so I can deduct those and must take 5 poverty cubes at the end of the actions “govern in town”. The more poverty points I have at the end of the game the more victory points I lose, and the amount rises non-linear!! A table at the edge of the board shows the numbers. For 1 or 2 poverty points, I lose 1 victory points, but 10 poverty points do already cost me 15 victory points. Fortunately, the opportunities to get rid of poverty points become more frequent during the course of the game.
The allure of London is centered in the fact that you must keep making decisions, sometimes rather hard and difficult ones: Do I discard a building with many victory points to pay for a building which reduces poverty? Or do I choose a card that earns me lots of money? Do I buy another borough before they are all gone? Oh, to do so I would need to take out another loan. But will I earn enough money during the rest of the game to be able to pay back the loan? I do need money urgently, so I should govern my town, but, what a pity, that I hold so many cards – those dratted poverty points – can I reduce them, if I build first, but how do I pay for the pink card, let’s hope that another player discards a pink card into the display before it is my turn ….
In reality, each player plays on his own and only for himself, there are very few direct means for interaction, but all the same there is no „long waiting until it is my turn again“, unless you have one of those puzzlers in the game who manage to destroy the most simple game. Indirectly you are busy all the time, with planning what would be your best move, and if one player chooses “governing”, then normally all players assist in scoring. The duration of the game is 90 to 120 minutes, only the first games may take a little longer.
Basically, London makes do with a few simple actions, but offers many different strategies to win, so far none of us has managed a foolproof strategy for winning the game. At the start 4-5 stacks are sensible for governing, but you cannot do much without taking out loans, as good cards often also cost money when being displayed and of course you will want to buy boroughs, which results in safe victory points, fast access to many cards and thus fast extension of your town which in turn results in a higher income ….
In the further course of the game most displays hold between 7 and 9 cards, more stacks rise poverty levels far too high; some players have tried to display only cards which are not turned over after activation so that they could save on building actions and therefore get money more often for the governing action, but this results in much too much poverty. A certain amount of chance of course comes into play by the drawing of cards, mitigated by the possibility to choose from up to 10 cards in the open display on the board.
I like London, it is a good game which you want to play again and again, even if it maybe is not THE top game. It is diversified and entertaining and features very well done graphics and components. The card texts are in English, and the rules are attractive, clear and without any gaps and come in German, English and French.
Christoph Proksch
Spieler : 3-4
Alter : ages 13 and up
Dauer : ca. 120 min
Autor : Martin Wallace
Grafik : Mike Atkinson, Peter Dennis, Simon Jonnerland
Titel : London
Preis : ca. 35 Euro (again available in March 2011)
Verlag : Treefrog Games
Genre : Card game
Zielgruppe : With friends
Mechanismen : Several interacting mechanisms
Kommentar:
Good rules in three languages
Plays very smoothly
Very attractive and well done simulation of London’s development
Vergleichbar:
St. Petersburg, San Juan
Meine Bewertung: 5
Christoph Proksch:
London is an interesting card game for rather experienced players despite being easily accessible for newcomers. The topic has been implemented very placatively, the game makes you want to play again and is also very good with two or three players, offering all in all a rather low level of complexity.
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Taktik 2
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Kommunikation 1
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