Review - Citadels

9th of August 2011 (Tuesday)

Game(s) Played:
Citadels



Review – Citadels
This Game Is… …:
Citadels is a role-choosing, building (role-playing means something else altogether) card game that is what one would call a “gateway game” in gaming circles. Basically gateway games are deemed to be introductory games to the world of serious boardgaming, the in-between of Monopoly and Caylus if you will.

In Citadels, Players are vying to have the highest points total at the game end which is usually when a Player builds his 8th building (or 7, the goal is adjustable based on your desired game length).

Citadels caters for between 3 – 7 Players and typically takes longer with more Players. Again you can shorten the game by adjusting the end game goal (No. of buildings) but most 4 Player games I have played take approximately an hour and I have heard of 7 Player games going on for more than 2 hours if competition is fierce.

What Do You Get In The Box?
The game comes with two decks of cards, the bulk of it will be the buildings deck that contains buildings with various types of costs. Buildings typically don’t provide any form of power-ups or bonuses unless they are special buildings with text to explain the buildings’ ability. The buildings do come in colours, namely red, green, blue, yellow and purple (special buildings). You also receive a set of character cards (8 unique characters, more if your set includes the expansion: Dark City) which I must say are rather… oddly illustrated.

You also receive gold tokens which you absolutely must count at the end of each game if you have lil’ ones about. These gold tokens look like lemon lozenges albeit a bit more booger coloured and tend to roll around if you’re not careful.

And finally, you receive a crown! Which turns out is just used to indicate whoever was the last person to take the role of the King (whose duties involve shuffling the character cards, dealing them out and calling the characters to take their actions in the prescribed order… so much for kingship).

How Is It Played?
Starting from the King, the Player chooses a character card secretly and places it face down in front of him and passes the remaining character cards to the next Player until all Players have chosen a character to use that character’s abilities for that particular round. Character abilities range between collecting more gold if you have buildings of a particular colour, assassinating another character so he does not take an action that turn, stealing another character’s gold, destroying another Player’s building, building more than one building in a turn and so on.

The King then calls out the character to take his action in this order:
Assassin, Thief, Magician, King, Bishop, Merchant, Architect and Warlord.

Each Player, when his character is called, gets to use his character’s ability, build 1 building by paying its cost in gold coins and choose between drawing more building cards or gaining 2 coins. Once all the Players have taken their turn, the round ends and a fresh round of role-choosing occurs until a Player builds his 8th building.

Scoring is relatively simple in that the cost of the building is also the amount you score at game end (there are some bonus points you can gain by having a building of each colour, being the first to build the 8th building and extra points from special building).

What I Think About The Game?
Gameplay:
In my opinion, Citadels is best played with the maximum 7 number of Players where there is a greater chance of the Assassin & Thief succeeding in assassinating a Player or stealing a Player’s gold. In this case, chaos certainly breeds excitement. Whilst Citadels may seem to be a simple game, there are many choices to be made, particularly during role-choosing. A typical mid-game in-brain scenario would be as follows:

Alright, let’s see now... ... ...

Your brain: Okay, I have some gold to build that next big building but I will have no reserves left. Should I choose the Merchant to get more gold from my green buildings to replenish my treasury?
Your brain: But wait! It is plain obvious that I will pick the Merchant because of all the green buildings I have. What if the thief steals all my gold before I can build? Should I pick the thief instead to prevent others from stealing from me?
Your brain: But if I pass the Assassin to the next Player he’ll guess that I’m the Thief and assassinate the Thief! To be safe, I should be the Magician instead. Nobody bothers with the Magician right?

The Assassin and Thief then purely out of spite, proceed to assassinate and steal from the Magician.

Success in Citadels seems to stem from a strategy to stay invisible / below the radar from other Players for as long as possible.

Citadels also has a high probability of “King Making”, a syndrome associated with games that more often than not, force other Players to decide who will win the game by denying one of two (or more) contending Players who are about to win the game. Hence it is unusual to have a runaway leader in a game of Citadels as Players would gang up on the leader until there are multiple contenders for the end game move, followed by the “King Making”. This on top of the AP in role-choosing, can make the game a touch longer than you would expect.

There’s also a movie called King Maker but I’m not too sure what language its in

For maximum enjoyment, Citadels should be played with Players who are selfish (won’t involve themselves in denying other Players too often), don’t mind making a mistake or two and are quick to choose a character to speed the game up.

Quality:
As I mentioned before the cards art is unique in its own way. I personally enjoy the art but based on personal experience the “darker” aspects of the art have turned away some girl gamers (including the wife) and parents of children who want to play the game. I think as a gateway game, some other considerations of a generally wider target market need to be taken into account. This includes the potential choking hazard of the gold coins.

However if you’re a regular gamer with no one silly enough to put booger coloured lozenges into their mouths living with you, the cards are of good quality, the coins do a great imitation of non-machine minted gold with its unevenness and I absolutely love the crown marker. It reminds me of the King in Katamari Damacy with the little crown on his head, now that game is a gateway game for everybody!

Three cheers for wacky games!

Affordability:
Price ÷ Recommended No. of Players ÷ [Game Length (hour) x No. Times Game is Played in a year]

My copy happens to be the version with localized rules translations by our very own Malaysian gamer, Hiew. BoardGameCafe (BGC), the official distributor for the localized version in West Malaysia, was distributing this at a promotion at the time but the normal retail price is RM85.

RM85 ÷ 4 Players ÷ [1 hour x 3 times a year] = RM7.10 / hour per Player

This seems a little steep but if you do manage to regularly play with more Players, the cost goes down incrementally to RM4.00 when you hit 7 Players, plus my plays per year would be lower than average. Still, RM7.10 is cheaper than Banana Leaf Rice which like Citadels, is something nice to savour once in a while for your health.

Makes me crave banana leaf rice already

Is This Game For You?
Citadels is gaining popularity amongst non-BGGs, I’ve had colleagues and friends who after finding out what I like to do in my spare time, inadvertently ask if I have played / own a copy of Citadels, having played or seen someone play it at a party or some other form of gathering previously.

I have this in my cupboard because it’s absolutely enjoyable and an easy game to teach and break out with non-gamers which in my circle of social friends is quite a fair number. If you foresee yourself hosting / attending small parties with… dare I say it “regular people”, where some entertainment would be nice, this game will most certainly fit the bill and probably would’ve already been played once by some of the people there. However, if you only play with your own group and they’re hardcore Starcraft, Twilight Imperium III, Power Grid sorta people, Citadels may not get that much playing time with you. I suspect it would be somewhat akin to getting a Le Havre junkie to play Stone Age.