This little game is a lot bigger than it appears to be. It also mixes up way too many things to manage casually. With a nice presentation and cool, gradual introduction into mechanics it just could not hold me after it got too complicated.

So what this game is a puzzle city builder, with deck management.

It starts out nicely. You get a board and get to place buildings on it in an isometric fashion. Your goal is to score enough points on each row starting from the last one. Once you get enough points the row is removed and you move forward. A little bit like tetris but you need to clear the very bottom row first always - if you can’t you have three hearts to give in order to skip a specific row.

At your disposal you’ve got three types of buildings - residential, commercial and industrial. Commercial and industrial buildings come with different variants of 3x3 bonus grids - commercial give positives while industrial negative points. Your job is to place them in a way that creates enough scoring points on a field you’ll place a residential building to collect the points and clear the row.

This mechanic is actually pretty cool and I was quite happy building the little town. But it’s not enough for the game.

Next step is the introduction of cost. Each commercial build has a cost that fills in the meter - once the meter is filled the number of points required for each line increases. Next up - research points (or whatever they’re called) - each industrial building costs little but provides research points that fill another meter. Once the meter is filled you can purchase new building cards that get added to your deck.

Now this is where things start getting complicated. Turns out the building you’re placing is essentially a deck of cards to which you can add or remove cards during gameplay. But you soon learn you can construct decks before going into level. And some of them get unlocked or bought at some point - don’t recall anymore.

But wait, there’s more. Soon you will discover that the research points can also be used instead of purchasing cards - unlocking different skills - which admittedly are still just cards added to the deck but from a different pool and categorised in tiers.

It doesn’t end there as well. The game soon after introduces the concept of blocks. So by placing the same type of building next to each other you create a block. And if you have a special block card you can play it and it will multiply it’s positive effects based on the size of the block you have.

And just as I thought that’s quite enough mechanics to have in a game - the game introduces opponents who semi-randomly place different buildings on the map as you play your game. I can’t be even sure that it’s an end there though - but it was definitely the end for me. Enjoyed it a little bit in the beginning but there’s just too much going on for me to comprehend and properly enjoy. Try at your own risk.