City Tycoon, 21 December

Pre-Christmas games at Adrian's with Guest Gamer Felix and we tried out City Tycoon, Kieron's birthday pressie. This new, semi-abstract game involves the players creating a tile city grid of power plants and buildings. Once buildings are built, powering them with electricity or water cubes (generated by the power plants) creates money to buy new buildings, or goods which in turn can be used to acquire victory points or intermediate benefits. It took us a few turns to get the hang of the game but we then realised its subtlety and cleverness. Not only a cracker in terms of gameplay, the design is also attractive and the construction solid. All in all a great little game. For this first play, the power of combiner cards meant that Adrian developed a pretty unstoppable lead. The final scores were Adrian 35; James 28; Kieron 27; Felix 26 and Andy 18.