Summary
👥 a game for 2 to 4 players
⏳ Play time is approximately 60 minutes
🏢 Publisher is Arcane Wonders
Introduction
Are you ready to start building in Metropolis? Metropolis, aka the city of the most famous superhero Superman. But this game, unfortunately has nothing to do with that. In Metropolis, you will compete to become the best architect in your city. Buy deeds for empty lots and build your new buildings.
The player with the most glory is the winner!
The game is played over 3 rounds, at the end of each round there is a scoring session. During your turn you perform one of 3 actions;
Action 1 Receiving Income
You receive $5 in income anyway but in addition you also receive income linked to the buildings you have placed.
Action 2 Buy a deed
Buy one of the exposed cards, above the cards is the amount this particular deed costs. After buying, all cards to the right of the deed you just bought move one spot to the left. This makes these cards cheaper. Now place a new card on the last free space.
After this, place one of your available tokens on the space just purchased on the board.
Action 3 Place a building
Place one of your buildings on the available land. You may only build where your tokens lie or where one of your buildings stands. In fact, you may build over another building but only if the new building is larger.
Once you build, nothing happens yet except if you build a residential building. As soon as you build and/or replace it with another building you have to update the population track. E.g. As soon as you place a building with 2 citizens you advance 2 steps on the population track.
As soon as the cards of the respective season are completely exhausted, all cards have been bought by the players, we will do a scoring.
Before moving on to the next year, let’s count the points.
Each player now counts the total value of the number of citizens on the board through their residential buildings and checks if this matches the population track. The player with the most citizens gets prestige points equal to his position on the population track and a year-end bonus (4,7 or 10 points).
Every other player gets prestige points equal to the position of the player before him on the population track.
After this, players score points for their commercial buildings; the player board shows how many points have been scored. In addition, each player also gets the coins equal to what was built, again this is shown on your player board but now without the $5 in action income.
Was this the end of year 3, score everything as indicated above only now you do not receive coins but points for the commercial buildings. You also get extra points for unused lots tokens, each lot token is worth 1 point.
Conclusie & eindscore
Difficulty: 1.69/ 5
Re-playability: 8
Our score: 8.5 out of 10 dice
Foundations of Metropolis is a super fun game with simple rules. Setting it up is super easy because of the perfect insert. You clean up the game neatly afterwards and next time you can start playing right away.
The theme of building is obviously very well reflected in it but in which city does not matter so much whether this is Metropolis or another city. But quite honestly, this is not disturbing at all. The actions you can perform are quick, place a tile, buy a piece on the map or receive income. For this last part they have made a really good game rule, because you receive a minimum of 5 ticks regardless of what you have built and on top of that money for buildings with a dollar sign. So your minimum income is always 5 and you can do that as often as you want. This allows you to perform all your actions.
Overbuilding smaller buildings is also very nice so you can still receive income or population first and continue building in another turn if you manage to purchase the other buildings.
The game plays away quickly and I think that will make you want to play it a bit more often in a row.
With several players it is very fun, the only thing is that with 2 players the scoring at the end of a year, the population track does not come into its own as much as in a 3 or 4 player game. Something could have been changed about that.
Foundations of Metropolis is a very nice puzzle game in which you can thwart each other well but also not too much when you place your buildings. It looks cool, solid quality and has a fat insert.
Thanks to Arcane Wonders for this review copy.
