Game Review – City of Iron

City of Iron
Number of Players	2 - 4
Play Time	120 minutes
Ages	14 years and up

City of Iron is a 2 – 4 player game from Red Raven Games.

In City of Iron, the players take the role of factions in a city state that are trying to build it into a great nation.  They do this through developing buildings in the city, founding colonies, and conquering neighboring towns.

In order to do this, players need to develop two decks of experts that will allow them to do the things that will help them achieve their goals.  The two decks are divided into civilian and military experts.  The player will focus on getting experts for the deck that enhances their faction’s abilities.  They will then use the experts that they draw from their decks to build new buildings, explore new areas, set up colonies, and conquer neighboring towns.  All of these things can increase the income and victory points of a player.  The person with the most victory points at the end of the game wins.

One of the things I do like about the game is the way they handle the expert decks.  As I mentioned above the experts are split into two decks:  a civilian deck and a military deck.  You draw new experts from the deck each turn based on abilities given to you during play of the game.

As cards are played they go into a discard pile based on the type of cards they are, civilian experts into the civilian discard and the military expert into the military discard.   When a player uses all of their cards from one of the expert decks, they then flip the deck over and it becomes the new draw pile so that they fist card they played when the previous draw pile was created is the top card of the new draw deck.

This makes managing when you use which expert from your hand and makes each drafting new experts count.  Quite simply you do not want to fill your deck with experts you are not going to use.

The game has the standard problem of most economic games in that the rich get richer and after a certain point in the game can maintain a significant lead over the other players by just out spending them.

It also seems that the conquest road to victory almost always guarantees a player victory especially if you play the faction that focuses on conquest when using the advanced rules.  In order to remove this advantage all of the other players have to participate in conquest, which is a shame because it does not let the other players take full advantage of their own faction’s special abilities.

While I like City of Iron, it is not a game that truly excites me in that I look forward to playing it over and over.  I think it has mechanic or two, it feels like the game was built around these mechanics without much thought to the rest of the game.  Add to that the conquest strategy being unbalanced against the other strategic options presented in the game, I would give this game a C.