Game Report: Between Two Cities

      10 Comments on Game Report: Between Two Cities

Yesterday at my local public library’s tabletop games shelf, I played Between Two Cities for the first time. It was an excellent game for three people who hadn’t played it before, and it seems like it would expand to larger tables well.

The interesting thing about the game is that it is both cooperative and competitive. You are partnered with the players on either side of you, placing tiles to build a city. You are trying to maximize points with each city-partnership, and you are in competition with every other city-partnership, and your ultimate score is the lesser of the two cities you sit so titularly between. So, f’r’ex, in a three person game there are three cities, Zachary-and-Yolanda’s, Yolanda-and-Xavier’s, and Xavier’s-and-Zachary’s. If the XZ city is the lowest scoring, then Yolanda wins, so Yolanda and her two cities are clearly competing with Zachary and Xavier, but at the same time she is co-operating with each of them in her cities. If she doesn’t co-operate well with them, she can’t build her cities well. In a larger game, of course, there are people you aren’t sitting next to and thus aren’t immediately co-operating with, but you are co-operating with people who are co-operating with them, or with a longer chain of co-operation—at any rate, your direct plays are all co-operative, and indirect or distant plays have to go through people who are directly co-operating. What this all means is that almost all the actual game focus is on improving your own cities together with your near neighbors, without losing the element of competition and an eventual victor. I really liked that mechanism.

It also avoids (I think) my main-problem with co-operative games, where one player who is quick-thinking, loud-talking and aggressive winds up directing the entire game and using the other players as pawns. Or, just as bad, a player with those tendencies spending the game time biting his tongue to prevent taking over. That can happen in a limited way in this game, as Xavier can try to take over both the building of both XZ and YX, but (a) even Xavier is more likely to listen in a one-to-one situation, and (2) even if Xavier steamrolls Zachary in XZ, Zachary won’t be a pawn in ZY, which should be nice.

My major caveat about the game (and I have only played once, with three people who share a household, so I’m only guessing about how it would work with six people who have never met, or any other combination) is that there is the opportunity for a player who tends to play slowly, preferring to take a long time to consider all the possible repercussions of any possible choice, to bring the game to a halt for everybody. On the whole, the game goes quickly, with everybody choosing tiles simultaneously, and in theory a game with six or seven people would go as quickly as a game with three, but I don’t think I’d choose to play it with people I hadn’t played more complicated games with before.

But other than that, I was really impressed. Have any Gentle Readers played this one?

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

10 thoughts on “Game Report: Between Two Cities

  1. irilyth

    I haven’t played this one, but that tension when you have an ally in common with one of your enemies is a neat mechanic. Five player monochrome Magic is good for that, and Castle Of Magic (unrelated “Magic”, heh) had some elements along those lines. This sounds fun!

    Reply
  2. Vardibidian Post author

    I didn’t mention—the game is surprisingly short, for a game that has some real thinking involved. I think it says 25 minutes on the box, and I suspect it can play a bit quicker than that once everybody already is familiar with it. Set-up is also very fast, as it’s pretty much making a pile of the tiles to choose from (that is, putting them all face down in the top of the box). So it’s not a game that’s the focus of an evening, but absolutely could be a game for while waiting for everyone to arrive for Board Game Night, or for a household that has limited after-dinner-but-before-bedtime game time.

    There’s also a ridiculous but excellent mechanic for determining who ‘goes first’, which could probably be stolen and used for other games… since there isn’t really a ‘goes first’ player in this game.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply
  3. Dan P

    Non-transitive cooperation is a major bee in my game bonnet, and I’d looked at Between Two Cities before but thought that the actual game play looked a little obscure. This is an old impression, though, and it’s fun to get a review from a trusted source!

    The major concern I had, when I read about it before, was whether there were subtly unhelpful tricks you end up playing on your neighbors, or downward spirals where two neighbors don’t get off to a good start and then lag behind the rest of the table because each of their other cities are more attractive. In your experience, did it seem like either of these would be factors?

    Reply
    1. Vardibidian Post author

      So, my answer is no, but then I’m not as clever as some people are, so it’s always possible. The first situation—playing to hose, as we call it—could certainly be an issue in a longer game, but this game has a limited number of moves, so I honestly think that doing anything other than maximizing the cities you are between is much more likely to redound against you. As for the second, while I suspect it’s possible for one city to lag behind, the game is short enough that it wouldn’t (it seems to be) be very long between the realization of the situation and the actual end of the game and the opportunity to win the next one (or some other game). You wouldn’t have the brutal twenty minutes of knowing you can’t win but you need to play as if you can to Maximize everyone’s Fun Quotient.

      Plus, since both players have real incentive to boost their lower-scoring city (since your final score is the lower of the two cities you are between) even at the expense of their higher-scoring city, I kinda doubt that the problem would come up all that often.

      Thanks,
      -V.

      Reply
      1. Michael

        I know card games that allow an alternative strategy when you’re failing partway in — Hearts gives you the option of trying to shoot the moon instead of just keeping your score low, and there’s some other card game where you’re trying to keep your score low but if that’s not working you can try to wrap around back to 0 if you hit 100. This discussion makes me wonder whether there are board games that include that sort of backup mechanism?

        Reply
        1. Vardibidian Post author

          Sorry! (the game of sweet revenge) has something of that, but not entirely. I can’t think of any others off the top of my head. I mean, there are games where it’s reasonable to shift to a high-risk-high-reward strategy at some point (in Settlers I think of it as buying cards and hoping), which isn’t quite the same.

          Thanks,
          -V.

          Reply
  4. Vardibidian Post author

    Update: I have played the game two more times, and still like it. These were four-player games, with one new player, and they were pretty much the same amount of fun and interest as the first three-player game. The new player picked up the rules very quickly—this particular person picks up rules very quickly anyway, so that’s perhaps not as useful a benchmark as it might be, but certainly it wasn’t a barrier to enjoyment.

    Also, in the first game, the final scores were very, very close: all four cities were within a range of four points, and the winner’s ‘worst’ city was only two points head of the losers’ ‘worst’ city. In the second game, the final scores were nearly as close, with a five-point spread of the cities, and again a two-point different between first and last place. They were all in the general 50ish range, if I recall correctly.

    So that was pretty awesome.

    Thanks,
    -V.

    Reply
    1. Vardibidian Post author

      No, not the same. As I understand it (dimly) The Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a different tile-based game, where each player builds a Castle for Mad King Ludwig. B2CoMKL takes certain aspects of B2C (particularly the aspect where each player is co-operatively building a thing with each neighbor) and the tiles and much of the gameplay of CoMKL to make a new game. Which might well be even better than B2C, but I haven’t played it.

      However, B2C does appear to be available from the publisher:
      https://stonemaier-games.myshopify.com/products/between-two-cities-retail-edition

      Thanks,
      -V.

      Reply

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