All in the Game Newsletter
Clark King
February 2002
USA

We had fun with some of the new line of PIN International games being marketed by Out of the Box games. A real winner was "Cityscape". Easy to learn and play, this beautiful wooden game involves each of 4 people secretly setting their four dice in their city rack to indicate what they predict their view of the city to be formed will be like. Cities are formed by placing various size (5 different thicknesses) wooden blocks on one of the 16 grid spaces on the board to start a building. Following players can play on new spaces or add pieces to existing buildings, each player only playing one piece at a time. There are 5 wooden pieces of each thickness to be eventually played before all building is finished and the round ends. Scoring occurs then -- each player revealing their predicted view of the city. Each die relates to one row in that person's skyline. Dice predictions of 1 through 4 meant that the player scores 10 points for each building that he could see by looking down that particular row. A die with 5 meant that he could score 10 points for all buildings of equal elevations in that row. A die of 6 meant that he would score 10 points for every building in that row that equaled the height of the tallest building created. The game plays quickly and involves considerable strategy, considering that everyone starts the game not knowing what anyone else's goal is. We gave this game a solid 9 and want to play it over and over again. We did find it difficult to compare heights of buildings since all blocks are of the same color, but eight different people played in two separate games, and all gave it similar high marks.

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