Infinite City - The City of the Future!

While it's not the most intricate or ingenious game design, Infinite City is a pleasantly surprising, quick-moving, tile-placement game that has players taking the role of rival corporations jockeying for control of a quickly expanding city in a booming economy.

In the box you will find a whole mess of tiles, and a bunch of colored pegs.

Player turn—Turns are pretty simple: Place a tile and put your colored peg on it. Then resolve the game text on your tile. Draw back up to 5 tiles.

The goal is to have as many of your colored pegs adjacent to one another as possible; you score 1 point for each peg in a group of three or larger. There are also tiles that have a numeric value on them or a "silver lining." If you control a tile with a numeric value on it, you also score that number of points, and the player controlling the most tiles with the silver lining scores a point for each of those as well.

The game text on the tiles is where the game becomes interesting; the tile effects let you swap two placed tiles, remove pegs from a previously tile, force the next played tiles to be placed adjacent to the one you just placed, and so forth.

The game ends when a) a player runs out of pegs, or b) all 5 of the "Power Station" tiles are played. Scores are tallied and the player with the most points wins control of the city and its vast resources, fame, wealth, and power!

The game supports 2-6 players, but I've found that 3-4 players is the sweet spot. With 6 players there are a TON of tiles being placed, shifted, removed, and thrown across the room before you place your next tile. It doesn't totally ruin the game; it just makes it a little more tedious than a game of this type should be.

The abilities of the tiles are pretty well balanced, and even with 6 players in the game, we've found that no one is really ever out of the game at any time. One player even commented that he was about to take on the king maker role after having a few of his tiles moved on him; instead he had a few well played tiles and ended up turning the game around for himself and pulling out the win. I enjoyed that about the game; there's nothing worse than playing a game for an hour when you know full well who is going to pull out the win, and everyone is just along for the ride.

The artwork is great—everything is done in an Art Deco/City Of the Future style and they all look really slick; they remind of those great Superman cartoons from the early 1940's.

This is definitely a game worth picking up and working into your rotation; it's not a reinvention of the wheel, but it's a pretty enjoyable iteration of it.