A curious combination of game mechanics
After playing the awesome Phoenix New Horizon from @perrolokogames, we also tried 🕋Concilium Urbis. This game is a mix of drafting with an I-split-you-choose element, voting, and tile-laying with interesting placement rules on how to score well.
According to the theme you have found a planet 🌕 with a very valuable mineral 💎 and you are one of the great kingdoms colonizing it. Each year the rulers meet in the Concilium to vote on the rules of governing the planet. But let’s see how it works in practice. 🕵️
Concilium Urbis is played over 7 rounds. Each round 2 law cards are drawn, which you will vote on later. Then everyone draws 4 tiles from a bag and arranges them into 2 groups of 2, passing them to their neighbour. They choose 2 and pass the other 2 back, thus everyone will have 4 tiles at the end that they can add to their city. 🧐 You are mostly free to place things as you want, but you have to build adjacent to already present tiles. ☝️Of course there are multiple laws in play at setup that you want to follow to score well at the end of the game.
📃Basically there is a law for the basic layout of your city, and one for each building type. There are 3 sets of laws you can choose to play with, or you could mix and match them for variety. Every tile type is useful in one way or another: mines come into play with crystals, that you can turn into energy with factories. Tree tiles are needed to combat pollution of factories. Finally, towers, houses and monuments score in interesting ways.
At the end of the round you produce votes 🤚 according to your city, then can use them to vote on the laws drawn earlier. Everyone secretly chooses an amount, then you see who is for or against each law. Laws will strengthen or weaken scoring rules for tiles, so you really have to see how the other players’ cities look. You might even make some alliances so you can get important laws passed. 😉
The game accommodates 1-6 players and playtime should be around the same as everything is simultaneous. The tile-laying itself is satisfying and the voting adds a cool interactive twist that you don’t normally see in similar games! 😊
