Shake That City is the newest game from AEG coming to Kickstarter in November 2022. It’s a quick-playing spatial puzzle game about building a little city on your 6×6 grid, which ideally should score the most points after 15 rounds.

The version I am reviewing here is just a prototype copy that we received, so components and gameplay details could still change. 

Keep that in mind while reading this.

How to play shake?

The heart of the game is a cardboard gizmo that dispenses cubes in a 3×3 pattern. Each round the active player shakes the gizmo and presses its lever so it randomly spits out 9 cubes. Then each player picks a color – keep in mind that in the first 12 rounds other players cannot pick the same color that the active player chose; in the last 3 rounds though you are free to pick whichever you like.

You then all place down buildings of your chosen color onto your player boards, in the shape that the chosen cubes had in the 3×3 pattern. You can’t choose a color if you can’t legally place that shape anymore – plus the usual rules: no overlapping or stacking of tiles, and it has to be inside your 6×6 grid.

When picking what buildings to place there are some things to consider:

  • How many cubes of that color are there and in what shape.
  • Each building type has its own scoring rules, so you might want to pick certain things over others depending on the current situation.
  • There are bonus tiles around your player board that were placed at setup: appropriately filling up the rows/columns that they are pointing to allows you to flip them for some end game points. (Like “have 4 red buildings in this row” or “have all 6 squares built in this column”.)

Picking a bigger cluster of cubes could be beneficial, because otherwise you might not completely fill your board up in 15 rounds. However haphazardly placing down buildings won’t work either – your board might fill up too fast, allowing less legal placements in the future, and also possibly scoring worse at the end. Choosing less cubes allows for more precise placements.

So how do the buildings score?

  • Red Houses score 2 points for each cluster of them. Having 10 continuous houses scores the same as a single house would do, so you want to separate them from each other. Also watch out for Factories because they make adjacent Houses worth 0 points.
  • Grey Roads are only worth 1 point each if they are connected to the edge of the board – either directly or through other roads.
  • Blue Shops score more points if they are on the brown or grey spots of your board, but only if they are connected to the edge through roads. Getting roads might not be easy, especially if active players keep picking grey for themselves.
  • Black Factories give 1 point if adjacent to other Factories and another 1 point if adjacent to Roads. 
  • Green Parks give 1 point if adjacent to Houses and another 1 point if adjacent to Factories.

At first it’s hard keeping in mind what each building does, but you quickly become familiar with them. There is also a handy scoring overview that you can check at any time.

This is why we like to shake it

I like how you can’t really “solve” the game. Depending on the cube pattern that gets randomized, the perceived value of colors will keep dynamically changing every round – either because of their amount/shape shown, or due to the current situation on your player board. This of course also means that you can’t really plan ahead and have to make the best of each round.
There is also an alternative side of the player boards with a different layout, which makes building well-scoring Stores and Roads harder to make. Add to this a small expansion module which I’ll keep a secret, and Shake That City should stay fresh each game.

I think a comparison will be almost unavoidable with Tiny Towns – both are simpler light-weight family games from AEG about building little cities. In direct comparison I would say Shake That City is a simpler game, but also faster. Though both of them present you with a spatial puzzle to solve, the puzzle itself is actually quite different, as is the gameplay experience. So they are not mutually exclusive.

When seeing the game I first thought to myself: “Why not just make a deck of cards and draw random 3×3 grids of colored squares?” But after the first game I realized shaking the cube-gizmo is indeed a lot of fun and the game is better for it. So having the cube shaker is a definite must! It is made of cardboard elements which you can punch out and assembly yourself. The whole thing is kept together by a standard household rubberband, which also functions as the pull-back mechanism of the lever! I love how clever this idea is.

I am excited to see what else AEG may put into this game during the KS campaign!