More about the City of the Great Machine

What is your fav dystopian game setting? If you have read our last teaser for City of the Great Machine, you know how brilliant the setting is. 🥰 An ongoing struggle in a dystopian steampunk city between an artificial intelligence and a few brave heroes trying to start a revolution. Let us give you a quick gameplay overview!

Regardless of player count, there are always 3 Revolutionaries, and the Machine controls 3 Servants to do his bidding. The city is made up of 9 tiles that are randomly put together - the main rule here is that each tile needs to connect to at least 2 other tiles. 🧐

The progress board is a central element of the game. It is a dial used to both track progress of the Machine’s Master Plan and the discontent in the city. The higher the discontent goes, the more citizens will join the fight. ✊

At the beginning of the round players get resources which are used to pay for actions. Especially at the beginning you don’t get much, so you are limited at what you can do. Even movement isn’t free - this makes the game very tight. Event cards play a major role too.

Revolutionists have to each secretly play an access card to plan where they’ll go - they only get to act after the Machine player though. This adds a Hidden Movement element to the game. 🕵️ You could also lose access cards, so certain districts become unreachable. There are some mind games on both sides, trying to guess where the other will go.

The actions are all really thematic. 🤩 Revolutionists mainly try to raise discontent and discover what types of citizens are hiding in which districts, and gather them together to be able to start riots. 3 successful riots win you the game! You also have to be wary of detainment, which either advances the Master Plan or causes you to lose your turn.

The servants can arrest citizens, organize raids and repair broken robotic guards. Some districts offer special actions depending on which side you are playing as, like publishing Directives that change some rules or repositioning the flying districts to surprise your opponents.

There is so much to cover here, we’ll have to continue in a future post! 😄