Family•Reviews

Cloud City Review

Put on your architect hat and get ready to get to work building an amazing city that rises high above the clouds!

Some games you just know are going to be excellent to play with anyone you meet, and Cloud City is one of those

How Do You Play?

In Cloud City you are an architect that will be planning a 3-Dimensional city high in the clouds. The player who constructs the best project and earns the most votes from the city council wins!

Players each will build a 3×4 grid city (2-3 players) or a 3×3 grid city (4 players.)

Each round, players will choose one tile from their hand to place in their city. Each tile features two city building spots that players will immediately take the corresponding buildings and place them onto the tile.

If the new constructed buildings line up with a previously constructed building in that color, you immediately place a skywalk between them. Skywalks are worth 1,2,3,5,or 8 points, these represent the votes players receive from the city council.

Higher valued skywalk sections are in more limited supply. Example: each color only has a total of three skywalk tiles that score 8 points. When they are gone, they’re gone and can no longer be earned by players.

Players take their turns one after the other until a 3×4 or 3×3 city has been built. Then everyone calculates the number of votes they’ve received and the player with the highest score wins.

To put it simply, you: Place a tile, build your buildings, connect your skywalks, count your score.

Boom! Done!

What Do We Think?

I have been very impressed with Cloud City. In so many ways, it reminds me of Ticket to Ride and has many of the same elements that I love in that game while being much quicker to play!

Much like in Ticket to Ride, in Cloud City you are trying to build “routes” by cleverly placing tiles to connect your buildings through skywalks. I love that how you choose to do this is up to you and often you’ll have to change your strategy based on what tiles are available to you to draft and place. Maybe you want to focus on building all three layers equally, or perhaps you’ll choose to focus on just one or two, abandoning a layer to maximize your score on another. There are so many ways to plan a winning city!

Cloud City is a really great gateway game for new players that may become my go-to pick for the foreseeable future.

Intuitive and Satisfying Play

I love that it is so completely intuitive. You can almost learn it just by examining the game components. And because its completely language independent, you can easily play with a younger audience. In fact, our four year old son was able to play right along with us and had a great time!

Building your city is quite satisfying. I love that no matter how well or poorly I performed in the scoring, I’m always happy to sit back and admire the city I built, and everyone we’ve played with has felt the same. I was worried that it would be difficult to add skywalk pieces inside the city once you’re half way through and lots of things are getting built, but it hasn’t been a problem for us. And because everything sits on a tile, even if you accidentally knock a piece over or perhaps your baby sneaks up and takes a swipe at your city like Godzilla (I’m not blaming anyone, Margot! Could have been anyone!) You can easily reset everything because your tiles show exactly where it goes.

Learning how to construct your city to maximize your points hits those puzzle vibes that keeps me coming back for another game. It’s all the fun of route building packaged with pleasantness of tile placement in a 20 minute package.

Cloud City also comes with a “Special Request” variant where you select one or two of the request cards that award a special bonus to the architect that successfully completed the objective. These include things like longest route, no unconnected buildings, etc. These provide a really nice bit of direction for players who may like to have some type of goal to work towards. While we don’t use them when we play with little kids, I don’t see us ever not using these outside of those games. I only wish that they would have made these tiles rather than thin cards and that the tiles would have been double sided so that we could have had 20 different requests rather than ten.

Is it Too “Light?”

Undoubtably, Cloud City will be too light for some. If you’re looking for a game with a lot of tough decisions, no luck, and a lot of strategy, this one isn’t trying to be that for you, and that’s okay!

I think this is a great option for anyone that is looking to get into board games but might be a bit intimidated, those that have a wide range of ages in their family (like ours!) and are looking for something fun everyone can play together, or if you frequently play with either new gamers or like to enjoy lighter, non-brain burner games. Cloud City is a great choice for any one of those!

Oftentimes, my very favorite game nights are those where we intentionally choose lighter games so that we can enjoy the conversation and company first and Cloud City is definitely getting drafted for those nights.

Summary

Cloud City is a lovely, light, and easy to learn 3D city building game. From Phil Walker Harding, the designer that has brought the joy and fun of Sushi Go into so many homes around the world, I think Cloud City has the potential to be another hit! Plus, it is beautifully produced by Blue Orange Games which means it’s not only fun to play, but fun to play with!

The need to plan for your city in the 3-dimensional space creates a fun spatial challenge that will undoubtably keep players coming back for more as they continually seek the best way to build their city. Fun for both new and experienced alike, Cloud City is a really well done game we highly recommend checking out!

If you’d like to get a copy of Cloud City for your home, you can pre-order it here!

A special thank you to our friends at Blue Orange Games for sending us a copy of Cloud City for review. As always, our thoughts and opinions are our own.