City Square Off

City Square Off is a fabulous 2 player game from GameWright.  I picked this up several weeks back with some other puzzles that were on sale at B&N.  I've been saving it for a rainy day, and today we cracked it open and gave it a play.  And boy, is this a fun little game! 

It has very simple instructions.  Start with a grid and a cityscape starter piece.  There are 4 cityscape starters to choose from, and they are pretty cool little pieces!  Then you shuffle the deck of shapes cards, lay out your 21 city tiles, and you're ready to play.

One player is green and the other is orange.  The city tiles are polyominoes just like what you use in a game of Blokus! You can see some of the tile shapes in the background of this photo.

Play begins with a card being drawn.  Each player picks up the shape shown and places it on their grid.  Tiles cannot extend outside of the grid, and they must touch either the cityscape or other tiles on at least one edge.  Play continues until a player cannot place their next tile, and they lose.  If both players cannot place the next tile, then free spaces are counted for decide the win.  Game variants are included in the instructions for more ways to play!

Very simple, yet quite elegant!

If you like Blokus, you will surely enjoy this...especially if you like Blokus, but hate being blocked!  My daughter really enjoyed playing City Square Off.  She had her own grid to work on, and no one could mess it up!  We played several rounds together, and afterwards, she and my son attempted to completely fill the grids with tiles.  Turns out you can do it, but you'll find that there are more tiles than grid spaces, so you'll always have extra pieces at the end of the game.

We give this game a thumbs up!