My City: Roll and Build Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review My City: Roll and Build, a roll and write board game published by Kosmos. My City: Roll and Build seeks to take the campaign style city builder My City and distills it down to its essence.

One of the better games to come out in 2020 was Reiner Knizia’s legacy game My City. It gave people a family-friendly legacy game that had them building their own city using polyomino-shaped tiles. While I never finished the campaign, mostly because of a crabby player at my gaming table who clearly hates fun, I enjoyed my time with the campaign.

This year, Dr. Knizia is back at the drafting table with My City: Roll and Build. Much like many other games have done, it seeks to take the essence of the core game and distill it down to a quicker-playing experience. Does the roll and write format work on a legacy-style city builder? Let’s find out.

The “campaign” for My City: Roll and Build is played over 12 episodes, broken up into 4 chapters. Each game is played over a number of rounds, and continues until all players decide to be finished. At the start of a round, a player rolls the three dice. Two of the dice are matched together to form the shape that must be drawn, while the third dice shows which type of building is to be constructed.

The first shape you draw must be placed next to the river, while subsequent shapes need to touch a previously drawn shape. There are also the standard drawing rules you’d expect: no overlaying shapes, has to be on the grid, can’t go past the outside border, etc.

If you don’t want to draw a building, you can pass, at the expense of ever-increasing penalty points (up to 6 times). Once a player feels like they don’t want to risk passing anymore (or runs out of passes), they are done for the