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Dylan Birtolo
United States
Lynnwood
Washington
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General Information
Number of Players: 2 - 4
Length of Game: 60 - 120 minutes
Difficulty of Game:  
Strategic Depth:
Fun Factor:
Popularity at Local Game Night:
Overview
The once great city of London was destroyed by a tragic fire. It is now time to rebuild the city. You and a few other entrepreneurs have decided to invest in the reconstruction. Whoever contributes the most to the process will have fame and fortune moving forward. But it is important to keep in mind the wealth of the citizens - driving them into poverty will only hurt your cause. You need to rebuild the city without accumulating too much debt, either for yourself or the people of London.
Game Materials
The game materials are well put together and serve their purpose well. It is too early to say how well they will stand up to the test of time, but they seem to be made of high quality materials. The cards are on decently thick stock and I think they will hold up. The board is a nice representation of London and is very easy to read. The artwork on the cards is nice and fits the theme of the game. All in all, these are good game materials overall.
Play Summary
The game proceeds in a series of turns where each player takes an action and play proceeds clockwise. The game ends when the deck of cards has been exhausted. After the list card is drawn from the deck, every player (including the one who drew the last card) gets one final turn. Then the game ends and victory points are counted.
Before getting on to the actions you can take, I should explain a mechanic about discarding cards. The board has two rows on it for card discards called the card display. When you discard a card, you need to place cards on the top row if there are any open spots. Once the top row is full you discard into the second row. These cards are discarded face-up so that everyone can see them. If the second row of cards is full and you need to discard a card, the entire top row is removed from the board, the second row is moved up, and you discard into the now-empty second row. This becomes very important because cards you discard may be recovered in later turns, either by you or another player.
On your turn you can take one of four possible actions. It is not possible to pass, and this is pertinent because you can get yourself in situations where passing makes the most sense. However, you still need to take an action. The possible actions are: play cards, run city, buy land, and take three cards.
When you play cards, you can play any number of cards from your hand and put them down in front of you. For each card you want to play, you need to discard a card of the same color from your hand. You place cards in stacks in front of you. You can have any number of stacks. When you play a card, you can either make a new stack or play it on top of a stack already in existence. There are some cards that do not get played in front of you and are simply discarded (to the discard pile and not the card display). In these cases, the cards have an immediate effect that you process. However, the vast majority of cards are played on your display.
The run city action depends on the cards in front of you. You process the cards in front of you in any order that you choose. All of the cards have special actions that are described on the cards themselves. Some cards require you to discard a card from your hand in order to process them. Also, some of the cards flip over after you process them, meaning they can only be used once. The individual effects are beyond the scope of this review. Most of them involve gaining money and gaining or losing poverty, but there are several special effects as well. After running the city, you acquire poverty. You add up the number of cards in your hand and the number of stacks in your personal building display. The number of cards in a stack is irrelevant, all that matters is the number of stacks you have. You subtract the number of boroughs that you have built. This final number is the number of poverty points that you gain. If the total is negative, you lose that number of poverty points. As a quick final note, you can never have negative poverty points to prevent against a future acquisition.
Buying land is an action where you buy one of the sections of London on the board. Each of the sections has a price associated with it, as well as a card number and a victory point number. You pay the price for the borough, place a counter of your color on the board to indicate you own that section and draw the number of cards indicated. You cannot just buy any spot on the board, though. The first time a player buys land, he or she needs to choose from one of three areas. Every area after that must be adjacent to a currently purchased plot of land.
The simplest action to explain is draw three cards. Can you guess what you do on this one? Yep! You draw three cards. It is important to note that the cards can either be from the deck or the card display.
Once the game ends, there are a couple of things to do before tallying the score. First, any loans are paid back to the bank. Loans come in 10 pound increments and you pay them off with 15 pounds. I didn’t mention it earlier, but anytime that you need money and don’t have enough you can always take out a loan. Then you take one poverty point for each card left in your hand. At this point you can discard your hand - it no longer holds any value. Then you figure out which player has the fewest poverty points. Every player then loses that many poverty points. So, the player with the fewest has 0 poverty points. What this measures is the number of points you have in excess of whoever had the fewest.
You are now ready to count victory points. Any cards in your personal building display that are worth victory points are added to your total, regardless of whether they are face up or down. Any boroughs that you purchased are also worth victory points. If they have the Underground marker, they are worth two bonus points (the Underground marker comes up as a result of a card when you process it). You also get one victory point for every 3 pounds you have. You lose 7 victory points for each unpaid loan of 10 pounds. Finally, any poverty cubes you have left are worth negative points based on a scale that is printed on the board.
Whoever has the most points, wins. If there is a tie, the player with the least poverty wins. If it is still tied, then whoever purchased the most boroughs wins. If it is STILL tied, then whoever has the highest valued single card is the winner. If somehow all of those criteria still results in a tie, it is a tie.
Play Experience
This game is a wonderful strategic experience. Timing in this game is critical, as is the case with many strategic games. If you choose the wrong action at the wrong time, you might find yourself going into poverty just because you have too many cards in your hand. And that can cripple your attempt to achieve victory (unless of course all of the other players are also accruing lots of poverty). You often have tough choices on which cards to play, when to pick up cards, and whether you should create a new stack on your building display or cover up a stack with a still-usable card.
Sometimes you may need to change your strategy in the middle of the game as well. You may have what seems like a perfect plan, but need to change it because of an opportunity that presents itself. If you don’t take advantage of it, then other players will and you might fight your once-glorious strategy no longer measuring up. Being flexible and open to opportunity is paramount to achieving victory.
The level of interaction between players is pretty small. The largest level of interaction deals with the card display on the board. If you pay attention, you may be able to predict cards that will be especially useful or desired by other players. However, beyond that and which boroughs are purchased, there is no option to interact with other players. Every player pretty much plays his or her own game. This is not a bad thing, but it is worth mentioning. If you see a player building up a killer collection of cards on his or her building display, there is nothing you can do about it.
It is often difficult to tell which player is in the lead until you tally points at the end of the game. This is a very nice aspect about the game in my opinion. There are a few cases where it is clear that one player is in a huge lead or fallen way behind, but that is definitely the rarity. Unless you are very good at counting cards and keeping running totals in your mind, the winner can be quite a surprise at the end of the game.
Notable Praise
This game has a wonderful strategy element and I love the quandaries that arise with trying to figure out which action you should take. Should you play your cards now so that you can run the city next turn and have just the perfect amount of cards to minimize your poverty? Or should you wait because you saw a killer card on the card display that you don’t want to pass up? These are the kinds of decisions that this game is made of and it makes it a wonderful experience. You need to plan ahead in order to win, and that is a sign of a good game from my perspective.
The poverty side of the game is a nice touch. Since poverty is measured as a relative score, you can use it to your advantage. If all the other players are collecting lots of poverty, you can minimize yours to hurt their scores. Or, you can safely collect a few poverty points since you know you have a buffer zone. It works really well with the game and I think it adds a nice touch. It isn’t an aspect I have seen used often.
Notable Gripes
The only negative that I have with this game is not a gripe and more along the lines of a potential problem. I am concerned that this game might have a longevity problem. Since there is limited interaction between players, you are often more or less playing your own game. Most of the variance in this game comes from the deck of cards. I am concerned that once we get used to the cards the game will play out more or less the same. It is not a game like Brass which requires you to adjust your strategy almost every turn based on what other players do. It also doesn’t have the sheer number of cards available to create a game like Dominion. I cannot say if this is going to be a problem or not since we haven’t played enough to say. It just seems like it might be a possible problem.
Summary
All in all, this is a great game that I very much enjoy and has the more strategically-minded members of our gaming night enthused. Some of this enthusiasm is admittedly because the game is new to the group. As I said in the previous section, I am a little concerned about how the game holds up to repeated plays. However, for now, it is a wonderful game with a lot of strategy behind it. I would definitely recommend it if you enjoy games where you have to think about the timing of each of your moves. However, if you require a lot of interaction between players (playing defense or preemptive offense if you will), you will be disappointed.
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Holger Hannemann
United Kingdom
Severn Beach
South Gloucestershire
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Thanks for the great review!
You're right, it gets a little same-y after a while but we bought this game when it came out and we still pull it off the shelf once in a while. There are some cards that seem much too powerful (Covent Garden, Whitehall and Underground really stand out) but they are not game breakers.
I think this is one of the better Wallace games, and every Eurogamer should try this at least once.
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Paul Grogan
United Kingdom
Cullompton
Devon
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The MatrixCube wrote: I think this is one of the better Wallace games, and every Eurogamer should try this at least once.
I unfortunately disagree. I have played a lot of Wallace games, and a lot of them are very good.
London however was a disappointing purchase and clearly a game that wasnt really finished. As far as 'strategy' goes, this has been discussed a lot on other threads. The way to win is just build boroughs, go into debt early and not bother playing cards. Simply build another borough, draw cards, ditch the ones that are no good. Do that 3-4 times before playing any cards.
Now when you play cards, you are playing better ones, and when you run you get a lot less poverty as you have boroughs.
Once our group (and another group I play with) realised that this was the only real way to play, everyone did it. If you tried to do something different, you lost badly. And because everyone was doing it, it meant all of the A cards were simply just ditched due to better cards, they may aswell have been blank.
Nobody really wants to play this again. Combined with not great components and anytime a player got 2 Omnibus cards they won no matter how good the other players were, this game needed house rules to make it to even get to the table.
The cards are too samey. Some give money, some give points, but money is really just points. Poverty too is gained or lost, but again, that is just points done in a different way.
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Holger Hannemann
United Kingdom
Severn Beach
South Gloucestershire
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Hi Paul,
I only play this 2-player with no double cards in the tableau. I tried the strategy you described a couple of times but it wasn't a significant advantage to not go into debt and play cards in the beginning. In fact, we start with 20 poverty cubes each and get rid of most of them at the end of the game. Maybe that makes a difference in play.
I for one still enjoy playing it :)
Cheers,
Holger
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Huzonfirst
United States
Manassas
Virginia
David Wright is hitting over .400 and has an OBA of over .500. He is a young god!
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Yeah, I still play London with some frequency (usually with 3) and Paul's comments don't come close to matching my experience. Discarding cards is throwing away points, as far as I can tell. I've yet to play a game where someone didn't wind up with only 0 or 1 poverty, so obviously that can be handled without delaying running your city until all the boroughs are gone. The game is consistently enjoyable and challenging and I've yet to see anything like a dominant strategy.
However, there's one peculiar proviso I've just thought of. If your group believes that the only way to win is to do nothing but buy up boroughs until they're all gone, I can see a potential problem with running against the tide. You see, boroughs are really important, for VPs, lessening poverty, and giving you a quick intake of cards. So if every player except one is playing that strategy, I could see where that holdout might do poorly, simply because he won't be able to buy many boroughs. Note that I'm not saying that the Land Grab strategy is a winning one--if only one player is playing it (in a 3 or 4 player game), then there's a good chance that she won't do well. But if the rest of the table is playing that way, I could see where even someone wishing to hold out would be forced to go along.
To my way of thinking, that's a truly dramatic case of groupthink. Those who believe in the Land Grab strategy would probably disagree and say that I'm the one who's deluding myself. I guess it's possible that they're right, but I'm the one who gets to enjoy London!  So all I can say is that if your group just plays this game normally, you'll enjoy it and you shouldn't worry that you're playing it suboptimally. It's possible that you are, but there's ample evidence that you aren't, so why not just play the game in the way that makes it fun?
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