7 Wonders: Cities

Black is the New… Black

I’ve decided to try to keep my expansion reviews short and sweet, pointing out what’s new, what I think about what’s new, and what I think about how it changes the game overall. Let’s start with a great expansion for a great game, 7 Wonders Cities.
Cities is the second expansion for 7 Wonders adding a bunch of new cards in a new colour black. These cards provide some new tricks to use. And we also get a couple more wonder boards and leaders. Let’s check it out!

Additions

Black Cards – The new black cards add an extra card to everyone’s hand each age. They do various things touching on each other area in the game, and usually require some amount of coin to build rather than straight resources. The theme is along the lines of dark, seedy places in your city. There are some interesting ones like gambling cards which get you and your neighbours money, and some insanely powerful military cards.
The great thing about these cards, and this expansion as a whole, is the fact that you now get eight cards instead of 7 in your hand. Giving you another card to play each age is awesome and just opens up more possibilities of things to do.

Diplomacy – Some cards will give you the option to take a diplomacy marker and opt out of the fighting at the end of each age. This makes for some interesting strategic play since someone who is only worried about their neighbours may now have to worry about fighting another military might at the table. This change is just okay.

Debts – There are cards which allow you to cause other players to lose money (and if they don’t have enough they take debt tokens with minus points). I’m not a fan of these as I like to hold onto my money. It can really mess players up.

Spies – Cards with a spy symbol can copy the science symbol of a neighbour. These are cool as they can be used well to really boost your science and make that category more competitive.

New leaders and Guilds – I’m always done for this. Gimme more, gimme more!

New Wonders – Petra is sort of like Giza in that it just gives you a bunch of points. Byzantium makes use of the Diplomacy tokens. Again, I love having more options, but neither of these are overly interesting.

Critique

Best Feature: The 8 card hands. Sure it breaks the “7” theme, but that was already broken when Rome because a wonder. But its really great having that one extra card, it really makes you feel like you can do more each age. The black cards are nice to have as well, especially the gambling ones which get you and your neighbours money, and the insanely powerful military cards.

When to use: We use this expansion every time we play. Unless I’m introducing it to new players.

Does it fit?: Its tight, yes, Cities fits in the box even with the Leaders expansion in there.

What type: Cities would fall under the category of “More of the Same” for expansions. I know a lot of people think this is sort of a waste, but not me. I love more of the same, so long as they do something just a little bit different, like this expansion does.

Overall: Cities is great. It doesn’t change the nature of the game, but just gives you more to do.