Friday Night Unplugged #21.2: City of Remnants Part 2

Welcome back to another week of Friday Night Unplugged and we’re continuing where we left off with part two of our look at City of Remnants. In the last column we had a look at the rules and also dove a little into what we think makes City of Remnants great. This week we’re diving into a three-player fight for control between Fi, Josh and myself.

Setup

As usual we’ll skip the setup instructions but once all is done we have 9 purchasable properties, 4 gang members, 4 items for the shop, 1 board and 3 player mats all crammed into the smallest table known to man. Fi is playing red, I’m playing blue and Josh is playing green. Rolling highest, Fi gets to play first. As with the play-through for Eclipse we’ll be jumping into the action every 2 rounds to avoid boring you to all with details on how long it took me to decide on which development to build.

Round 2

Round one started fairly uneventfully with everyone moving the 7 seven starting members onto the board and building up ARCS by cashing in cards from their opening hand. Round 2 however saw all three of us jumping into the housing market.

Josh took the option of spreading his troops out and picked up a few developments out in the slums so he could start turning product and Fi played it safe, only expanding into one new development while opening and winning a bid on a new gang member. I choose to huddle my gang members straight into the centre of the board.

Thanks to some handy cards that reduce the price of developments I picked up and controlled 2 high profile areas in the green and blue Heights/Midtown districts. We finished up round 2 narrowly avoiding anyone being attacked by the patrolling Yugai and moved straight into Round 3.

Renown –

Lewis: 7
Josh: 5
Fi: 3

Round 4

After a slow round 3 spent grinding out product on our new developments then selling it away, round 4 looked set to have a little more action. Having lost a few of my newly purchased gang members to Yugai at the end of round 3, I decided to keep my controlled developments as close together as possible and picked up a couple more slum developments to finish my area. Now in a position to gain up to 20 Renown at the end of each round with a few new developments in round 5, the game would hopefully be over quickly. Josh opted to make use of the lesser-patrolled slums around the edge of the board

Renown –

Lewis: 35
Josh: 23
Fi: 11

Round 6

At this point in the game the board is starting to fill up and players are looking at expanding. Testing how willing I am to over-extended my control of the central area, Fi pushes inwards and builds her own development in the Heights district. Josh picks up a few more gang members with early bids while the rest of us were cashed out and I focus on generating more product in my plan to straight up buy a bulk of the remaining renown tokens.

Renown-

Lewis: 84
Josh: 65
Fi: 33

Round 7

In what I knew would turn into the last round I focused my resources on stocking up on extra gang members. Fi knew better than to risk attacking into a core where she had less support and Josh resigned himself to continue making more product in the corner of the map. Selling off the last product I could, we bided our time for the end of the round finishing the game with the final renown totals (disregarding the 200 renown pool) of:

Lewis: 106
Josh: 75
Fi: 45

The Winner

I managed to scrape through a win and the game ended without enough renown counters to tally it up properly. If you plan on playing City of Remnants any time soon then don’t hesitate to rush straight for the more valuable development spaces so you can grind out a lead early in the game.

Final Thoughts:

City of Remnants is a big complex game on a small board. It wants you to second-guess your friends and it wants you to have no issues creating and selling “product”. This is the grim future, so get used to it.

There’s a lot to keep track of from the amount of ARCs you own to how much product you have and how much it will sell for and then having to take into account if you can outbid your opponents on gang-members you want. City of Remnants is a game for people who like to think and it does a good job of making it fairly accessible. All of us here at at FNU towers agree that Plaid Hat Games have done another fantastic job. Bring on the Bioshock Infinite boardgame!

You can be like us and scrap in the slums of a megacity while avoiding ending up in an iso-cube by picking up City of Remnants today from Amazon for £42.31.

Next Week:

Since E3 is next week and my editor is off sunning herself in LA, the column will return the week after. We’ll use that time to prepare ourselves mentally for the future Game of Thrones: The Boardgame Features by bringing you a short look at the luck-based Skulls and Roses card game. We’re also going to be giving you a list of some recent releases we haven’t covered here on Friday Night Unplugged but believe you should check out.