In Sorcerer City, each player begins with an identical stack of shuffled tiles. They have two minutes to turn them over, one at a time, and arrange them into a city. Tiles all have various patterns of different colors on their edges (out of four colors total). A handful of specific tiles trigger scoring for a continuous straight line of the same color, a continuous path of the same color (even if it zigs and zags), and having a corresponding color in the 8 surrounding spaces (whether their path connects or not).
After each round, your score is tallied in three categories (with the fourth a wild assigned to any other of the three colors you wish). One category is buying power, in the style of a deck builder, to improve your tile stack for future rounds of city building. One category is raw points. The third pile is a competitive one, awarding points and special powers to those ranked highest in it.
Each round, a new monster type is added to the game, with each player receiving one monster to shuffle into their stacks. During building, when you draw a monster, it ravages your city and complicates your efforts in some specific way that you must try to work through before time runs out.
Unfortunately, there are just a lot of issues going on with this game. The contrast in the scoring methods -- line vs. path vs. surroundings -- is simply confusing, and needed to be re-explained every round of the game I played. Having two scoring methods that care about building sensible, Carcassonne-style connections, while another doesn't care about that at all... it was enough to break brains, repeatedly.
The monsters added to the confusion. Though the game feels a bit convoluted, there aren't actually that many design levers in the rules set. That means that a lot of the monsters are quite similar. By the end of a game, you have 4 different monsters in your city stack, and some of them are going to be close enough to each other to make you ask "wait, is this the monster that does THIS, or THAT?" When you have to interrupt a two-minute timer to ask what you're supposed to do (because you can't read tiny text on a reminder card halfway across the table), it does serious damage to the flow of the game.
The balance seems pretty far off too. Of course, many a gamer has often made this claim of a game, having played it far less than its designers and playtesters -- so take this particular critique with a grain of salt. But chasing the "competitive scoring color" (red) seemed like a fool's errand when we played. While other players clashed and got in each others' way, players who just pursued the self-dependent scoring color (green) walked away with the game. What was even worse is that the player who scores lowest in red each round was assumed by the rules to need a leg up, and received a free tile for their stack -- which was often, by random chance, just as good as the reward for winning! The ideal strategy for the five round game seemed to be quite straightforward: yellow (the tile-drafting color) as the focus for your first two rounds, a blend of that and green for your third, and then all green for the last two rounds to cruise to victory.
The game played fast enough that I wasn't really that down on it in the moment. Yet it left an aftertaste, and thinking about the experience only made it seem worse in retrospect. There are plenty of other games that nail the "real time chaos" genre much more effectively; Galaxy Trucker is a Top 200 game on Board Game Geek, and Fuse is a fun option offering cooperative play. Sorcerer City feels unpolished by comparison.
If it had a strong flavor, maybe the game would be more appealing on that basis? But Sorcerer City's tiles don't really look like anything. You don't actually get a sense that you're building anything -- you're just color matching unlabeled, unflavored patterns. The monsters seem like the only significant story element (and, as I mentioned earlier, many of those feel nearly interchangeable).
So all told, I give Sorcerer City a D+. Possibly a fan of the real-time game genre can point out to me what I'm missing here. But unless someone does, I have no desire to play it again.
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