City Living / Island Flopping

My board gaming group has circled back to legacy games this year -- those campaign-style board games that permanently change each time you play them. It started back in the summer when we played designer Reiner Knizia's 2020 creation My City, and then continued when most recently we completed his follow-up from this year, My Island.

I certainly want to post about My City, because we enjoyed it reasonably well. It's a tile-laying game that uses polyominos. In each game, a shuffled deck of cards is revealed one by one, each card indicating the next building shape that each player must place on their board. Buildings come in three "categories," and how you place them to maximize scoring is one of the elements that changes from game to game in the legacy campaign.

That campaign sounds daunting at 24 games... but each individual game takes only about 30 minutes to play. That's why the campaign is actually organized into "chapters" of 3 games each. You're sort of intended to play 3 games in a sitting (though certainly, you don't have to); there are only minor changes between games of a chapter, while the more significanat legacy adjustments are introduced as you begin a new chapter.

My City starts off frankly too simple for experienced gamers, but the activity of playing it is fun and fast enough to see you through to a point when things start to become more interesting. Spoiling those twists and turns would be ruining the fun of discovering them for yourself. But I can say that even some of the simplest elements of the design have intriguing ramifications again and again. For example, this is one of the few polyomino board games I've played in which the pieces aren't double-sided: the non-symmetrical pieces aren't "reversible," and that trips you up again and again as you wish for zigzags to "zig" the opposite way."

The game grows gradually, reliably more interesting as you work your way through the campaign -- and we did so rather quickly. My City probably won't "blow your mind" (unless it's your first legacy game, period), but we enjoyed enough to want to seek out the sequel when we learned it was around the corner. I'd rate My City a solid B.

In contrast, however, I cannot recommend the new follow-up, My Island. If you play My City and enjoy it, no doubt you, like us, will be interested in how Reiner Knizia tweaked it for a sequel. For starters, he switched from a grid of squares to a grid of hexagons. He also switched from tiles in which every square is the same "category" to tiles in which different hexes have different characteristics.

These minor changes, combined with interesting new rules about placement, makes My Island a much stronger experience right out of the gate than My City. My Island is another 24-game (8 chapter) campaign, and by just a few games in, everyone in my group was feeling like this sequel had surpassed the original.

Unfortunately, the rising arc of enjoyment we experienced with My City was reversed for My Island. At right about the halfway point of the campaign, the game begins to come apart at shocking, disappointing speed. New added elements have a dramatic impact on the speed of play, turning a breezy 30-minute game into something that can easily take 4 players close to an hour. And the balance falls apart, with random chance able to give a player a significant edge over the rest that just keeps widening over the rest of the campaign.

We did finish My Island, but by Chapter 8, nobody in our group seemed particularly enthused to do so; we just felt like we couldn't come that close to the end only to quit. (Sunk cost fallacy?) My Island does have the option for some form of post-campaign play, and since we enjoyed it so much in the beginning, there's a chance we might explore that at some point. Maybe. After we've forgotten how burned we felt by the back half of the campaign. Overall, I'd give the game a C-.

I probably wouldn't have bothered to write about My Island... but My City could well be worth a look, and it seems appropriate to then warn you, if you like the first game, what may then follow if you explore the second.