City of Ruins is a solo game playable with ordinary playing cards, together with three dice and a token, usually a pawn. Black cards represent rooms, which are added one at a time using special "docking" requirements. Red cards represent either treasures or monsters: even-numbered cards are treasures and odd-numbered cards are monsters.
In addition, rooms, treasures and monsters are classified as either Physical or Psychic. Clubs and Hearts are Physical, while Spades and Diamonds are Psychic. Two of the dice are used as point trackers for Physical and Psychic attributes.
To win the game you must explore each room and defeat each monster without running out of either attribute.
Each card has a description given in the Card Guide. Here are examples to give an idea of the flavor:
"4: Room of Eerie Whistling: The walls are covered in what looks like ancient paper wasp nests. Wind blows out of the holes in keening chords."
"9: Cloaked Man: A human in a black cloak. The cloak bursts apart, for it is actually the wing covers of a huge insect. The head unfolds as two spiky legs, and a glow-eyed face with huge mandibles raises up with a horrible hissing noise."
"8: Grimoire of Abjuration: A text to rebuke evil spirits in the strongest terms possible."
The Rules and Card Guide will be given in the Files section.
—description from publisher
- Absolutely fantastic
- Really good puzzles
- Chock-full of wonderful encounters, wonderful monsters, surprises
- Takes urban exploration to another level
- Hero's quest to find a wizard to learn how to kill a monster, involving a wild goose chase for ingredients.
- The town of Silverton
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Ingredient gathering — The hero must find ingredients to defeat the villain.
- Mini-Games — Includes a 'baseball game' and a game played in the 'black lobster'.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- we have read every single foil fantasy game but there is known to humanity so we think we know what we're talking about on this one
- this is our number Tennessee of blood
- it's clash off the princess got the wall up Prince and the warrior Prince
- and it's also got a wonderful artwork early from that classic photo fantasy art I see on glass
- the atmosphere created in this one is second to none
- this was released in 1985 we waited years for this to come out when I was a kid and it didn't disappoint
- this is howl of the werewolf by Jonathan green and this is a excellent read
- this is what a lot of people class as in Livingston's masterpiece and the worst we don't agree with that it's still absolutely fantastic
- this and really good puzzles in it
- it takes that urban exploration to another level
- appointment with fear this is one of our favorite gun books of all time
- this borrows from the sort of campy kitsch batman of the nineteen sixties TV show
- car eight seaboard traps one of our favorite game books of all time
- you've got a spell book at the back of the book with all these spells and you've got to try and memorize all of the three-letter words that correspond to the spells here
- this could be played on its own it's good enough on his own but when you play it as part of these sorcerer epic it really does come alive
- house of hell and this is the first book that I ever bought
- my gosh what on earth is this and I was hooked
- house of hell is our favorite game book of all time