London

London Deep Dive

What the Community Thinks About London

Reviewers who have actually played London agree on the shape of the game even when they land on different corners of it. Rolling Dice & Taking Names calls it an engine builder at heart, noting that at its core it is an engine builder with cards built around competing for prestige rather than raw cash. Drive Thru Games frames its weight as sitting between two familiar card-drafting classics, while Getting Games, playing the second edition for the first time on a copy sent by Osprey Games, walked away with a full table wanting a rematch.

Where the channels diverge is on the second edition's redesign. Rolling Dice & Taking Names spent real time missing the original map, noting that fans online kept remarking the board looks odd without the map now that it is just card slots. Getting Games, coming to the series without memory of the first edition, took the opposite view: folding the map into a deck of location cards still works mechanically, since only which side of the Thames a location sits on continues to matter. Rolling Dice & Taking Names also flagged the card iconography and graphic design as a hurdle that sent their table back to the rulebook more than once, a friction that Adam in Wales did not report, since their reaction to the redesigned cards, formed from preview images rather than a play, was that the iconography and graphic design were a highlight of the new edition.

Core Mechanics That Define London

Building a Tableau, Then Running the Engine

Players spend turns drawing, playing, or activating cards that assemble into a personal tableau of stacked columns, as Getting Games and Drive Thru Games both describe. Getting Games explains that a card can start a new column or be stacked on top of an older one in the same column, and that if the covered card carries endgame points those points still count even though its ability no longer triggers. Drive Thru Games adds that most cards can only be activated once, so a turn spent running the engine means weighing whether a wide tableau is worth the extra options it unlocks.

Poverty as the Governing Resource

Every reviewer who played London singles out poverty as the mechanic that defines it. Rolling Dice & Taking Names explains that running an engine generates poverty based on the number of cards in a player's city and in their hand, and that poverty subtracts victory points at the end of the game. Getting Games describes the same tension from the other side of the table: going wide with columns means more one-time activations per turn, but it also means more poverty, and only the player with the least poverty at the end escapes it, with everyone else losing that same amount off their own total.

The London Experience

A Push and Pull Between Growth and Debt

Rolling Dice & Taking Names describes the core decision loop as deciding how big to make a city against the knowledge that a bigger city means more poverty once it is run, calling that trade-off the most interesting part of the design. Getting Games frames the same feeling in terms of the table talk after the game: with four players seated, the win went to whoever ended with the least poverty, and the rest of the table finished close together, which the channel took as a sign the poverty balancing act had genuinely mattered to the outcome.

A Weight Between Two Familiar Card Games

Drive Thru Games situates the complexity of London between San Juan and Race for the Galaxy, noting it has more going on than San Juan, with a board and restrictions on which colors of cards can be played, while offering fewer distinct cards to track and an easier time digging through the deck than Race for the Galaxy. Getting Games, reaching the second edition without the comparison history of the first, calls it a relatively light engine builder that is not a complex game for the most part once its four core turn options click into place.

What Makes London Stand Out

A Theme That Matches Its Mechanics

Drive Thru Games credits the Great Fire premise with actually working alongside the systems built on top of it, describing the feeling of picking through a ruined city as a competing baron while infrastructure cards for things like irrigation and plumbing reduce poverty in a way that tracks with the fiction. The channel likens the overall feel to a Sim City style of city management layered onto a card economy.

Replayability Through the Boroughs

Rolling Dice & Taking Names points to the borough cards as the reason repeat plays do not collapse into the same strategy: which boroughs come out, and in what order beyond the three fixed starting ones, changes how a city can generate income and manage poverty from game to game. The hosts describe one player leaning into a poverty-heavy strategy built around cards that punished a full hand while another built along the river for a cash bonus, in the same session.

Potential Drawbacks

Card Iconography Needs a Learning Pass

Rolling Dice & Taking Names names the card iconography and graphic design as its biggest nitpick, saying the table had to keep referring back to the rulebook to understand cards where a darker background meant a payment and a lighter one meant income, even after the busy layout became familiar with repetition.

The First Edition's Missing Map

Rolling Dice & Taking Names spends real time on the loss of the original board and map in the redesigned edition, noting that without it the board now just consists of slots to put cards, and that fans online were surprised by the change. Drive Thru Games, reviewing the original edition directly, notes separately that it had already gone out of print by the time of the review, making it hard to track down at a reasonable price.

If You Enjoy London

Rolling Dice & Taking Names places London just behind 51st State and Imperial Settlers among their favorite engine builders, and separately compares its discard-to-play mechanic to Ethnos, noting that neither game leaves a player stuck with a genuinely bad card. Drive Thru Games positions the complexity of London directly between San Juan and Race for the Galaxy. Adam in Wales, previewing the redesigned edition from images before playing it, says its mechanisms and feel reminded them of Abyss.