Welcome, city planners! Design the best city block using patterns from the new and exciting "Cube Shaker". You'll place a mix of tiles to help grow the thriving city. The best design wins the game!
Shake That City is a family puzzly tile-laying game for 1-4 players, that plays under an hour! The game is played over a series of rounds. The active player shakes the Cube Shaker and presses its slider to reveal a 3x3 pattern, based on which they need to place the corresponding building tiles of a single color of their choice on their board. The building tiles correspond to roads, factories, shops, parks and of course, homes. The other players then pick any building color other than the one the active player picked, then place matching colored tiles in the matching pattern on their board. Players earn points for tile-placement combinations and for the completed bonus point tiles around the edge of their board.
• Roads wants to connect to an edge of the board.
• Factories wants to be next to other factories and roads.
• Homes want to be placed in clusters that are as small as possible — the smallest being a single tile — so long as they're not next to a factory.
• Parks wants to be next to homes and factories.
• Shops score increasingly more the closer they are placed to the city center, but if they're not placed on an edge, they need to be adjacent to a road connected to the board's edge in order to score. Without road access, you'll have no products to sell!
At game's end, players earn points for tile-placement combinations and for the completed bonus point tiles around the edge of their board.
- Unique physical gameplay mechanic (shaking cubes)
- Town/city building theme
- Engaging kinetic element
- urban development
- city building
- physical play
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
References (from this video)
- Unique shaker gadget that is more than a gimmick
- Colorful components and durable production
- Accessible rules with a satisfying puzzle
- Multiple play modes including family variant and solo variant
- Replayability potential with expansions
- Setup time is longer due to sorting and baggies
- Rule complexity for casual players may be high (five tile types scoring)
- Replayability may benefit from expansions
- Print crooked components (noted by the reviewer) and potential production variance
- City planning and density scoring
- Urban city-building with parks, factories, shops, and roads
- Puzzle/strategy with clear scoring rules; modular board
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Adjacency Scoring — Parks and factories score based on adjacency to other tiles.
- Column/Row completion scoring — Complete a full row/column to trigger extra points.
- Construction tiles (solo variant) — Optional construction tiles that modify setup and scoring.
- Edge-connectivity scoring — Shops score if connected to the board edge via roads.
- Shaker gadget — A built-in mechanism that reveals a 3x3 grid of tiles after a push.
- tile placement — Place colored building tiles on a grid in your city board.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- it's a really cool Gadget
- not it's not just a gimmick
- it's really simple really simple to play
- it's fun to shake that and press on here
- the setup time is a little bit longer than I would think
- I really like this game
- it's very cool
- I want to use expansions to keep it alive
References (from this video)
- Shaker games
- Bingo-like mechanisms
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
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Quotes (from this video)
- spreading the gospel of board games
- it's a must-have
- don't sleep on this
- we love talking about gateway games
- we're taking the game out to people
References (from this video)
- Bright, appealing art and chunky components
- Fast rounds with meaningful decisions
- Great for streaming because of clarity and pace
- Scoring can be intricate and eye-crossing live
- Board can become visually busy
- urban planning and zoning
- city-building with roads, parks, factories, and various buildings
- light, family-friendly, tongue-in-cheek city creation
- Carcassonne
- Cities: Skyline
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Bonus tiles and end-game scoring — certain rows/columns with complete sets unlock bonuses and flips for additional scoring opportunities.
- Scoring from zones and bonuses — points come from road networks, park/housing distributions, and bonus tiles.
- Tile placement and zoning — players place tiles to build roads, parks, shops, houses, etc., scoring based on adjacency and border connections.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- We are going to do a prediction and this time we are going to offer a buy option.
- This is Call of Duty the board game we’re demoing, sponsored by Arcane Wonders.
- Fiction is a Wordle-inspired, traitor-filled word game.
- Mind Space is a thoughtful polyamino game with a clever dice-driven draw system.
- Shake That City is a bright city-building card game on a small footprint.