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Underwater Cities Deep Dive
What the Community Thinks About Underwater Cities
Reviewers who spend real time with Underwater Cities converge on the same verdict: the central card-and-action system is the reason the game works. 3 Minute Board Games called it one of the best games of the year and pointed to the way matching cards to board actions creates a puzzle that rarely lets a player take exactly what they want. Rolls in the Family reached the same conclusion from a different angle, rating the game a nine out of ten and crediting the core action system as the driver of that score. No Pun Included agreed the loop is fun, tight, and dynamic, though the channel found the pace much slower than the science fiction setting suggests. Not every channel came away thrilled with everything in the box. Nights Around a Table was blunt about the base game's player boards and noted the main board would not lie flat out of the shrink wrap. Board Gaming Ramblings, revisiting the game to cover its Data Era expansion, still called the base design a fantastic game that did not need fixing. Underwater Cities comes from Delicious Games, a publisher No Pun Included and Board Gaming Ramblings both named directly when discussing its expansions.
Core Mechanics That Define Underwater Cities
Card-Matching Action Selection
Each round, a player chooses one of three colored cards from their hand and places it against a board action of the same color, unlocking both the action and the card's own bonus. 3 Minute Board Games explained that landing a perfect combination of cards and open actions almost never happens, since spaces get blocked as other players take them and hands rarely line up with what is available. Rolls in the Family described the same tension from inside a turn: a hand of two red cards and one yellow forces a player to decide whether to burn the yellow action alone or gamble that another useful color turns up before options run out. Rolls in the Family also noted that a player takes three actions each round, so drawing a fresh card at the end of a turn reshapes the puzzle before the next decision even begins.
Engine Building Through City Production
Between action rounds, Underwater Cities runs dedicated production phases where every building a player has constructed pays out at once. Rolls in the Family walked through how buildings can be stacked for higher output of the same resource or diversified for better endgame scoring, since a city built around several different building types scores more than one stacked with a single type. No Pun Included broke down the same tradeoff from the player's seat, explaining that a city can hold at most three factories and that a maximum of three production phases in the whole game makes every choice about which type to build feel consequential. Both channels agreed the growth curve is visible on the table: production that starts sparse ends the game running much wider.
The Underwater Cities Experience
A Puzzle That Resets Every Turn
Rolls in the Family described how drawing a new card at the end of each turn immediately reshapes what looked like the best next move, turning the game into a running renegotiation with whatever hand a player happens to be holding. 3 Minute Board Games framed the same feeling as pressure: the game rarely lets anyone take their first choice, so players learn to make the least bad decision now in service of a better one several rounds later. That inability to always take the ideal action, rather than any randomness in the cards themselves, is what both channels pointed to as the source of the tension at the table.
Slow, Deliberate Pacing
No Pun Included pushed back against any expectation that a science fiction underwater theme would translate into a fast-moving game, describing the pace as slow despite the setting and comparing it to swimming through syrup rather than surfing. Even so, the same review called every turn an absolute delight once it arrives, since a player always has three cards and a dwindling set of open actions to weigh against each other. Rolls in the Family traced the downtime to player count directly, naming two to three players as the sweet spot and warning that four players introduces real waiting between turns.
What Makes Underwater Cities Stand Out
A Tight Core Loop With Real Depth
3 Minute Board Games kept returning to how much is packed into a single decision: after six plays, the reviewer still felt far from solving the game, calling that ongoing discovery reassuring rather than frustrating. The Broken Meeple placed the game, designed by Vladimír Suchý, among a favorite designer's best work, praising the card tableau play and the tight worker placement for rewarding combos without feeling as restrictive as the turn count might suggest. No Pun Included put a number on that structure, noting the game runs across ten rounds of building before production and scoring take over, which keeps every action from feeling wasted.
Replayability Through Asymmetry
No Pun Included pointed to the asymmetrical player boards as a source of ongoing variety and welcomed the idea of even more asymmetry rather than resisting it. Rolls in the Family credited the New Discoveries expansion with pushing that variability further, since its personal assistant cards and triple-layer boards mean players are no longer working from an identical starting position every game.
Potential Drawbacks
Component Quality Complaints
Nights Around a Table called the base game's player boards cheap and flimsy, comparing the material to keno tickets, and separately noted that the main board would not lie flat out of the box. No Pun Included raised a similar complaint, describing the base game's player boards as toilet paper thin, though both channels credited the New Discoveries expansion's triple-layer boards with fixing the problem. Nights Around a Table also pointed out that some card artwork repeats across the deck.
Length That Grows With Player Count
The Broken Meeple called four-player games ridiculous at three hours or more even with the quick start rules in play, and settled on three players as the real sweet spot. No Pun Included made the same complaint from the opposite direction, noting the game falls apart at four players because the length balloons, and confirmed a personal preference for two or three. Board Gaming Ramblings agreed most people are better off playing with two, citing the length as the reason.
If You Enjoy Underwater Cities
3 Minute Board Games compared the game directly to Terraforming Mars and Gaia Project, citing a shared appetite for engine building, science fiction themes, and starting from a blank board that fills in over the course of play. Rolls in the Family also reached for Terraforming Mars alongside Agricola when describing the weight class Underwater Cities occupies. No Pun Included drew the most detailed comparison, noting the obvious card-based engine-building parallel to Terraforming Mars before arguing the must-play-a-card structure actually feels closer to Brass. Board Gaming Ramblings, discussing the expansion's quick start rules, compared them to the way Terraforming Mars Prelude shortens its own base game.
What Reviewers Are Saying
"Simply put, Underwater Cities is one of the best games I've played this year, and potentially one of the best games I've ever played. Now why does it tickle me so much? Let's dig in, find out."
— 3 Minute Board Games
"This is a game that when I researched it, it felt like it was kind of in a crowd of these types of games. It's... is there really something that's going to have it stand out, and having now played it quite a bit, I think it really does, and I'm actually going to be coming in at a 9 out of 10."
— Rolls in the Family
"I'm pretty sure it's a recommendation for me. It's fun, it's tight, it's dynamic, it's slow. It's really, really slow despite its setting. It's less like surfing on a board and more like swimming through golden syrup."
— No Pun Included