The name of the game is Walled City attributed to the Battle of Troy.
Walled City is a simple strategy breakthrough game in which the players try to capture opponent's home city. There are 4 small red tiles that are placed in the center of the table to form the wall. The side of the wall facing each player is their inner wall. The inner wall extends to an imaginary horizontal line. The space before the inner wall is the player's home city.
Both players have 11 Warrior pieces: the Trojan Horse (1 big square tile), the cavalry unit ( 1 of 1x1 tile, 1 of 2x1 tiles, 1 of 1x2 tile), the swordsmen (1 of 1x1 tile, 1 of 2x1 tile, 1 of 1x12 tile), the spearmen (2 of 1x1), the archer (1 of 1x1), and the king (1x1). The actions that may be available to the warriors are:
- Move a tile in one-space
- Move a tile in a straight-line
- Move a tile over on the other side
The game starts by placing the 4 red tiles to form the wall. After which, players then take turn to either place or move any of their tiles. The Trojan Horse may be introduced any time but it must be placed first behind the player's inner wall. The Trojan Horse takes on the characteristics of any piece of the same color it touches at the time. The swordsmen can move up to three one-spaces. The cavalry can play one of the actions per turn. The spearmen can be placed to any free side of a piece orthogonally adjacent to the spearmen tile. The archer can play one or two actions per turn. The king can have a series of actions per turn but these actions can only be done on the pieces of the same color. Each piece must link to another piece at all time and at least one side of the Trojan Horse piece must be free after each turn.
The game ends with the first Trojan Horse to get into the opponent's home city.
- clever meaty design with deep decisions
- strong narrative framing around a controversial city
- highly replayable with different strategies
- can be heavy for casual or new gamers
- theme can be sensitive and requires thoughtful handling
- urban planning and socio-political storytelling through meeples
- historical Londonderry/Derry context with colonial overtones
- cooperative/competitive worker-placement with a strong story layer
- brass birmingham
- Santorini
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- area control/tiles and tokens — meeple placement affects surrounding areas and scoring regions
- Worker Placement — players place workers to influence district development
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Walled City is criminally underrepresented in the gaming sphere.
- It's a real gem, it's a nice small box.
- Lanterns Harvest Festival is a standout for its tile-laying and color-mantling mechanisms.
- If you like real-time games, Jab Real-Time Boxing is the best of the best.
- Star Trek Alliance Dominion War Campaign is by far my personal favorite campaign-style game.