City of Demons: Discussion
Transcript
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Board Games Unlocked and today I'm doing a discussion over City of Demons. This First of all, disclaimer, this was sent to me as a review copy. Uh this is a game that is by Nightingale Games and to my knowledge the only game that they have ever produced is a massive uh uh area control war game called War Room, which unfortunately I have never played. I've been interested in it and I know they went on Kickstarter like a few years ago probably at this point. And I fiddled around with the idea of getting that game just because it looks insane, but ultimately didn't get it. Well, they reached out to me seeing if I wanted to cover this game, City of Demons, which is a two-player push-your-luck kind of race game.
And I'm like, "Sure, why the hell not? It'll be kind of interesting to see how you came from War Room over to this one and if they even have the capability to make such a smaller-scale game. And you know, I got to say it's it's I mean, it's a pretty solid game. I have had my fun with it. It's not the most deep game in the world, but typically for me with push-your-luck games, they're either a small subsection of a much larger game. Hey, here's this massive game with, you know, 10 different mechanisms and one of them is push-your-luck. But uh and they're always larger multiplayer games, at least in my experience.
This one, like I said, specifically two-player games, oh or specifically a two-player game, where the goal is two runners are trying to get from uh the outer edge of a city all the way to the end and then spend five beacons to activate the final room. And and then that's how they win. And [snorts] the push your luck element is in each section, there are five sections, in each section section, you roll the dice and then you get resources for that. But there might be radiation on it which has you take damage, there might be demons that will have you take damage.
And the push your luck element is how long you are willing to stay in that area to try and get the the icon that lets you go forward. Now on my first play of this, I was thinking this might not be that great because on every single die face, there's only one result that lets you move forward. So I was I was like, okay, so you're going to roll until you get it, that's not that interesting. Well, there's a lot of nuance to this game, a little bit more than you would initially think upon reading the rules. Well, first of all, you can just do that. You can just stay in the area and hope you get lucky enough to get to the middle, but chances are you're not going to get that and you have health to manage. Every single player, all two players, have health that pretty much at the at the beginning of the game will any demon or radiation will just kind of one shot you. So you're trying to get junk, junk is a resource that you manage that you can use to go back to camp and spend to draw various junk cards that will give you extra abilities. Some of them can just be evade up to two demons per roll, spike club, use once a run to evade one demon. Risk computer, pay one info to reroll a die. Can be used multiple times. Uh speed drug, can be used to evade all demons, but you take a damage.
Things like that. So, you might be trying to gather a bunch of junk. You might be try trying to gather a bunch of info. And info is how you actually upgrade your runner. And there's three things that you can spend info on. One is max health. You start at three, you can go up to six. One is actually gaining a beacon. And then the last one is just natural demon evasion, which starts at zero and goes up to three, which is huge. So, you can spend you can try and get a bunch of info that way, go back to camp, spend info, spend junk, level yourself up for another run. Um on top of that, going back to camp fully heals you. So, if you're kind of not sure, cuz whenever you lose all your health, you're not out of the game, you just kind of skip your end of turn, and you kind of have to go back a level.
And the interesting thing about all of this is you can spend beacons on other stuff. You can spend it every single location has a special ability. Either at the very outer perimeter, you can spend it to fully heal yourself. At the surveillance node, you can activate it to then spend beacons to reroll dice. Defense node, uh moves your runner back all the way to the beginning. Um and what's interesting is you don't you have to take the result. So, it's not it's if you're in the defense node, and it's your it's your turn, and you go to roll the die, and you get the result that has you move forward, you can't be like, "Oh, wait, wait, wait, I want to actually activate the defense node to move you back." Nope, you have to move forward, because you can only activate those cities at the end of your turn.
The equipment locker lets you draw gear cards without having to actually go all the way back to fix them. Um and then the control room is how you win. Now, the interesting thing about all of that is you can actually kind of skip all of it. The extra element of pushing your luck is going into the underground. And the underground has a result that lets you move forward. You stay uh you kind of skip everything and you went underground all uh you know, underneath the entire city. But, there's a extremely high chance that you're just going to deal with radiation and demons. And that's basically it. You have a one out of six chance of constantly rolling um the go forward. So, you could save up on beacons, go into the underground, and just cuz the underground allows you to roll this as many times as you want. All the city locations are okay, I rolled, activated whatever I rolled, do an end of end of turn effect, and then now it's your turn. But, you can go underground and keep rolling. And as long as you can weather the damage or evade demons, you can just keep going until you get oh hey, I got the result that lets me move forward, but I take a damage.
You can bum rush all the way to the end and pop back into the control room and be like, okay, I have all five beacons, I'm going to spend it and I win. Now, all of that kind of stuff would ultimately lead to not really that great of a game if it lasted any longer than 30 minutes. But, it doesn't. It actually lasts, in my experience, around 20 minutes, even quicker than that. Uh your first game is pretty much going to be 20 minutes, and then every game after that, because you know the systems are just going to be super quick. So, for what this game is, I I've had a great time with it. Uh and I can't really think of anything cuz they're going to go on Kickstarter for it. I can't really think of anything that they could add without making the game longer and just kind of more complicated than it really needs to be.
I mean, I can see the only thing that I could see them adding is individual runners. Something cuz right now both runners are literally the same and the only difference is the gear cards that you actually draw. And if you added more locations or more dice or more different types of cards or more actions to do, it would ultimately just make the game longer and therefore kind of make the push your luck element overstays welcome. Because right now with the way it works, if someone does get to the end and they have all five beacons, well, you I mean, you can kind of see the writing on the wall. Again, it's only a 20-minute game, 15 to 20-minute game. So, it's it doesn't really matter if that happens.
You just can quickly, very easily set this game back up and jump in again. But if you had just more and more and more to this, then I think the the luck element would, at least for me, it would just get frustrating. Um so, the only thing I think that they could add which would add some variety to the game is if the runners were actually unique. Maybe I think maybe not an all-game ability, but a once-per-game ability and have them all be unique. I think this game could be super fun if the runners all of them had just like really busted powers. Uh but again, the game is so simple that you can't really get too creative with it.
Uh but I mean, it could be kind of neat to just have some variety cuz I don't know if this is one of those games that would just be hitting the table all the time. But, for what it is, uh and for kind of the the you know, how not necessarily how low on it I was, but I didn't really expect it to be as much fun uh as I was having. Not really any shade to the designers or the publishers. It's just okay, I know you made War Room and what I know of that. Phew. Oh, and this is quite the departure. You would almost expect that they would have made a two-player War Room instead cuz they that's the only game that they've ever made, to my knowledge. Anyway, uh if this game goes for a a good price and the prototype I got is actually it feels done. I almost kind of like the the minimalist effort on it. Uh yeah, I think that they could go with a higher-designed board, but I kind of like the the wooden dice. I like the art on the cards. Kind of looks almost cave painting-like.
Uh very silhouetty on all the designs. But, there's four piles of tokens, the different colors of of player boards where you keep your beacons, your health, and your your uh info or your junk. Sorry, not your info. Uh and then your entire turn is on here. So, it's extremely minimalist. This is something I feel like that would have came out 10, 15 years ago. And normally, whenever that's the case, whenever we play a game that feels oh, this feels like it's two decades old, it should have came out back then, it doesn't stand the test of time. But, for some reason, I I really like it. I think that this one is actually pretty solid. So, if you're interested, uh I'll have the Kickstarter link uh below.
And uh yeah, let me know what you think of this game. I mean, on a preliminary scale of 1 to 10, which is always difficult to do for uh uh you know, prototypes like this, uh I'm give this a seven. I think it's good. Again, I don't think it's one that I would have hit the table all the time. That goes for many, many games. Uh but this one's just super solid to pop down for two players, play for 15, 20 minutes, and and then pack it back up, and you had a good 15, 20 minutes. Anyway, that's my thoughts on City of Demons. Let me know what you think of the game in the comments below. Other than that, like, comment, share, and subscribe, and have a wonderful whatever time of day this is for you.