Players: 2-4
Playing Time: 60-90 minutes
Difficulty: 3 (of 10)

The Components

Sunken City comes with a mass of components:

• 1 game board
• 12 buildings
• Wood Bits:
  • 4 adventurer pawns
  • 1 Neptune figure
  • 3 dice
• Cardboard Bits:
  • 30 streets
  • 44 treasures
  • 4 adventurer boards
  • 8 Neptune chips
• 24 movement cards
• 4 rule summaries
• 1 rule book

Game Board: A bright & colorful four-panel board printed on linen textured cardboard. The majority of the board depicts a gridded lake from which the sunken city will be raised. Surrounding the lake are the home villages of the four players. The board also helpfully contains spaces for: the buildings and the streets.

Buildings: These large plastic cubes are each numbered from 1-10 (plus two extras) and printed with a three-dimensional building on the sides and top. The registration is off on a fair percentage of the cube sides (meaning that the colors don’t match up correctly), but nonetheless these are attractive, high-quality pieces.

Wood Bits: Wooden pawns appear in the four player colors (white, yellow, orange, and red). In addition there's a nice wooden Neptune piece which depicts the god in black ink on front and back.

The dice are wooden too. They're printed in three colors (white, black, and purple) with numerals indented and inked on each side. Each die contains slightly different numerals; they're intended to be used in different sized games.

Cardboard Bits: The rest of the cardboard bits are all high-quality, linen-textured cardboard, printed full color with generally evocative artwork and coloring.

The streets simply depict rock pathways over the lake water. Each one fits over two spaces on the lake grid.

The treasures each show a number (1-10 or 12) and a pretty bauble taken from beneath the waves. They're printed in the four player colors.

The adventurer boards are a repository for the treasures. Each one has 11 spaces, marked 1-10 and 12. There's nice enough terrain printed on the board so it's not just a boring set of boxes (though it's irrelevent for play).

The Neptune chips are circular tokens depicting Neptune.

Cards: The cards are medium weight, printed at regular card size with rounded corners. There are six each in the four different player colors. Each card depicts what a player can do during a turn: a certain amount of building and a certain amount of movement. Good use is make of icons (or, more correctly, depictions of the game pieces), to make it obvious what the options are.

Rule Summaries: These full-color rule summaries are printed on thin cardstock. Each one summarizes the setup on one side and the turn actions on the other. They're overall concise and a good overview of the game.

Box & Tray: The box is a large, rectangular box that's entirely sturdy. There's a tray inside that's at least partially mystifying. It has spaces for all the buildings and the cards, but most of the wood and cardboard pieces have to be placed in slots that don't really fit them. I don't know if this was a standard tray that got reused, or what. I suppose it does the job, but it's a bit awkward.

Overall, the pieces for the game are gorgeous and high quality, while the cards have been designed with very good usability in mind. As a result, Sunken City earns a full "5" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The object of Sunken City is to retrieve as many treasures as you can from the unnamed sunken city.

Setup: Each player chooses a color, then takes the player board, movement cards, pawn, and treasures for that color. He places his pawn in his village on a corner of the board. All of his treasures go face-down on his player board.

20-26 street tiles are placed next to the board, as are buildings 1-9. Building 10 is placed in the center of the board, with Neptune atop it.

Finally, either the white, black, or purple die is selected for use, depending on the number of players.

Order of Play: Each turn a player plays a Movement Card which allows him to take three actions:

• Place City Pieces
• Move Adventurer
• Move Neptune

Each player has six cards, which show some combination of city pieces that may be raised and spaces that can be moved. The total is usually 7 (e.g., there's a "place 2, move 5", a "place 4, move 3", etc).

Each turn a player will get to choose one of the cards to play. After a card is played, it's set aside. When a player has used all six of his cards he gets them all back to play again.

Note that once a player's turn begins, the placement of city pieces, the moving of the adventurer, and the movement of Neptune can be done in any order.

Place City Pieces: Each card lists from 0 to 4 city pieces which must be placed. This allows the player to raise the city up from a deep.

The city pieces played may be a combination of buildings and streets, but no more than one building on a turn. Note that buildings and streets can be played anywhere, not just near the player. However, they can't overlap, and there are certain restrictions as to which specific spaces can contain buildings and streets.

Buildings. Buildings are placed in special dark blue spaces on the map (basically, a ring around the middle and the very center space). They take up one space on the board and contain treasures. They also can't be placed adjacent to other buildings (not even touching diagonally).

Streets. Streets are placed in any space on the board except the very center. They take up two spaces on the board and are used to get between the home village and the various buildings.

Move Adventurer: The adventurer may move up to as many spaces as shown on the played card, from 3 to 7.

Each street space or building costs one movement to move onto.

When a player moves onto a building he collects the treasure of the same number by flipping it face-up on his player board. If the building was in the middle of the board he also collects special treasure #12.

When a player moves onto his home village he stores treasures by taking all face-up treasures and placing them in his tower.

An adventurer may also choose to play a Neptune Chip during his turn (more on them momentarily). This lets him move an additional number of spaces equal to the number of face-down treasures currently on his player board.

Move Neptune: If he wishes a player may also Move Neptune on his turn.

If Neptune is currently in that player's home territory (a 4x4 grid next to the player's village), Neptune moves 3-4 spaces depending on the number of players. Otherwise, the active player rolls a die and moves Neptune the appropriate amount (which can vary from 0-4, depending on the roll and which of the three dice is used).

Neptune moves just like adventurers. He goes over buildings and streets at a cost of one movement point each. Which means at the start of the game he won't even be able to move, since he's in the middle of the board with no connecting streets.

However, there's one catch: Neptune doesn't like all this tomfoolery about raising his sunken city, and so whenever he steps off a city space, it sinks. A building goes back to its space on the side of the board, a street gets placed face-down next to the draw pile.

If an adventurer was on the space Neptune left, he's sunk too. He must swim back to his home village, losing all of his face-up treasures in the process (they're flipped back face-down). However, he's given a Neptune Chip for his trouble.

Winning the Game: If a player collects all of the treasures, he wins. Alternatively, the game ends at a specific time (after five piles of face-up streets have been used, as it happens, with each face-down pile being flipped face-up after the previous pile is expended), at which time the player with the most treasures wins, ties going to the player with the highest numbered treasure.

The Advanced Game: The Sunken City website also contains a set of advanced rules which successfully make the game more strategic.

The big change is that Neptune isn't moved every turn. Instead, there's a special "sinking" phase that follows every "raising" phase. Whenever the supply of street tiles is expended (and you'll recall this happens five times during the game), Neptune comes out and sinks tiles until he ends up "trapped" and unable to move. (Then a new raising phase begins.)

The specific place where Neptune emerges is determined by which grotto he's hanging out in while he waits to sink the city. He will appear on the board at the building number matching his grotto--or alternatively at the highest building number, if "his" building isn't currently out. Players also have the ability to change which grotto Neptune is in if they visit the building which corresponds to his. As a result, there's a lot of jockeying for position in the final rounds before Neptune emerges.

Overall, while the basic game feels very chaotic, the advanced game is almost abstract in its play, as players have more opportunity for strategic movements because of the longer spans between Neptune movement--and also have more ability to determine where Neptune appears.

The difference in play style between the two versions of the rules is, actually, pretty stunning.

Relationships to Other Games

Sunken City is a fairly unique combination of a race game with a tile-laying game as well as elements of brinkmanship.

Most traditional race games are dull things where you move a piece around a track by rolling dice, and whomever rolls the dice the best wins. Thus, they're less common in more serious gaming circles (past Candyland and The Game of Life).

Sunken City manages to add a fair amount of tactics & strategy to the genre by putting movement speed largely within the control of the player (through the movement cards). Instead of the luck of the roll, success in the game is based upon good placement of tiles & buildings and good brinkmanship play, centering around collecting large numbers of treasures before getting home. As such, it introduces new life into a genre of games that are largely constrained to kid's games and the most simplistic family offerings.

(And, just for completeness' sake, it's worth mentioning that there are other good racing the games, the best known being Backgammon, or alternatively the recently reviewed Tuchulcha; it just so happens that many of the worst games are racing games too.)

Contrary to its appearance, Sunken City is not really an exploration game, because there's no hidden information about what tiles you might receive for going to certain locations.

Finally, it's also worth mentioning that Sunken City is by the same team of designers (Kramer & Kiesling) who produced Java, Tikal, Mexica, Torres, and the recent Raja. However, the games are very different in style. The other Kiesling & Kramer games are clearly serious strategy games, while this is a family offering. Set your expectations accordingly.

The Game Design

Here's some of the game design I liked about Sunken City:

Nice Tactics: There's a few different elements of nice tactics in Sunken City; besides moving your own piece (which is usually largely obvious), you can also choose to raise appropriate buildings, or sink buildings near you to get space, or sink your opponent's buildings, either to take them away, or just because you need the number closer to you. There's a lot of room for thought here. There's also some room for short-term strategy as you try and figure out how you're going to use the cards remaining in your hand.

Nice Brinkmanship: The whole idea of having to get your treasures home to score them introduces a very heavy degree of tactics in the game. Do you take the safe route or do you go for more score? Unfortunately the tension is a bit limited, because usually you can figure out whether there's any chance Neptune can get you or not (though this surety decreases the more players there are).

Good Balances: There's a few good balancing elements in the game, including: that if you end up with a lot of buildings in your area, and thus probably a lot of treasure, your area is also clogged for more out buildings; if Neptune is too close to you, then you can probably move him further, faster; and if you ever face a major setback (because Neptune sank you) you also get a major helper (through the Neptune tokens).

I don't have any actual complaints about the game, but I do have a set of comments:

Some Randomness: The Neptune movement is definitely a high random factor in the game, but also one I find appropriate given that the game is designed for family play.

About Player Numbers: I don't feel like the game works well at two-players because there's just too much back and forth of Neptune, who's generally moving directly toward one player's region, unless one player is doing something particularly clever. As a result I only recommend the basic game for 3 or more players.

About the Advanced Game: The advanced game is pretty amazing in how different it feels from the basic game. I felt like the rules were a tiny bit clunky, but they did manage to do the job of introducing a lot more strategy in the game (because you can now plan much further ahead, depending on how far out the next Sinking Phase is). The whole game actually starts to feel kind of abstract because there's so much thought about where Neptune will enter, how far he can move, etc. Despite all this, there's still a fair amount of chaos, especially with more players (and, converse to my comment on the basic game, I feel like the advanced game would work better with less players, probably 2 or 3, since the chaos is at odds with thes trategy).

On whole I feel like Sunken City is a slightly above average family game: there's some neat mechanics that you don't find in more common fare, but nonetheless tension and strategy are boths somewhat limited.

The advanced game, meanwhile, evaulated as a strategy game, felt dead average. It's got some real possibilities for thoughtful strategy that's fun to play, but none of it particularly stood out from the field.

On average I've decided to give Sunken City a high "3" out of "5", with the comment that it's best directed toward family gameplay for 3+ players.

Conclusion

Sunken City is a beautifully produced family game with just slightly above average gameplay. Raising up and sinking the city is a pretty neat mechanic, and there's some chance for interesting tactics, but beyond that the game is fairly average. It plays best with 3 or 4 players.

Though there are advanced rules, and they do truly change the mechanics to be those of an abstract strategy game for more serious players, the game still plays slightly better as it was originally designed: as a family game.

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