Players: 2-7
Ages: 10+
Playing Time: 20-60 minutes
Complexity: 2 (of 10)

This is a revision of a review originally published in February, 2003.

This new review is of the Silver Line (second) edition published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2003.

The Components

Citadels is basically a card game with some gold coins required for purchasing. A couple of other components are included to try and help ease the play of the game. Here's what you get:

• 66 district cards
• 18 character cards
• 35 gold coins
• 1 crown and plastic base
• 16 victory point markers
• 18 character markers
• 1 rulebook

Cards: All of the cards are printed on medium weight cardstock with rounded corners, full color on the front, blue and white on the back. The cardstock weight is fine for the district cards, but really insufficient for the character cards, which get shuffled and handed around a lot in the game. (As an aside, I've been told that if you want to get card sleees for your character cards, so that they don't get worn away, you should get Yu-Gi-Oh card sleeves.) It's also a pity that both cards have blue backs, as it'd be a lot easier to tell them apart if there was color variation.

The district cards are very nicely illustrated cards showing different locations in a city, such as taverns, cathedrals, manors, and observatories. They're divided up into five colors (green, blue, red, yellow, and purple), with each color very clearly marked next to the name. There's also a set of coins running down the lefthand side showing the cost (and later value) of the card, between 1 and 8 gold, and on the purple cards there's an explanatory text for special powers. Overall the cards are very well laid-out and show the art largely and to nice advantage. They do, however, make it a bit hard to count Victory Points (a number for the cost would have been a lot easier to count than all those gold coins).

The character cards are likewise nicely illustrated, only showing their pictures to slightly less advantage because every character has text. There are two sets of character cards labeled 1-9, each with a name ("Assassin", "Bishop", etc). The 10 cards used for advanced games are clearly marked with a star. 7 of the cards are associated with special types of city cards, and these are very clearly marked with the same color (green, blue, red, or yellow) around the characeter's number, which is a nice iconic connection. They're altogether easy to use.

Gold Coins: These are yellow, plastic pieces that look a bit like butterscotch candy. They're an upgrade from the previous edition, which used cardboard counters, and are nicely evocative.

Crown & Base: A cardboard crown (again, nicely illustrated) that goes on a little plastic stand to show who the current king is. The crown is generally useful, to help you keep track of who's the king, in case rounds go by where the King card doesn't come into play.

Victory Point Markers: More cardboard. These victory point markers are labeled +2, +3, and +4 and are used to denote a few different special conditions when you count up your points at the end.They're relatively pretty to look at and have iconic representations that make it fairly clear what the victory points are for, which is a nice touch. They make it easy to sum up your extra points at the end.

Character Markers: Finally, we come to the component that tends to mystify more players of the game. The character markers are hexgonal cardboard representations that match up with the 18 character cards. Since you only use 8 or 9 of the characters in any one game, the idea is that you lay out these markers to help everyone remember what characters are in the game. If the markers had included names, that might have been useful, but I can't imagine anyone but the most addicted players will remember the pictures of the different characters. The "regular" and "special" characters do also have differently colored numbers on the markers, so perhaps that might help, but I'm not really convinced of the utility of these pieces ...

Rulebook: The rulebook is a short, four-page explanation of how to play the game, a page and a half of which is taken up by a listing of the 18 characters and their powers. It's unfortunately slightly hard to read because it was printed in purple(!). The layout is also pretty workmanship.

The rules aren't entirely clear and took a couple of readings to figure out when I first played. Even after that they were some questions during play, such as, "When do these character powers go off?" which were only clarified after a few hunts through the rules. A revision of these rules to clean things up would probably do the game some good.

Missing Components: The one component that I wished I had, but was missing, was a card listing all of the characters. The current holder of the king is supposed to call them out each round, and that would have been easier if we weren't always stumbling over "5 ... was that the merchant? No, the bishop?" (It's no good embarassing the king.) A succinct listing of powers for each character would have been nice too.

Box & Tray: The box is the standard small-to-medium size that Fantasy Flight is using for all their Silver Line games, and the tray is the standard plastic tray that they've been using in those boxes, with spaces for three piles of cards and a slot for other stuff. It does the job, and is much better than the trayless box that the previous edition came in.

Overall, Citadels has very pretty cards and relatively nice components; there's also been some attempt to make it worth its price through the inclusion of extra cardboard components. This new edition is a slight upgrade from the original FFG edition: not enough to warrant repurchasing it, but enough to make new purchasers happier. Overall, it rates a high "4" out of "5" for Style.

The Game Play

The core Citadels game is designed for between 4-6 players, and thus I'll explain how the game works for those numbers first, with a few notes about otherly sized games at the end.

The ultimate goal of Citadels is to build 8 districts within your city, and for them to be the most valuable.

Setup: Each player starts the game with four district cards in his hand and two gold coins. A player is choosen to be the king for the first round, and the eight character cards are shuffled and handed to him.

The District Cards. Districts are cards in one of five colors (yellow: noble, blue: religious, green: trade, red: military, and purple: special) which cost between one and six gold pieces to build. The purple district cards have special powers.

The Character Cards. The character cards are what really shape this game and make it unique. In the standard game there are eight character cards, each numbered, and each possessing a unique power. They are:

1. Assassin. Murder one character (not player), costing them their turn.
   
2. Thief. Steal all the gold from one character (not player).
   
3. Magician. Exchange cards with other players or with the deck.
   
4. King. Receive one gold per yellow district and have first choice of characters next round.
5. Bishop. Receive one gold per blue district and be protected from the Warlord.
6. Merchant. Receive one gold per green district, plus one extra gold.
7. Architect. Draw two extra cards and build up to three districts.
8. Warlord. Receive one gold per red district, and pay to destroy one district of your chocie.

Order of Play: Each round, the following actions are taken:

1. Choosing Characters
2. Taking Character Turns

Choosing Characters: To start off the character choice, the current king randomly places one of the character cards face-down. He then randomly places between zero and two character cards (depending on number of players) face up, leaving him with one more character card than the number of players in his hand. Then the king selects a character card of his choice, and the cards are passed clockwise around the table with each player choosing a character. In the end the last player selects one of the final two cards and places the other facedown on the table.

The end result is that each player has had some choice over the "special power" he gets to use during the current round, and in addition each player has some knowledge of what characters other players are using (but not total knowledge).

Taking Character Turns: After character selection is done, each player then gets to take his turn in the current round. This is done in the order of the character cards, so the player with the assassin goes first, the thief goes second, etc. At least a couple of characters will be out of play every round, and thus skipped.

Actions During a Turn. Each turn each player may decide to collect two new gold coins or else take two district cards and keep the best of the two. Afterward, he may build up to one district (by paying the appropriate number of gold coins), and his turn ends.

Each player also gets to use his character power sometime during his turn. So the assassin might collect a couple of cards, play a new district, and then kill some other character, the exact fate of which isn't revealed until that character's turn. The bishop might collect some gold, then collect some more gold for his blue districts, then build something expensive.

Ending a Round: Eventually after the warlord (#8) has gone, the character cards are all recovered, shuffled, and a new round begins. The new king (#4) gets to begin card selection in the new round (or the old king, if the king card wasn't selected).

Ending the Game: The game ends at the completion of the round during which someone built their eighth district. Everyone then counts up the value of all their districts and adds a few bonuses, denoted by VP markers: +4 if the player was the first to 8 districts; +2 if the player made it to 8 districts after the first person; and +3 if the player had districts in all five colors.

Alternative Play: The game also supports some alternative plays: games for two, three or seven players; and a second set of character cards.

2-3 Players. The game supports two or three players by allowing each player to select two character cards during their turn, one at a time. There's a fancy little dance in the two-player game where each player chooses a card and discards a card so that no one knows exactly what the other player has. The two player version works quite well; I've never played the three-player version, but people don't seem quite as enthusiastic about it.

7 Players. A seventh player is allowed by the introduction of a the queen (#9), who gets 3 gold if she's sitting next to the king.

Alternative Characters. Citadels comes with a second set of characters, also labelled 1-9. One or two of these can be substituted in every game for the "normal" characters, allowing for quite a bit of variability of game play. Many of the characters have similar powers to their alternative numbers, such as the abbot (#5*) who receives 1 gold per blue district just like the biship (#5), but who also takes a gold from the player with the most gold (as opposed to the bishop, who is safe from the warlord).

Relations to Other Games

Citadels (2000) is an interesting and even now original logistics game with unique role selection and bluffing aspects.

It reminds me quite a bit of a couple of other city-construction card games which have come out in the last couple of years, including: San Juan (2004) and Saint Petersburg (2004). In the end, Saint Petersburg and Citadels probably diverge quite a lot, since the former is staid and the latter somewhat chaotic. However, San Juan and Citadels share a lot of similarities, since they both conflate role-selection with city building. I think that the bluffing aspect of Citadels and the more variable strategies of San Juan are enough to set them apart, but if you like one I suspect you'll like the other.

The idea of character role cards apparently originated in Marcel-André Casasola Merkle games, Verraeter (1998) and Meuterer (2000). Faidutti already knew that Citadels would have characters, but borrowed the method from character selection from the earlier releases. Tracing the chronology onward, Puerto Rico (2002) probably got the idea of roles from Citadels, and then it was of course incorporated into the Puerto Rico card game, San Juan, explaining the similarity in the two games' styles.

This game is also closely related to a few others of Faidutti's designs.

Castle (2000) was developed by Serge Laget and later refined by Bruno Faidutti, at the same time that Citadels was being developed. The original idea had been for each designer to develop their own gameplay about characters and locations and then combine them, but the games ended up too different. Citadels had 60 locations and 8 characters while Castle almost exactly reversed that ratio. Castle is a slightly lighter game than Citadels, with less strategy and more chaos, but it's still quite fun.

Fist of Dragonstones (2002) was more recently developed by Bruno Faidutti & Michael Schacht. It started out as a "sequel" to Citadels, and indeed does share the idea of characters with special powers, and you'll meet many of old favorites, such as the thief, the alchemist, and the wizard in the new game. However the core mechanics and the way to select characters are very different in Dragonstones, which is an auction game.

Finally, it's worth noting that almost every edition of Citadels has been a little different from all the others. The FFG edition has the expanded character cards, but since a few new district cards have been added to more recent German and French editions (the second ed. of each). They're not a big deal, and I'm perfectly happy with my newly purchased FFG second ed.

A lot of the info, above, on Citadels's evolution is pulled from Bruno Faidutti's Citadels page.

The Game Design

The game design of Citadels is very strong and robust, and for a fairly simple card game allows a surprising amount of strategy and cognitive gameplay.

Here's some of the best game design points:

Good Balance: The idea of trading the characters off every round allows for a nice amount of balance, because of the fact that an "unbalanced" character will move around. This is further helped by the inclusion of the assassin and thief, who prevent other players from holding on to specific characters because it makes them vulnerable. (The thief and the assassin attack characters, but if a specific player keeps pulling the same character, the thief or assassin player can then de facto attack that player, which has some very nice advantages.) Other characters create innate balance too, such as the thief, who will act as a balance to someone hoarding gold, the magician, who will act as a balance to someone hoarding cards, and the warlord, who will act as a balance to someone who's out in front on districts.

Nice Bluffing: There's some nice bluffing implicit in the character selection as well, as you try and figure out which cards opponents might take, and which cards they think you might take.

Good Replayability: There are a lot of different factors that add up to good replayability of this game. First is the fact that the game dramatically changes based on how many players you have, even within the original 4-6 player constraints. At 4 player, for example, 2 extra characters are out every round of play, as compared to a 6-player game. Second is the inclusion of the 9 extra cards, which allow every game to be a bit different because the powers available will constantly be changing. Third is the fact that it would be very easy to totally change the dynamics of this game by adding in new characters (though, alas, FFG didn't include any blank cards).

Good Control of Randomness: Though there is a random element in the game, based on what district cards you draw, lots has been done to control that randomness. The magician and architect characters are the most obvious helpers, since they can allow you to draw more or different cards. However, the king, bishop, merchant, and warlord are also help offset randomness because you can usually select the specific character who will benefit whatever your mix of district colors is.

I have no complaints with the gameplay of Citadels, and indeed have just come to enjoy it more as I've played it more.

Originally, I was somewhat undecided as to whether Citadels earned a "4" or a "5" Substance rating when I originally reviewed it. Since, I've played it more and come to the conclusion that there's some really nice depth to the gameplay. Add that on the fact that it's a fairly pivotal design with lots of innovative ideas, and I give it a full "5" out of "5" for Substance.

Conclusion

Overall, Citadels is an excellently designed card game that's a lot of fun to play. Bruno Faidutti's game design is spot on. There's strategy, tactics, and bluffing, but the game still remains light enough to be fun. If you play filler games at all, you should pick this one up (and particularly if you also enjoy San Juan).

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