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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jan van Leyden" data-source="post: 6077899" data-attributes="member: 20307"><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120217/city-of-horror" target="_blank">City of Horror</a>: Zombies attack a small town. Try to survive for four hours.The game sports some fantastic production values, with it's big gameboard including a 3d water tower, dozens of zombie stand-ups, 21 different citizen stand-ups and several sets of colorful, stylish playing cards.You run a set of randomly drawn citizens who try to find solace in one of the five buildings, perhaps find vaccine and/or canned food and make sure that the other player's citizens are devoured by the zombies. Each citizen has a special ability she can use once per game, reducing the victory points to be scored for her survival at the same time.Zombies are deployed and moved according to randomly drawn cards, which - with a special exception - you see only after you've decided on your move. Attacks occur in each building where a condition (more zombies than people, or three or more zombies) is fulfilled. Attack means that one citizen s devoured. The citizens inside said building vote on who gets the honor. Voting is subject to negotiations, blackmailing, promises and the occasional Action Card.If there are some spoils in the building - vaccine or Action Cards - another vote takes place, this time to determine who gets to assign the goodies.Each building also allows a special action (resting to reactivate a citizen's special action, swapping Action Cards, buying vaccine, looking at the zombie card before deciding on your move).Now each building only has a few positions for the fearful citizens. When you want to move into a building but no space is available, your citizens ends up on the street crossing. You can snatch up a canned food token which is worth a random amount of VP at the end, but one of the citizens at the street crossing will be eliminated at the end of the round. Here, no vote takes place, but the zombie leader selects its morsel according to a distinct rule.After four rounds the Air Force arrives and rescues the surviving citizens. You need to drop one dose of vaccine for each citizens in order to score his value. Additional points are awarded for additional doses of medicine and the canned food you've acquired (What? The Air Force rescues people, but they have to bring their own food?<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" />)City of Horror essentially boils down to a series of negotiations. In our six player game, each player only had three citizens. With only four rounds in the game, each negotiation became a pretty much isolated affair. Typical deals like "Vote for me, I'll return the favour in the next similar situation" weren't made because the "next similar situation" was not sure to turn up. It never came to a heated negotiation between us because the situation was mostly crystal clear from the outset.Now, we're all experienced Euro-gamers who dissect a game into its mechanical parts and anylse those parts to build a winning strategy: negotiating feels somewhat alien to us. <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/blush.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":blush:" title="Blush    :blush:" data-shortname=":blush:" /> Players with more enthusiasm for this aspect may find City of Horror much more enjoyable than we did.Another caveat: we played with the full complement of six players, which made it next to impossible to build a situation where you gain a majority of the votes on your own because of clever play. It was even hard to have two of your citizens meet in one place. This made a tactical play preferred by our group next to impossible. If we hadn't unanimously decided to relegate City of Horrors to the never-to-be-played-again container, I'd perhaps try it out with three players instead of six. Maybe there'd be more possibilities.Even forgetting about our verdict, there remains a quandary. Price and production value are not adequate to the play value, IMHO. You'll experience 24 negotiation situations maximum. In our game we had about half of that number. The wiggling room for offers and counter-offers is very limited due to the lack of ressources one might offer, so many of this negotiations are very short affairs.Such a game might have been realised as a little card game with a handfull of cardboard counters without taking away any of the play-value. All the rest is nothing but heavy, expensive eye-candy. If I had bought City of Horror, I'd be really disappointed.Well, with the first bad experience of 2013 behind us, we're looking forward to all the new games this year will bring us!</blockquote>

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