Game Review: Citadels

By Jeremy Anderson


Type/Time/Players: Citadels is a card game with counters for money. It lasts for about an hour, and people get past the learning curve pretty quickly so barring slow readers or overanalyzers you can expect even your first game to last an hour. Citadels says it supports 2-7. Like most games, this means it's best halfway between, at 4 or 5.

The Skinny: Each round, you take either two money or one district card. Then you build a card from your hand. Districts cost 1-6 coins, the game ends when someone has 8 districts built, and the winner is whoever has the most coins worth of buildings. There's a bonus for being the first to have 8 cards in play, and another if your cards include all 5 delicious flavors of district (mercantile, military, etc). So far it's all pretty simple.
The interesting part is, of all things, deciding turn order. There's a set of character cards, each with a number and a special ability or two. One card from the set is put aside without anyone seeing it, two are set aside face-up so everybody knows those characters won't be in this round, and the rest are handed to the "crown player," which is the last person to play a King. He picks one, passes the rest to the left, and this goes until the final player picks one and sets one aside.

Because there are cards that allow players to get a huge benefit (or cause one another great harm) if they can guess what character the other players pick, a lot of the game is a matter of building cleverly, trying not to be predictable in your own choices, and punishing other players for taking the obvious choice.

The Good: Citadels is easily the simplest game I've played from Fantasy Flight. Because so much of the intricacy of the game comes from the effects on those individual character cards, I've explained all of the "not on cards" rules in two paragraphs. This makes it really quick to pick up. The fact that three cards are kicked out of any given round keeps people from overusing offensive cards like the Assassin or Thief, and forces players to switch up their strategies a bit even if nobody's punishing them for being predictable. If you're trying to use the Priest to get lots of money from your temples, sometimes there just isn't a Priest to pick.

The Bad: You do need to know what those character cards are and what they do. This can slow down the game a bit as the player who picked Assassin or Thief takes a look through his catalog to decide who to hit today. Also, because your decisions are all informed by the decisions of your fellow players, Citadels is rarely a game where you can decide what you'll do on your turn before your turn comes around. This means that a notable amount of the game time is spent simply waiting for one another. Don't play this game if you can't be patient with your fellow players as they try to make decisions.

Or if everyone's fine with impatience, get yourself a 7-person chess-clock.

Conclusions: Wait time notwithstanding, Citadels is a game that manages to incorporate a lot of factors into deciding who wins. There's luck, there's your skill at deciding what to build when, there's your ability to predict enemy actions, and there's your own ability to play in a way that is both thematic and unpredictable. As players become familiar with the cards, the game becomes both faster and more fascinating for all involved. It's a good game to own.
It comes with a set of bonus character cards, and rules for using them, so it's likely that gameplay will stay fresh for a long, long time!