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From Shadows over Camelot to Ticket to Ride to Mystery of the Abbey (complete with tiny tin bell), Days of Wonder has put out some richly thematic games often set long ago or far away. Its last title, Five Tribes, was a turn toward more puzzle-y games, but even it was set in the world of the Arabian Nights.

So new title Quadropolis, from French designer François Gandon, is something of an anomaly: a puzzle-style city builder set in contemporary Eurmerica. Can Days of Wonder keep its streak of hits alive?

Building the city

Gameplay in Quadropolis is quick and elegant. A central board called "the construction site" holds all available tiles for each round, and players take turns grabbing these to build their own cities. To do this, each player controls four architects, numbered "1" through "4." Turns consist of choosing one architect and laying it down beside one of the construction site's rows or columns. Then, players simply count inward the number of spaces shown on the architect and pick up that tile. They take any resources—blue inhabitants or red energy units—shown on the top of the tile, then place the tile on their personal player board. The round ends when all the players have used each of their architects. A new set of tiles fills the central board, and the next round begins. After four rounds, your city is complete—or as complete as it's going to get—and it's time to score.

"Sounds simple!" you say. "Where's the puzzle in that?"

Game details Designer: François Gandon

Publisher: Days of Wonder

Players: 2-4

Age: 8+

Playing time: 30-60 minutes

Price: $49.99 (£30 Amazon UK) François GandonDays of Wonder2-48+30-60 minutes$49.99 ( $38 Amazon US

But Quadropolis is trickier than it sounds, both when it comes to taking and placing the tiles. When you take tiles, for instance, you can't lay an architect atop another player's architect. So, as each round progresses, spots around the edge of the construction site fill. You might desperately need that harbor tile with its two delicious-looking red resources, but it's two spots in from the right edge of the construction site—and your horrible brother has already placed his architect there. You could swing down to the bottom of the board and try to point at the same tile from there, but that spot too has been taken by your friend who chews his gum way too loud. You could instead try to point to the tile from the top of the board, but from there it's four spaces in, and you played your number "4" architect on your last turn.

The order in which you deploy your architects and the ways in which you respond to other architects sitting on spots you want are a significant part of the Quadropolis challenge. But taking tiles gets trickier still, thanks to an officious do-gooder called "the Urbanist."

Who or what is an Urbanist, and why does she hang around construction sites all day? No idea. But Quadropolis includes a beautifully big "Urbanist" figure that moves after every turn. She takes the spot on the construction site from which a tile has just been removed. The next player now has to avoid pointing his architect at the Urbanist, which takes additional spots out of action for that turn. The upshot of the Urbanist is that, in addition to being blocked by other player's placed architects, you can also get blocked by the previous player's tile choice, making it just that much harder to grab the tile you want.

Once you actually have a tile, limits remain. You can't simply plunk the thing down anywhere you like on your player board. Remember that architect you just played? While it was used to grab a tile, it also tells you where you can place the tile. Tiles can only be placed in the row or column corresponding to the architect used to select them. So if I grabbed a purple shop tile using my "3" architect, I can only place it in row three or column three of my burgeoning city. (If it's an apartment building tile, you can also stack these up based on the floor you're trying to build; a "3" architect could build a third floor.) And this matters a lot for your final score, which is all about building groups.

Each building in Quadropolis scores points in a different way. Apartments score more points the higher you stack them. Parks score by touching apartments. Shops gain points only as you fill them with meeples. Civic buildings need to be evenly scattered throughout your city for the most points, while harbors only score if placed in straight lines. (If this sounds like a mess to keep track of, especially on your first play-through, a handy player aid actually makes it easy.)

Building your city in such a way that it can optimally accommodate these different groupings is the other main challenge in Quadropolis. Because points increase in greater-than-linear fashion, a line of two harbors scores just three points... but a line of four scores 12. So it's no good dabbling a bit in all the groupings. To win, you generally need to top out in two or three categories and ride those buildings to victory.

But strategies change based on what's available, too, as well as what other players are collecting. You might want to fill your city with nothing but shops and apartments, but if Uncle Fred is going all-in on apartments, you may have a tough time. Or you might simply find yourself blocked from picking up the tiles you need, and so you need to change course in the next round.

Finally, you can do all this work—the architect selection, picking the perfect tile, placing it in the best possible space in your city—and still obtain no benefit. That's because, to score, most buildings need to be "activated." Many tiles provide resources of people or energy, which need to be deployed around your city to activate most buildings and sometimes to gain points from them. Shops, for instance, may require a red energy cube for activation and earn points based on how many blue meeples you shove inside.

But if you don't activate a building, it's not scored at all when the end game comes round. Managing the collection and deployment of people and energy cubes is crucial. You don't want too many of either, though; the game dings you a point for each extra resource on hand at game end. (You can reallocate resources freely throughout the game by deploying them differently as your city changes.)

Puzzle palace

Quadropolis is a terrific puzzle because of how the parts interlock. The available architects on each turn determine not only which tiles you can pick up but also where you can play them. And each tile choice not only affects future tile choices (by removing that particular architect from your hand) but can also be used strategically against other players (denying them architect placement spots or even stealing tiles they might need). So what seems like a simple enough decision—which tile to take this turn?—becomes complex.

I love games with simple rules that produce complex interactions, and the rules here are just a few picture-heavy pages. How they work out once you start interacting with other players is what makes Quadropolis fun. And once you master the "classic" mode that I've been describing here, the game offers an "expert" variant. "Expert" features two additional tile types (monuments and office towers), a larger board, and five rounds instead of four. Selecting architects is different, too: all player architects are grouped together in a pool, and you can draw any available architect on your turn.

On the other hand, I dislike games with fiddly setup and between-round cleanup. I groaned when I first read the rules for Quadropolis because the game certainly sounds fiddly. The mass of available tiles is broken up into five groups, one for each round. These groups are not random, either; they are specific and unchanging. In addition, each group is broken up into a main collection and a few additional tiles for both the classic and expert modes. Finally, unless you play with the full complement of four players, you don't use every tile in each round (tiles are marked on the back if they should remain face-down during three- and four-player games). And you have to change all the tiles on the board at least four times per game!

The situation is bad enough that I simply would not play Quadropolis if the game didn't make tile sorting easy. Fortunately, Quadropolis comes with a terrific box insert that stores the tiles by round and further by classic/expert. Don't bother with the included bag for randomly pulling tiles each round, either; just grab all the relevant tiles and scatter them face-down on the construction site, then flip up the ones in play for your number of players. Done this way, set up remains manageable and didn't pose a play obstacle for me.

My other complaint about Quadropolis is petty: the player mats and even the central construction site are thin cardboard. The player mats in particular feel like they were printed on Kinko's card stock. Clearly most of the attention and production money went to the tiles, which are thick and satisfying, and the translucent blue and red resources, which are shiny and wonderful. Days of Wonder, so well known for their lavish productions, also came through with attractive artwork and a well-designed, easy-to-read manual.

Overall, I enjoyed Quadropolis. Play is quick, the game is thinky right from the start, and it's all over in thirty minutes to an hour. That's my kind of game! It helped that my kids picked it up quickly and my gaming group also latched onto it.

But I had to make my peace with one key fact: Quadropolis is an intricately linked abstract puzzle, not a city-building game. Sure, you are "building" a "city," but this must be the most generic city on the planet. It's Anytown, USA or Centre Ville, France. You populate it with identical "shops" and flats and "civic buildings" so bland they don't have a name, upon a background so abstract that it's broken into four color-coded quadrants. There's nothing wrong with this; just be aware that Quadropolis won't give you that feeling of building up a specific city or a civilization.

Even the name is generic. You aren't playing the very specific Kemet or Tigris & Euphrates or Champions of Midgard or Lords of Waterdeep or New York 1901. You're building a quadrant city.

In writing, as in board gaming, I prefer the specific to the generic. As I played Quadropolis, I wondered whether the exact same game would be even better if the players were trying to build, say, Paris or New York, with recognizable artwork on the tiles. I'm not sure—perhaps that sort of specificity would have mucked with the abstract puzzle underlying Quadropolis. But given what we have now, this is a game for people who love puzzles and placement efficiency rather than building monuments to their own greatness.

But if you're that kind of person, Quadropolis is fun, fast, and clear.