Grey Fox Games: City of Gears, Strategy Board Game, Over 20 Plus Tiles to Build Your city, 45 to 60 Minute Play Time, 2 to 6 Players, For Ages 10 and up

A really super fun game. Love that different strategies can be used. The game pieces and tiles are vivid and beautiful to look at. The game play is simple but enough strategy involved to make it challenging. With lots of city tiles and the randomness of tile placement each game feels different. Highly recommended.

This game is pretty cool! It's a city-building, area control, worker/robot placement, resource management game in a steampunk world! You all play competeing inventors trying to become mayor of Gear City before opening day, but to do this you need to earn prestige by uncovering and controlling different areas of the city. The city tiles you use are completely random and even are unknown to the person who sets up the game. You need to manage your steampunk-based resources (such as steam, gears and electrical bolts) to maneuver your robot workers to uncover the city tiles and exploit their properties before your opponents do. Once all the tiles are uncovered, you then start the end-game scenario, where the game really ramps up! My favorite aspect of the game is the gear draw bag, which is essential to winning the game. Whenever you draw from the bag you can either use the gear you draw to give you special powers, or use it as a bridge between tiles (which is the only way to move your robots across the board). The bag is always randomized before the game and is never replenished throughout the game, so no one knows what they'll get and no one can get to overpowered. My only complaints about the game is I wish there was a way to make it last longer. Depending on how fast you move your robots around, you can start the end-game scenario in about 15-20 minutes. And the end game could last anywhere from 5-10 minutes, based on gear drawing. But these are minor nitpicks. This game is fun, easy to teach, and doesn't wear out its welcome. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a clockwork city to govern!

This is a great game; we were immediately drawn in by these odd shaped tiles and the steampunk themed pieces. In this Utopian Metropolis of the future players are trying to discover and activate all of the city’s great mysteries via nine randomly chosen city tiles and bring the clockwork creation to life. There is a fantastic bit of story and description text in the rulebook that sets the game in motion, it is a great opportunity to further immerse yourself into the story that you and your opponents are about to create as you explore and build the city. Beyond the amazing theme and game components there are fun and interactive game play elements that are both satisfying and have a sense of urgency to them. A standard setup of nine hidden city tiles starts each game and also serves as a part of the end game trigger. Once all nine of these tiles have been explored players gain an extra die to add to their available rolls and four white gear pieces are added to draw bag of city upgrade gears. When the third of these white gears is drawn from the bag the marvelous City of Gears is completed and ready to be opened to the public to display all of its wonders. The game ends immediately at that point and scores are calculated. There is a push your luck element in drawing factory and city gears that you have to weigh against the chance of you possibly ending the game. This is a fulfilling and strategic element to the game that we just love, if you have a good lead on your opponents you may try to focus on triggering the end, or if you still need to make up more points you will find yourself taking other game actions to try and gain more area control over the board. Having control of the areas of the board will award points for end game scoring and the different tiles each have their own values on them as well as unique powers that can be activated each turn. In order to control a city tile you must move your robot workers from your factory through the mechanical city by building clockwork gear links. Links that you build between tiles are marked with your own player color and along with your robot workers help to decide who controls each tile. These robot workers that you build and send out to repair the city do have the option of causing a bit of mayhem and destruction towards your opponents. You’ll have the ability to destroy opponent’s robots and send them back to their factories or to sever their gear links which allow them to travel across the tiles. This is a friendly bit of “take that” which can occur in your games, it isn’t heavily themed on combat so while interactions can be important to who wins the game it doesn’t feel like a battle game at all. There is so much more that just works perfectly in this game, from the dice rolling and opportunities to swap and duplicate the resources you need to perform actions, or the amazing variety of powers that are available to you as you upgrade your factory via gear tokens from the draw bag. This game packs a punch and will leave you wanting to play it again and again, the visual appeal of all the interlocking pieces and that satisfaction of placing gears to complete the city is rewarding all on its own. Underneath that fun interactive experience there is a well developed worker placement area control game that just keeps bringing us back for more. This is a game that will always remain on my shelf and I’ll be trying to hunt down more of the promotional pieces and tiles for it in the future, it is that good!