Ginkgopolis returns to the stores
The 1-5 player urban city planning game Ginkgopolis has recently been reprinted, and is now available to purchase from European stores and to preorder from stores in the US.
In Ginkgopolis, you are playing as an urban planner trying to build cities as efficiently as possible, since most resources on Earth have been depleted. In the solo mode, you are competing against an AI called HAL.
There are three types of building tiles in the game: Red tiles show production buildings from which you can gain resources; Blue tiles are office buildings which you can use to gain more building tiles. Yellow tiles are houses and leisure buildings which give you victory points. Six of these tiles will be placed in a grid at the start of the game, to form the starting board. Around the tiles you will place letter tokens that designate the areas that can potentially be built. You start with 6 resources and 6 victory points.
On each turn, you draw 3 Building cards for yourself and one extra for HAL, which you keep face down. Then, you choose a card from your hand to play, and discard the other 2. Your card will allow you to either gain resources, tiles or points, or to place a new tile in the grid and a resource in your colour to indicate ownership. On HAL's turn, you reveal his card and draw a tile for him, as he always constructs. You and HAL can build on top of each other's tiles and distribute resources and points according to the rules.
The game ends if the tiles run out, or if you run out of resources, or if HAL runs out of resources. If you have earned more points than him, you win the game.
Roads?!? Everyone knows you should only put down mass transit tracks to avoid people complaining about traffic.
I like the art on the cards. I've liked City Planning games since SimCity on the NES. 🙂 Competing againt HAL, as in Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer? Yikes, that sucker is pretty smart.
Photo courtesy of Video Game History Foundation