Skyrise

“Skyrise” is a city-building bidding game that is a remake of the 2008 game “Metropolys” that has an incredible table presence. It gives the feeling of a weighty game but is actually fairly simple to play and understand. Both Toby (5) and Jack (.8.) completely understood how to play. In fact, Toby won one of the two games that we played, and there will be more.

You each start by taking all of your buildings and your wonder. Each of the buildings has numbers on the bottom of them. These numbers are all slightly different. Essentially, you get one in each ten column, and it varies from player to player who has the highest in each ten column.

What you are essentially trying to do is lay your buildings on different neighbourhood zones in the “Skyrise” city. When you lay a zone, you also get the token that is currently placed in that zone, and they add to your scoring at the end.

For example, if you have three yellow tokens, then all of your buildings in a Yellow Zone are worth six points at the end.

Some tokens give you prestige with one of these special characters, but exactly how much those tokens are worth is hidden until you gather one.

On your turn, you lay a building that is adjacent to a previously laid building, and the next player can choose to outbid you by placing a higher-value building of theirs in an adjacent zone. A player can also choose to pass, and this continues until either all of the players choose to pass at once or there are no adjacent sections that can be physically built on. This means that the person with the highest building then gets to place their building on the zone, and everyone else gets theirs back.

A key part of this mechanism is that you can see what buildings everyone else has at any time, meaning you can start to try and manipulate proceedings and therefore try and have you end up in the particular neighbourhood you want.

The game is divided into two acts: the first one where you use a set of buildings with slightly lower values, and the second where you use slightly higher value buildings in general, along with a wonder. Your wonder is sort of like a trump card which instantly claims you an area when you use it and also allows you to activate a specific wonder card that you drew from three possibilities.

Once everyone has laid all of their buildings, you add them up by multiplying the tokens collected by the buildings in that zone, along with adding extra things such as the first person to finish gets the key to the city, which is worth 15 points, along with a variety of other special scoring parameters.

From a production point of view, this game is off the charts. What you can see here is the deluxe version that comes with really nice pre-painted miniatures that have the numbers pressed into the bottom with cardboard, a technique that I’ve never seen before but is very cool. Even if you do get the base version, you get wooden meeples instead of painted buildings, but you do still get the gorgeous island that the whole thing sits on. The cards are embossed with a wonderful metallic foil finish, all of the cardboard is double-layered, and everything oozes absolute quality. This game has incredible table presence and it’s joyous to play purely because of how nice the components are. This could be one of the highest-quality packages I have seen in a long time.

Both my boys and I absolutely adored this, and this is definitely going to become a key game in our rotation. Equally, this is definitely a game you can introduce to people who are fairly new to board games as it has relatively simple concepts.

If you are going to go for the base version, which is hitting retail shortly, it’s actually pretty reasonable, clocking in at about 45 pounds, which I would say is excellent value for this. While you can’t currently order the collector’s edition from the company, it is due to be hitting a few stores, mostly in Europe, and that’s going to set you back about 100 pounds. There is also the “prewashed” version that I bought that will run slightly more than that. I think when I bought this on Kickstarter almost 2 years ago, I paid about £85, and it was 100% worth it.

“Skyrise” is a fantastic example of an adult game which is very easy for kids to play and therefore will give you plenty of opportunities to get this to the table, both with the kids and also with family. I will 100% recommend this, and although I do not necessarily recommend you go out and splash on the collector’s edition like I did, it really does add to the overall feel of the package. It looks beautiful set up on the table and could easily be left on a coffee table as a conversation piece.

I have had quite a few strong recommendations recently (I promise there are more middle-to negatives coming), but this is a very strong positive that I have nothing bad to say about.