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Most cooperative games ask players to stop something terrible from happening. A virus spreads across the world, monsters appear, a spaceship breaks apart, or somebody accidentally opens a portal to another dimension. Link City goes in a much stranger direction. Here, the big challenge is trying to agree on where an alien embassy should be built.
The game starts with a tiny city around a town hall, but after a few rounds the table usually turns into this strange mix of schools, tattoo parlours, circuses, swimming pools, medieval taverns, bunkers, and even the occasional space base. Half the fun is simply looking at the finished city afterwards and wondering how any of it ended up together. The other half is trying to understand why somebody thought the stadium belonged next to the swimming pool instead of the cinema.
What surprised us after a few plays was how different the conversations became depending on who played mayor. Some players made very direct associations. Others disappeared into their own logic completely. At one point somebody tried to explain that the nuclear plant belonged near the observatory because “scientists.” Nobody agreed, but the explanation somehow lasted several minutes anyway.
Link City ends up feeling part party game, part communication exercise, and part awkward city-planning project. It stays simple most of the time, but the city slowly becomes harder to manage as mistakes start shaping the layout. By the final rounds, we were not only trying to understand each other’s logic anymore, but also staring at the table wondering why we had created such an awkward city to build around.
👥 2-6 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designer: Émilien Alquier
🎨 Artwork: Mathieu Clauss & Franz Lejeune
🏢 Publisher: Bandjo (review copy provided by Geronimo Games)
Gameplay Overview
The game begins with the City Hall tile in the middle of the table, surrounded by four random location tiles. Every location tile is double-sided, so before placing one you can choose which location to use.
Each round, one player takes the role of the mayor. They draw new location tiles behind a screen while another player becomes the deputy mayor and places construction cones around the city. These cones mark the places where new buildings could potentially go.
The mayor then secretly connects each new location to one of those construction sites. The existing neighbourhood around each cone acts as a clue. A school beside a swimming pool suggests something very different from a school beside a bunker or a casino. The mayor is basically trying to leave behind a trail of logic that the rest of the table can still follow.
After that, the rest of the players discuss where they think each location belongs. Everyone debates together while the mayor stays completely silent. Once the group agrees, the mayor reveals the correct associations. Correct guesses are placed directly into the city grid. Wrong guesses still enter the city, but only diagonally connected to the rest of the map.
Scoring comes from completed tree lines between neighbouring tiles. Every completed tree line is worth one point. Because of that, players are not only trying to understand the mayor’s logic, but also trying to leave enough room in the city for future connections.
Perfect rounds unlock extra content. The first perfect round introduces a fourth white cone, which means more locations enter the game every round afterwards. Bonus tiles are also added after successful rounds. After six rounds, players count all completed tree lines across the city.
Artwork, Components, and Visual Design
Most of the game is made up of the location tiles. These are double-sided and cover a surprisingly wide range of places. Some are ordinary locations like banks, schools, gyms, swimming pools, and supermarkets. Others become much stranger: alien embassies, haunted mansions, bunkers, psychiatric clinics, medieval taverns, and superhero hideouts all eventually appear somewhere in the city.
The tiles themselves use a very clean layout. Locations are represented with large coloured labels on top of simplified street-map backgrounds rather than detailed illustrations. That keeps the city readable even once the table starts filling up with tiles from every direction. We never had moments where players struggled to identify locations quickly, which matters a lot in a game built around associations.
The construction cones are probably the most eye-catching components in the box. They look like miniature roadwork cones and are easy to spot from across the table. Once the city grows larger, that visibility becomes surprisingly useful.
The mayor screen is bigger than expected for this type of game. It does its job well enough, although it also creates the slightly amusing image of one player sitting there like a deeply stressed city planner trying to decide where to build a circus.
Overall, the production feels practical first. The game stays readable, colourful, and easy to follow throughout the session.
Our Experience
The first game was much messier than we expected. At the start, everybody treated the associations very literally. A swimming pool belonged near sport-related locations. A school belonged near children-related locations. Most choices felt straightforward.
Then someone placed a tattoo parlour next to the stadium because “footballers have tattoos.” After that point, the game changed completely. Players stopped looking only for obvious category links and started trying to understand how specific people around the table think. One player always leaned toward realistic city planning. Another connected places through stories instead. Somebody else kept making emotional associations that nobody else understood until after the reveal.
The deputy mayor role also became more important over repeated plays than it first appeared. During the first session, cone placement felt almost random. Later, we noticed how much pressure certain placements created. Some cones opened spaces where several locations could reasonably fit, while others practically forced the mayor into very narrow choices.
One round became particularly awkward because we had accidentally boxed ourselves into a terrible section of the city. Several diagonal placements from earlier mistakes had left gaps everywhere, and suddenly every new tile placement became annoying to work around. Nobody said much during that round because everybody was staring at the city trying to figure out how we had managed to create such a strange layout.
The game was also noticeably different depending on the group. With talkative players, discussions kept spiralling into ridiculous debates about why a medieval tavern should sit next to a bio supermarket. With quieter players, the energy dropped much faster. Link City relies heavily on people being willing to explain strange logic out loud.
One thing we appreciated was that failed guesses still remained visible in the city. Wrong placements were not just forgotten after scoring. They stayed there permanently, usually in slightly inconvenient positions, reminding everyone about earlier mistakes. By the end of the game, certain badly placed tiles almost became running jokes.
Not every round landed equally well, though. Sometimes the drawn locations simply did not create very interesting discussions. A few turns ended with players shrugging because several answers sounded equally believable. Those reveals felt flatter than the rounds where somebody suddenly understood the mayor’s logic at the last second.
The white cone and bonus tiles helped the second half of the game considerably. Without them, the structure might have started feeling repetitive too early. Once extra locations entered the mix and construction directions started getting blocked, the city became much harder to extend cleanly. Our later rounds usually involved more hesitation and longer discussions because future placement suddenly mattered more.
The six-round length also felt right. By the end, it usually felt like we had played enough rounds without the idea wearing itself out.
Our Thoughts
Link City works best with groups that enjoy talking through strange logic together. People who enjoy table discussion and strange chains of reasoning will probably get more out of it than players looking for careful long-term planning.
What stayed with us most after several plays was not the scoring or whether we won. It was remembering certain ridiculous neighbourhoods that somehow ended up existing. The city becomes this strange shared creation full of accidental stories. Somebody places a circus next to a psychiatric clinic and suddenly everybody spends five minutes discussing whether that feels appropriate or deeply concerning.
There is also an interesting difference between players who try to be clever and players who try to be understandable. The best mayors were rarely the most creative ones. The strongest rounds usually came from people leaving clues that were unusual enough to be interesting, but still grounded enough that the table could follow the logic.
After enough plays with the same group, some habits start becoming predictable. Some players always think thematically. Others always connect locations through practical city planning. After enough sessions, parts of the puzzle become less surprising because players begin recognising how specific people tend to think.
Still, Link City avoids becoming exhausting because it stays short and keeps moving. The rules are easy to explain, setup is quick, and new players usually understand the idea almost immediately once the first round begins.
We would mostly bring this out with our family or players who enjoy discussing ideas more than calculating efficiency. It works especially well with people who enjoy talking through odd ideas and fully committing to them. There is something oddly entertaining about hearing somebody passionately argue why the alien embassy belongs next to the public swimming pool. Even when the explanation makes absolutely no sense.
📝 We received a copy of the game from Geronimo Games.
