Machi Koro: Life Review – Is This New Machi Koro Worth Playing?

We built plenty of cities in the original Machi Koro, and apparently that wasn’t enough. In Machi Koro: Life, city planning has been replaced by something slightly more ambitious: deciding what to do with your life. You get jobs, pick up hobbies, make investments, build relationships, buy things and work towards dreams. Thankfully, all of this can be achieved with a handful of cards and some heart-shaped currency. Real life could learn something from this.

If you’ve played Machi Koro before, much of this will be familiar. Life isn’t simply the same game with different pictures on the cards, though. Your portfolio can head in several directions, other players regularly get involved, and dreams give you something specific to work towards. We played the original a lot more than ten years ago, so coming back to Machi Koro also brought back some memories for us.

👥 2-5 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designers: Masao Suganuma
🎨 Artwork: Noboru Hotta
🏢 Publisher: Pandasaurus Games (review copy provided)

Gameplay Overview

Everyone starts with five hearts, which you’ll use to put together your initial portfolio. Before the normal turns begin, you go around the table three times, with each player getting the chance to buy one card on each pass. You don’t have to buy something, and you can keep any hearts you don’t spend. You can therefore start the game with up to three cards, depending on what you choose and can afford.

On your turn, you choose to roll either one or two dice. Roll two and you add them together. The cards in your portfolio have activation numbers, and anything matching the result can activate. Roll a six, for example, and you start looking around for cards with a six on them.

Your roll doesn’t only concern you. Red job cards activate on an opponent’s turn and blue outdoor hobbies can activate on anyone’s turn. Green indoor hobbies and purple interaction cards activate on your own turn. If several types activate from the same roll, they’re resolved red, blue, green and then purple. So even when somebody else has the dice, there’s usually a reason to see what they roll. Sometimes it’s because you’re about to gain hearts. Sometimes it’s because you’re about to lose them.

After resolving the cards, you can spend your hearts on one card from the central display. That can be a life card for your portfolio or a dream card. If you reach this point with no hearts at all, you receive one heart before buying. You can also collect several copies of the same card unless it says otherwise, and those copies usually stack. Three copies means the effect happens three times when that card activates.

The display is split across four rows, separating lower and higher numbered life cards as well as different dream cards. Five unique cards are available in each row. Identical cards are stacked together instead of occupying another space, and the corresponding row is filled again after something is bought.

Dream cards are ultimately what you’re working towards. They cost hearts and provide VIP points, with some having their own conditions or effects. The first player to reach eight VIP points on their dream cards wins. So you can’t spend the whole game improving your portfolio and admiring how well it’s doing. Eventually, you have to spend those hearts on the things you supposedly wanted from life in the first place.

Artwork & Components

Machi Koro: Life is a very colourful game. The cards use simple illustrations and large areas of colour, covering jobs, hobbies, investments, relationships, homes and all the other things we’re apparently supposed to fit into one life. The four life card colours make the different types easy to recognise across the table. The yellow dream cards are easy to pick out as well.

Most of the box is cards: 80 life cards and 56 dream cards, alongside two six-sided dice and 80 plastic heart markers. There’s no large board in the middle. The card display sits between everyone, and your own portfolio gradually spreads out in front of you. Depending on your approach to organising cards, this can remain wonderfully tidy or turn into a small representation of your actual life.

The heart markers caught our attention more than I expected. They’re used instead of ordinary money, so you’re constantly handing little hearts back and forth as you buy jobs, investments and whatever else your new life apparently needs. Once the portfolios have grown, the table becomes a colourful collection of careers, hobbies and ambitions with hearts scattered between them.

The cards themselves are easy to read from your own side of the table. Activation numbers are prominent, which helps when you’re scanning everything after a roll. Things can get a little busy once everyone has accumulated a sizeable portfolio, although we never had much trouble finding what we needed.

Our Experience

Machi Koro has a bit of history in our family. More than ten years ago, it was one of the games we regularly played with our oldest son, who was six at the time. He’s sixteen now and has become an experienced board gamer himself. Sitting down with Machi Koro: Life together felt a little strange in the best possible way. Back then we were building cities. Now we were building lives, after quite a lot of actual life had happened in between. I don’t think the game was deliberately trying to make us feel old, but it succeeded anyway.

Getting back into Machi Koro was surprisingly easy. Our first game began with fairly modest portfolios and not much income. We’d gain a few hearts here, spend them there and slowly add more cards. Somewhere during the second half, that changed. A number would activate several cards at once and somebody suddenly had a pile of hearts in front of them. Dreams that had looked far too expensive earlier weren’t so ridiculous anymore. We had a few turns where our portfolios were paying out properly, and then somebody was already getting close to eight VIP points.

During that first game, I mostly looked at my own cards before deciding whether to roll one or two dice. That didn’t last long. Somebody else started earning considerably more from my rolls than I did, and suddenly there was a lot more looking across the table. In later games we’d regularly pick up two dice, inspect somebody else’s portfolio and put one of them back down again.

Of course, the single die could still roll exactly what they wanted.

We tried different player counts and three ended up being our favourite. There were enough rolls between our own turns for cards triggered by opponents to come into play regularly, and we didn’t spend much time waiting for something relevant to happen. Once we knew the cards better, we also became rather more suspicious of what everyone else was buying. Some effects moved hearts around. Others interfered directly with what somebody had built, and there were definitely moments when one person was considerably happier about a card than the person on the receiving end. Having someone interfere with your carefully planned life does feel annoyingly realistic.

By our third game, we were buying cards differently. In the first, we’d mostly picked whatever looked useful on its own. Later we tried spreading across more numbers in one game and piling onto the same few numbers in another. Sometimes the card we wanted disappeared before our turn and whatever plan we’d been forming went with it. Other times we got several cards lined up around exactly the numbers we wanted.

Then we’d roll something completely different three times in a row. It is still Machi Koro, after all.

Our Thoughts

I’m glad Machi Koro: Life hasn’t tried to turn Machi Koro into a substantially heavier game. You’re still rolling dice and hoping your numbers appear. There’s just more to look at around that familiar idea. We checked other portfolios more often than I remember doing in the original, and the available cards could easily pull us away from whatever we’d been planning. Then there’s the question of when you’ve built enough. Another life card can always look useful, especially when it promises more hearts, yet at some point you have to stop improving your income and actually buy the dreams that win the game.

The dreams are probably the part I like most. Your impressive collection of jobs and hobbies doesn’t win anything on its own. Dreams do. They can also have their own conditions and effects, so we weren’t only looking at how many VIP points we’d get for our hearts. What a dream did could matter too. I much prefer that to reaching the end of building an engine and simply converting whatever it produces into abstract points. Here, the things you’re buying at least feel connected to the life you’ve been putting together.

We haven’t settled on one way we want to build our portfolios either. Spreading across several numbers gives you more chances for something to happen. Concentrating on fewer can produce much larger payouts when those numbers finally appear, and cards that trigger during other players’ turns give you another option. You also can’t count on the right combination sitting in the display waiting for you. The dice engine underneath all of this is always recognisably Machi Koro. We’re not discovering a completely different game each time we play, nor do we need to. There are still cards and combinations we want to try.

The randomness is the main reservation. You can understand which results are more likely, spread your cards across several numbers and build what seems like a perfectly sensible portfolio. The dice can then spend several turns ignoring all of it. Meanwhile, somebody else might hit the same profitable number repeatedly. An early run of successful activations can make this worse: more hearts buy more cards, and those cards make later successful rolls worth even more. Interaction can sometimes slow somebody down, and reaching the buying step with no hearts gets you one from the bank. Neither prevents somebody’s economy from taking off when the dice happen to favour them.

For us, that’s part of Machi Koro rather than something we expect Life to fix. Sometimes several cards activate together and everything you’ve built suddenly looks wonderful. Sometimes your portfolio sits there doing very little as somebody across the table appears incapable of rolling a bad number. Players who want their decisions to have much more influence than luck may struggle with that. The direct interaction won’t suit everyone either, particularly if having hearts taken or cards interfered with tends to cause more irritation than laughter around your table.

For us, though, returning to Machi Koro after all these years reminded us why the original spent so much time on our table. We could play it with our son when he was six. Ten years and many hundreds of board games later, we can sit down with him again and still enjoy the same basic system for slightly different reasons. Life is still dependent on the dice and occasionally rather unfair. That’s fine with us here.

We used to build cities together with a six-year-old. Now we’re building lives with a sixteen-year-old who knows exactly what he’s doing around a board game table. It’s been genuinely nice to have Machi Koro back.

📝 We received a copy of Machi Koro: Life from Pandasaurus Games.