Wouter & Ymke 
Building a town sounds simple enough. Put down some buildings, make them taller and eventually stand back to admire your work. Upside Town has other ideas. Its buildings are made from magnetic units with different polarities, so some pieces simply refuse to sit on top of each other. Even the construction sites have their own polarity. Apparently the planning department wasn’t enough of an obstacle, so physics decided to get involved as well.
Upside Town is a game in which everyone develops their own street of five buildings. Rather than trying to create the largest or prettiest town, you’re constantly changing those buildings to complete contracts showing different skyline patterns. Build something, score it, then probably change it again. That’s basically life in Upside Town, and there’s more going on in that process than we initially expected.
The game is set to launch at Spiel Essen ‘26, where you’ll find PlayByDesign in Hall 5, booth G400.
👥 1-4 players, ages 8+
⌛ Playing time: 25-40 minutes
📝 Designer: Quentin Quek
🎨 Artwork: Supatcha Kleeppratum
🏢 Publisher: PlayByDesign (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Everyone starts with their own street containing five construction sites and a small storage area for building units. There are three types of units: singles, doubles and triples, representing one, two and three building levels. Storage is limited to four units, so you can’t simply collect everything you might need and worry about construction later.
The magnets determine how those pieces can be combined. Singles have a positive pole on one side and a negative pole on the other, so they can be flipped to fit. Doubles have positive poles at both ends, while triples have negative poles at both ends. This means two doubles can’t be stacked directly on each other, and neither can two triples. The five construction sites also have starting polarities, determining which pieces can begin each building. Once you’ve built something, you can’t simply flip or rearrange those units without demolishing them first.
Each turn gives you two main actions, and you’re allowed to repeat an action. You can take a single from the supply, upgrade a unit in storage, split one into smaller units, build any number of stored units, demolish part or all of one building, or take a contract. Upgrading turns a single into a double or a double into a triple, while splitting works in the other direction. You can have up to three unfinished contracts at once.
Those contracts are what you’re building towards. Each shows a pattern of building heights that needs to appear on your street. You’re counting levels rather than looking at the exact pieces inside a tower, so the colours and orientation don’t matter for completing the contract. Once the required pattern is there, completing the contract is a free action. You take any building units or free construction token shown on the card, then place the contract in your scoring pile.
Contracts come in two tiers. Pink tier 1 contracts are worth fewer prestige points but generally give you more building units. Blue tier 2 contracts score more points, provide fewer units and also give you a free construction token. These tokens can be spent to build or demolish without using one of your two main actions. The advanced game adds town view cards, where each player chooses a personal objective showing a complete five-building skyline. Special projects add three shared end-game objectives based on things such as a specific building, the types of units remaining in your street, or the polarity showing on top of your buildings.
The end of the game is triggered when either contract draw deck runs out. Everyone finishes the current round so all players have had the same number of turns, then there’s one final round. Completed contracts, town views and any applicable special projects provide your final prestige points. There’s also a solo game, where you get twelve turns while contracts automatically move through the display after every turn.
Artwork & Components
The first thing we noticed when opening Upside Town was obviously the building units. There are 50 magnetic pieces in the box, divided into 28 singles, 12 doubles and 10 triples. They’re chunky black blocks with red, orange or cyan sections showing their size, and they feel quite different from the usual wooden houses or plastic buildings. The pieces in our preview copy are 3D-printed prototypes, so you can still see the printing layers on them. These aren’t the final production components, though, so keep that in mind when looking at our photos.
And yes, playing with the magnets is fun. I mean, they’re magnets. There was inevitably some unnecessary clicking together of pieces before we’d even finished setting up. More importantly, you can physically feel the polarity rule. Put two incompatible ends together and they’ll push apart, so this isn’t something you constantly need to check on a player aid.
The rest of the presentation uses mostly black backgrounds with pink, blue, orange and purple highlights. The contract cards are easy to separate by type, and their building diagrams closely resemble what you’re creating on the table. Small illustrations of streets, trees and cars run along the bottom of the cards and across the player streets. They’re easy to miss when you’re concentrating on the numbers, but we like that they’re there.
The individual streets were probably our favourite part after the magnets themselves. They’re long, narrow boards with five magnetic construction sites, road markings and tiny vehicles between them. Once everyone has been building for a while, you get several little striped skylines facing each other across the table. They’re not exactly realistic city centres, but they do look good together.
Our Experience
Upside Town was easy for us to get into, although we weren’t particularly good at it at first. The magnets quickly showed us what could and couldn’t connect, so our first game wasn’t spent checking the construction rules every few minutes. Instead, we happily picked contracts that looked easy, built exactly what they asked for and scored them. The problem was that our street afterwards was often rather useless for whatever we wanted to do next.
By our second game, we were comparing several contracts before taking one. A contract worth fewer points suddenly looked much better when its buildings were almost identical to another one in the display. We had turns where one building changed, a contract was completed, another piece went down and suddenly another contract was possible as well. Free construction tokens were especially handy for this. Sometimes we’d spot a combination only for the player before us to take one of the cards.
We also stopped treating completed buildings with much respect. Early on, demolishing a tower we’d just spent time creating felt slightly wrong. A few games later, buildings were coming down all over the place. Our streets could look quite impressive at one point and strangely unfinished a turn later, but that didn’t really matter. The contracts were already scored.
We kept making buildings that were technically correct but annoying afterwards too. A four-level tower might complete a contract perfectly, only for us to realise that we’d used exactly the wrong combination of pieces for what we wanted to do next. Later on, we paid much more attention to what was actually inside each building. Same height, very different problem. Town views and special projects gave us a few other things to watch at the same time, and after introducing them we preferred keeping them in. A special project could be enough to save a building that otherwise would’ve been demolished without a second thought.
Most of the time we were looking at our own five buildings. We occasionally took a contract somebody else clearly wanted, and once we knew the game a little better, it became easier to recognise when another player’s street was suspiciously close to one of the available cards. That’s about as confrontational as our games became. Player count didn’t change much for us beyond the length of the game and how quickly cards disappeared.
Our Thoughts
The magnets were the first thing we wanted to play around with when we opened the box, but they’re not the part we found ourselves thinking about afterwards. They aren’t just holding the buildings together. The polarity actually decides what you can construct, and putting the wrong pieces together makes them push each other away rather than leaving you to remember another restriction from the rulebook.
Calling Upside Town a town-building game can give slightly the wrong impression. You’re not developing a city that gradually becomes bigger and better. What you’ve built can disappear again almost immediately, and at the end your street isn’t necessarily some grand monument to everything you’ve achieved. We don’t mind that at all, but someone wanting that feeling of developing and protecting their own little city may find the theme a bit misleading. Here, the completed contracts are a better record of what you’ve accomplished than the buildings still standing in front of you.
The contract display can be lucky. Sometimes a new card appears and somebody basically already has it. That’s a little annoying when you’ve spent several turns preparing something else. Your existing street still has a large influence on how useful that card is, but the occasional easy contract is definitely there. We’re more curious about long-term variety. Once you’ve seen the contracts often enough, you’ll naturally start recognising certain useful combinations. The additional objectives change what you’re aiming for, but you’re still manipulating the same five buildings and matching patterns. How long that stays interesting will depend quite heavily on how much you enjoy that particular puzzle.
The limited interaction is easier to judge. You can take a contract somebody wants and read their street to see what they’re likely to do, but you can’t mess with their actual buildings. For us that was fine, since most of our attention was on figuring out our own street anyway. We can also see the game slowing down with someone who wants to mentally test every possible arrangement before doing anything, because there can be quite a few ways to reach the same building heights.
What stayed with us most is that the magnets aren’t separate from the rest of the game. They’re the reason one version of a four-level tower can be more useful than another, and why a piece that looks perfect for the height you need might be rather inconvenient afterwards. If you enjoy looking at several objectives and trying to work out how one can lead into the next, that’s where Upside Town works best for us. If you mainly want to watch your city steadily grow, or want other players constantly interfering with it, this isn’t really that kind of town-building game.
We came away more positive after several plays than we were after the first one. Not because Upside Town suddenly became something different, but because we started seeing things we’d completely ignored before. Spotting two or three contracts that could work together, then actually managing to make that sequence happen, was where we had the most fun. By our later games, we were spending less time asking, “Can I build this?” and much more time asking, “What can I turn it into afterwards?” That’s probably the best indication of why we’d happily bring those little magnetic buildings back to the table.
📝 We received a copy of Upside Town from the publisher, PlayByDesign.
Going to Spiel Essen ’26? You can find Upside Town at PlayByDesign in Hall 5, booth G400.
You can also find all of our pre-Spiel ’26 coverage here.
