Wouter & Ymke 
A stack of teacups becomes an apartment building, an old camera turns into someone’s home, and a watering can is suddenly a perfectly reasonable place to live. That’s the world of Minikin City, where everyday objects have been turned into places for tiny Minikins to live, work and gather. Over the course of the game, you’ll build your own little settlement from them.
It’s a lovely setting for a card game, and the little cities certainly look the part once they start filling up. There’s more going on than placing nice-looking cards in front of you, though. You’ll also be competing for rewards, picking new cards from a shared display and trying to make sure your city has enough inhabitants to actually score.
👥 2-5 players, ages 10+
⌛ Playing time: 30 minutes
📝 Designers: Simone Luciani & Matthieu Verdier
🎨 Artwork: Kerri Aitken
🏢 Publisher: Cranio Creations (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
A game of Minikin City lasts eight rounds. Everyone starts with six city cards and chooses four to keep. During the game, you’ll play these cards one by one to build your city. Most belong to one of three colours and have a numerical value, along with symbols, spaces for Minikins and different effects. Some effects happen immediately when you play the card, while others can score points at the end of the game.
At the start of each round, a display of new city cards is revealed, with one more card than there are players. The reward card for the current round determines the favoured colour. Starting with the first player and continuing clockwise, everyone plays one card from their hand into their city and resolves any immediate effect.
The played cards are then ranked. Cards matching the favoured colour come first, from highest to lowest value, followed by cards of the other colours, again according to value. Your position determines the reward you receive, which might be Minikins, a bonus token, victory points or cockades.
After receiving rewards, everyone chooses a new city card from the display in reverse ranking order. The player at the bottom chooses first, so the best reward comes with the latest choice of card. The remaining card goes back under the deck, and whoever finished first becomes the first player for the next round.
Minikins are needed to activate the scoring effects on many city cards. Whenever you gain them, they have to be placed immediately on empty spaces in your city. If you can’t place all of them, the extras wait in front of you and must fill available spaces on the next scoring card you play. Only scoring cards with all their required Minikins will give you their points at the end.
After eight rounds, everyone looks at the colour shown by the endgame tile and adds together the values of all matching cards still in their hand. This creates one final ranking and another set of rewards. Whoever finishes first may also play one additional city card from their hand. Final scoring includes points from rewards and bonus tokens, completed city card effects and cockades, which become worth more as you collect them. Whoever has the most victory points wins.
Artwork & Components
I think the first thing that caught my attention was seeing everyday objects turned into tiny buildings. Kerri Aitken has used cameras, books, sewing machines, globes, teacups and all sorts of other things as locations for the Minikins. Some are fairly simple conversions, others have lots of little details tucked into them. It looks as if the Minikins found whatever humans left lying around and simply claimed it.
The city cards use large areas of red, green and blue, so their colours are easy to recognise across the table. Some contain quite a few symbols and scoring conditions, but we didn’t have much trouble reading them once we’d played a game. As more cards and Minikins appear, the individual tableaux start to look like little settlements rather than rows of scoring cards.
Then there are the Minikin pawns themselves. Instead of generic meeples, they’re shaped pieces printed with individual characters. There are several designs, all functionally identical, but apparently that didn’t stop us spending time deciding which character should move into which building. It made absolutely no difference.
Everything else is fairly straightforward: reward cards, coloured player markers, bonus tokens, endgame tiles, and a scoring pad. Most of your attention ends up on the illustrated locations and their inhabitants anyway.
Our Experience
Our first game started with everyone paying quite a lot of attention to high numbers and the favoured colour. Then somebody finished near the bottom and took the exact card another player wanted from the display. That changed things rather quickly. There were plenty of rounds afterwards where we accepted a worse reward because choosing earlier was more useful. Trying to engineer a particular position wasn’t always successful, especially when several players appeared to have the same idea. We had rounds where everyone seemed determined to be bad at the same time.
Low-numbered cards weren’t automatically cards we wanted to get rid of either. Some had symbols or scoring effects that fitted our cities particularly well, and sometimes a poor ranking was exactly what we were aiming for. Our starting hands often suggested a direction. A few matching book symbols could make books look promising, for example, but there was no guarantee the display would cooperate. We usually kept a couple of possibilities open rather than committing everything to one symbol.
Minikins were sometimes in short supply in our games. We had scoring cards ready to go with nobody to put on them, so some promising combinations simply sat there unfinished. Immediate effects and Minikin rewards became useful when half the city was waiting to be populated.
There’s quite a lot of information sitting openly on the table. We found ourselves checking other players’ symbols and looking at which cards in the display would obviously suit them. Sometimes you could make a decent guess at what somebody was after; sometimes you couldn’t. We rarely took a card purely to deny it to someone else. With our own cities needing attention, there was usually a better use for the pick. The endgame colour also left us holding cards that we otherwise might have played earlier.
We preferred three and four players. More cards entered each ranking, and there was more competition for the display. At two, it was easier to predict where the cards would end up and which card the other player was likely to take. Turns remained fairly quick at every player count we tried.
Our Thoughts
We wouldn’t primarily describe Minikin City as a trick-taking game. There’s ranking-based card play at its centre, but no following suit and no traditional tricks to collect. The card you play stays in front of you and becomes part of your city. For us, a compact card game combining ranking-based card play with tableau building is a closer description.
The ranking and reverse drafting are the part we like most. They give you a reason to care about your position without making first place the answer every round. There were enough situations where we wanted the reward and the early card pick at the same time, and obviously we couldn’t have both. That’s where most of our interest in the card play came from.
The shared display can also ruin a promising combination simply because the right card never appears. There isn’t much you can do about that. It happened in several of our games, and occasionally left part of a city going nowhere. Building very heavily around one symbol therefore comes with a risk that isn’t entirely under your control.
The structure doesn’t change much between games either. Different opening hands, reward orders and displays send your city in other directions, but after several plays you know roughly what kind of game you’re going to get. We haven’t run out of combinations we want to try, but I can see the framework becoming familiar after enough plays.
I think Minikin City sits somewhere between a family card game and the smaller hobby games we bring out when we want something relatively quick without switching our brains off completely. It’s easy enough to get started, and there’s room to pay more attention to other players and future rounds if you want to. Anyone coming to it specifically for traditional trick-taking or lots of direct confrontation will probably be looking for something this game isn’t really trying to provide.
We preferred it with three or four players, and that’s probably how we’ll play it most often. There are still combinations we haven’t properly tried, and I still like seeing those little cities spread across the table by the end. It’s not a game we’re going to spend an entire evening analysing afterwards. We’ve enjoyed our plays, though, and I’m quite happy that there are more of them ahead.
📝 We received a copy of Minikin City from Cranio Creations.
