Urbion (BGG Link)

I got to play Z-man Games Urbion this past Saturday in 2-player mode twice. First off, this game is strange. Didn’t quite follow what exactly was going on with the theme. To make matters even worse, the rules were terribly written IMHO. However, we did finally get through the rules and found that the game was fairly decent. In fact we played it twice. Unfortunately, we lost both times. You really need to be pretty darn lucky in order to win this game… unless we were doing something wrong. In the two player version, both players are working to bring balance to the cities. They alternate playing cards that match the city symbols. One player plays “nightmares”. The other player plays “dreams”. When the sum of the cards are equal on both sides, then the city can be claimed. Ideally, you want multiple cities ready for claiming before invoking that action via discarding a dream card.  Both players lose if the dream deck runs out. Both players win if they claim all of the cities.

In closing, I think if the rules were better written, this would have been a pretty good light solo or co-op dual card game. Would I buy it? Hmm, not to sure about that.

Rating: 6/10