Ginkgopolis

15th January 2022

It's Wogglecon and the final game of the day was Ginkgopolis.
What's a Ginkgopolis? Good question, I guess it means Ginkgo city but what does Ginkgo mean? It's a type of tree, so Ginkgopolis must mean tree-city.

In Ginkgopolis, players take on the role city planners in tree-city and attempt to manage it's expansion, both outwards and upwards.

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What's in a game?

• ​Cards: Gingkopolis makes use of several different types of cards.
  Urbanisation cards: These 12 cards are labelled A-L and are used when expanding the city outwards.
  ​Character cards: These 27 cards provide players starting resources and they depict a personality, they may also confer bonuses when performing certain actions.
  Building cards: These cards come in 3 colours, red, yellow and blue and each relates to 1 of the game's key currencies, resources, building tiles and VPs respectively, (VPs can be spent as a currency in Ginkgopolis.).
  ​​Each set is also is numbered 1-20, thus there are 60 in total.
  At the bottom of each kind is a bonus it can confer on the owning player.
• Building tiles: There are also 60 building tile, also in the same 3 colours and each numbered 1-20. Buildings tiles are tied directly to their card counterparts.
• Tokens: The game uses several different types of token.
  Urbanisation tokens: These round tokens tie directly with the the urbanisation cards and thus are also labelled A-L.
  New hand tokens: The small round tokens show a hand of tokens and can be traded in by players to gain a new hand of cards during the game.
  Success tokens: VPs by any other name. These green tokens are stylistically shaped like the crown of a Ginkgo Biloba tree, a theme continued across the game.
• Screens: Each player will have a screen to hide their resources from other players. These are pretty standard three-fold card screens and on the outside, a futuristic undeveloped landscape is depicted, inside an iconographic guide displays the basic game rules.
• Resources: There are 25 wooden resources in each player colour and they are shaped like octagonal tubes, while they're not little cubes, octagonal tubes will do in a pinch.
• Meeples: The game makes use of pretty unique wooden crane or construction (The industrial sort, not the bird!) shaped meeples (Creeples?). These meeples are used to track construction over a round.

That's it for most components.

Ginkgopolis has solid components, the tiles and tokens are constructed from suitability thick, chunky card as are the screens, while the meeples and resources are wooden which is always appreciated.

The game makes good use of colour, effectively mixing primary colours with green and emphasising the ginkgo tree motif employed throughout.
Ginkgopolis' artwork is high quality, character cards are well illustrated with slightly cartoonish, colourful individuals that follow the game's red-yellow-blue and green theme, the same is true of the building cards/tiles which depict various different types of structures.

The iconography in Ginkgopolis is a bit strange, there's not too much of it and it's fairly simple to understand. However, due to Ginkgopolis' almost counter-intuitive rules, getting to grips with it took a little time. Nothing too bad though.

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How's it play?
Setup

• Starting tiles: Take the 9 building tiles numbered 1-3 in each colour and randomly put them into a face-up 3x3 grid.
  This is essentially represents what buildings there are at the beginning of the city.
• Building tiles: Shuffle the remaining build tiles into  any number of face-down stacks.
• Urbanisation tokens: Take the 12 urbanisation tokens and place them around the perimeter of the 3x3 board in alphabetical order.
• Starting deck: Take the 9 building cards numbered 1-3 in each colour (Identical to the building tiles setup in the 1st step.), then take the 12 urbanisation cards and shuffle them all into a face-down deck.
• Building cards: Take the remaining building cards, sort them by colour and put them into ascending order by their numbers.
• Players: Give each player the screen in their player colour and 2 new hand tokens, which should go behind the screen. Players do not initially get any resources, instead these are put into the central playing area.
• Character cards: Shuffle the character cards and deal 4 face-down to each player. All players choose 1 character card to keep face-down and pass the remaining cards leftwards.
  Continue until all players have 3 character cards, unselected cards are discarded out of the game.
  Players now reveal their 3 character cards which should be placed in front of their screen. Once these cards have been revealed, players gain starting items as indicated on the card. These could be resources, VP tokens or building tiles are all kept behind each player's screen.
• First player: Determine a first player. After this deal 4 cards from the building deck to each player face-down.
• New Hand: When a player is dealt cards, they may discard a new hand token to draw a new hand.

On to play

In the basic flow of actions in Ginkgopolis, players simultaneously put down cards and then resolve them in turn order.

• Play card: Each player puts a face-down card in front of their screen, they may also choose to play a face-down tile on top of that card. When all players have done that, play progresses to resolution.
  It's not quite as simple as that however.
• Resolution: ​Players now all reveal their cards which are then resolved in turn order.
  The action a card performs changes depending on whether a tile has been played with it or not.
• Playing a card without a tile: This action basically allows the player to gain one of the game's currencies.
  Urbanisation card: When this card is played without a tile, the player can gain a single resource token or building tile from the supply and place it behind their screen.
  The urbanisation card is then put into the discard pile.
  Building tile: If one of these is played without a tile, then the building on the card (Which will be on the grid of tiles.) is 'activated' and the player gains the related resource, be it resources, building tiles or resources. Furthermore, the 'taller' the building, the more resources the player acquires. More on building upwards below.
  The building card is then put into the discard pile
• Playing a card with a tile: This allows players to build outwards or upwards, depending on the card played.
  Urbanisation card: Playing a building tile along with a urbanisation card allows the player to build outwards. The tile is placed on the space with the urbanisation token that matches the letter on the urbanisation card that was played. Thus, if the D urbanisation card is played, the tile is played on the D token.
  The token is then moved further outwards, the city must always be ringed by the urbanisation tokens.
  Finally, any tiles orthogonally connected to the tile just played are immediately activated and the player acquires the related resources.
  The urbanisation card is then put into the discard pile.
  Building card: If a tile is played with a building card, then this allows the player to build upwards on a already existing building tile. There are some rules that govern this.
  The tile that was chosen must be played on top the building tile that corresponds to the building card that was played. If there are any resources on the tile about to be covered, the are returned to the owner's personal supply.
  The player must put resources of their own on the tile they are playing equal to the new level. If a building is going up to level 3, then the player must put 3 of their resources on top of it. If the tile being played is a different colour​ from the current tile, then the player must discard 1 resource to the central supply.
  Additionally; If the value of the tile being played is lower than the current tile, then the player must spent VPs equal to the difference. If a level 8 tile is played on a level 10 builds, the player would need to spend 2 VPs.
  Finally, it's very important that a construction meeple is placed on the newly built building tile and the building card is played in front of the player's screen and not put into the discard pile.
  Districts: When 2 or more buildings of the same colour are orthogonally connected, they form a district. Districts are very important for the end game scoring.
  
• Bonuses: Once a card's action has been resolved, the player should apply any bonuses they gain from the cards in front of their screen.
• Continue: Once all players have completed the actions on their cards, play progresses on.
  All players pass the 3 cards they did not play to their left, the first player card should be passed on.
  1 card is dealt from the building deck to all players, so everybody now has 4 cards again.
• Next round: Turns continue being played out until the building deck is depleted, in this case the following immediately occurs.
  ​All construction meeples are removed from the tiles they' were placed on and the card that corresponds to the tile is added to the building card. If a meeple was removed from the red 8 building tile, the red 8 building card is added to the building deck discard pile.
  All the building cards are then shuffled into a new building card deck, cards are dealt out as required and play progresses.
• Depleted building tiles: When the supply of building tiles becomes depleted for the first time, the following action occurs once only.
  ​Each player can donate building tiles to a new supply and receive a VP for each tile they donate.
  

Endgame
There are 2 ways in which Ginkgopolis can end.
If the building tile supply is depleted a second time or if a player has put all resource tokens on to the city.
In either case, the current round is resolved and the game goes to scoring.

VPs come from various sources in Ginkgopolis.

• VP tokens straight-up score their value.
• Cards with end game bonuses on cards may also score VPS.
• Each unused new hand token is worth 2 VPs.
• Finally, each districts is scored, that is areas where 2 or more buildings of the same colour are connected. This can be slightly complicated.
  All players with resources in a single districts count them up. The player with the most resources scores VPs equal to all the resources in that district. 2nd place gains VPs equal to the resources in that district of their colour only.
  If a district only has resources of 1 colour (I.e., from 1 player only.), then that player scores VPs for both 1st and second place, which means scoring 2 VPs per resource!
  

Points are tallied, highest score wins.

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Overall
​Firstly, one small fascinating thing about Ginkgopolis is how the game almost operates like a machine! Cards played to build something must not be put into the discard pile, otherwise they'll end up going back into circulation and later, players will end with cards in their hands that can't be used to either get currencies or build upwards.
Further to this, new buildings must be given a meeple so that players can track which new cards must be added to the building deck as again, it would leave players without cards to gain currencies or build.
Get this wrong and like a machine losing cogs, the game will begin grinding to a halt!
I don't know what kind of fevered imagination dreamt up this mechanic but it's both convoluted and brilliant!

​Ginkgopolis' rules are definitely a little counter-intuitive.
For example; when you play a card, that's not what you're building but what you're building on top of. Or after building something, getting to keep the card you used to build something.
Additionally; it took a little bit for me to wrap my head around the game. Remember:
Playing a card without a tile earns currencies.
Playing a card with a tile allows a player to build a tile.
I would also say Ginkgopolis is little fiddly for beginning player but none of this a dealbreaker, it's more an indicator of how Ginkgopolis feels a little unusual compared to other games I've played and I don't consider this a bad thing.

While there are various avenues to follow for scoring, I feel that the biggest source of VPs would come from controlling districts because it's possible to not only score your own resources but those of other players' too!
It can be quite hard to plan ahead though due to the card drafting and they'll be times when you'll want to play more than 1 card from your hand. It pushes you to make hard decisions (And hope the other cards come back around.), it means you have to adapt and spot situations you can exploit. It also means watching your neighbours and trying to gauge their objectives. There's quite a lot of player interaction that goes on and putting the right tile into play at the right time can dramatically alter the landscape. 

There's also an interesting strategy when deciding which tiles to put in the city. Putting a 20-value tile down makes it harder for other players to build over it, they'd have to pay VPs to build a lowered valued tile, or an extra resource to play a 20-value tile in a different colour.
On the other hand, keeping a 20-value tile back can give a player the opportunity to build over other higher value tiles later in the game.

The building outwards or upwards mechanics provide plenty of scope here. Expanding outwards can be easier (Provided a player gets the right urbanisation cards.) because a player need less resources and will also earn currencies when doing so. The downside is that it's easier for other players to build over your tiles.
The opposite is also sort of true, building upwards tends to be costly, but it's also more costly for other players to build over them.
Building tiles also puts the related card (And it's bonus action.) in to play in the player's personal area, creating the opportunity to combo actions into bonuses.

Players will need to balance the need to acquire currencies with the need to build tiles. However, as the city landscape and a player hand changes, so can the options to do either of these. Adaptation is vital and every decision can be critical

This made my choices feel meaningful when playing Ginkgopolis, which is always good. I'd say that Ginkgopolis is a mid-weight tile laying game with some fairly interactive area-control gameplay that gives players interesting and changing options.
It took a little time to warm to Ginkgopolis but I enjoyed the game and think it's worth giving a try.