Legacy games get a bad rap around my table. I’ve started more than half a dozen and completed only 2. It seems my thirst for discovery goes beyond incremental rule changes and I find it burdensome to feel the obligation to play a game, rather than picking it because it’s the game that I want to play. And yet, I still feel compelled to embark on these endeavors. Lured in by the promise of changing gameplay, an immersive story, and long term ramifications, I keep coming back to these legacy games hoping to find the one that shows me what I’ve been missing all this time.

My City by Reiner Knizia and published by KOSMOS is a 2 – 4 player tile laying legacy game that takes place over 24 games, broken into 8 chapters. Each chapter of the game introduces a new mechanic or a new major rule change, and each of the games within that chapter slowly increase the complexity or add wrinkles for you to contend with. It’s a little intimidating at first, hearing that you’ll have to play this game 24 times to see it through to the end, but each game only lasts between 15 and 30 minutes, making it simple to plow through 3 games in a single sitting, if you have the stomach for ever-changing rule-sets.

The gameplay of My City is smooth as butter. A card is flipped over, and all players need to place the tile that’s depicted on that card. Your first building needs to be adjacent to the river, and every subsequent tile must be adjacent to another building tile. The pieces range from little 2 square tiles, all the way up to pentominoes, 5 sided giant C shapes that you’ll struggle to fit into your commune. You can choose to pass, and give up a point, if the tile doesn’t fit, or if you simply don’t like the cut of that tile’s jib. You do lose a point for doing so, however.

So what’s the point of placing tiles? Well, your player board is littered with trees, rocks, and empty plains. You’ll try to cover all the rocks and empty tiles, while keeping your beautiful foliage intact. At the end of the first game, you’ll earn 2 points for every tree still standing, and lose 2 points for every rock marring your landscape, and 1 point for wasted, empty spaces.

As the campaign goes on, more and more scoring rules are folded in. You start scoring a point for your largest contiguous group of same coloured buildings, 4 points for 4 different buildings surrounding a well, unpassable churches that offer 3 points if it’s adjacent to all 3 colours. Thankfully, mercifully, it isn’t all rise. There reaches a point whereas new rules come in, old rules start to get pushed out. This helps reduce the cognitive load on players, as they try to remember the dozen different ways the game is offering points to you.

After each play, the winners are generally awarded something that will make their life harder, like more stones they need to sticker onto their board, while the lowest scoring players get a boon, like a tree that makes your board inherently more valuable, assuming you don’t bulldoze that bonus coniferous to make way for the blooming blue district that’s up and coming.

You’ll also earn mysterious little circles that you mark off along the top of your board. I don’t think it was spelled out during the start of the game, but the player who accumulates the most of these circles will be the victor of the whole campaign.

Playing My City is a fast and pleasant affair. Some chapters have players racing to cover two spots first, but beyond that, there’s nothing stopping you from just enjoying your own little game and comparing the scores at the end. You’ll curse the fact that you have the wrong Z or L shaped tile, no matter which one you’re trying to place. You’ll wish they were reversible as you place the tiles, making awkward shapes on your board. In the same vein, when the perfect piece gets flipped, and that tile slides in like a glove, connecting all the buildings of the same colour, it’s majestic. The rule changes keep the game feeling fresh and offer new wrinkles that flex the system in ways it might not expect.

I honestly thought my family would love this game. I picked up a brand-new copy, brought it out at Christmas with my wife and my mom, and going into the third game they both were annoyed that the rules kept changing. “Why can’t we play the same game?” they asked, apparently not understanding the whole point of a legacy game is for things to change from play to play.

My regular game group, on the other hand, played through this whole campaign, using the games are lovely little end caps of our evenings. After a much heavier game had wrapped, we cooled off with a game or two of My City, and it was the perfect way to experience this charming game. I don’t know if there’s a way to become good or skilled at My City, and I couldn’t tell you why I won some games and lost others, but it’s just plain enjoyable to fit little cardboard tiles together, like a jigsaw. When we got to the final game, I felt the whole experience ended with a sigh or a whimper, rather than a bombastic finale. It just, ended. The player who accumulated the most circles won, and we knew who that was going to be by the time chapter 5 concluded. There were no dramatic upsets, no surprise twists, just, the end.

My City offers an eternal variant, where you use the reverse side of the board for one-off games. It’s the mode I use with my family, but that mode would never be my first choice. In that same breath, I recognize that I can’t start a 24 game campaign with everyone who sits down at my table.

While the ending of the campaign left me wanting more, I remain charmed by My City. If you like polyomino tile laying games, My City is a no-brainer.

We call this one ‘Big Plus-y”. You always need to leave room in your city for Big Plus-y.