I’ve never made anything that’s been massively popular, and as a by product, I’ve never had to follow up a massively popular project. I have sympathy for those who have, like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, both of whom are authors who created excellent and popular book series, that have been dormant for a decade. I get it, suddenly, there are a lot of eyeballs on your work, and anything you do will be compared to your previous projects, and probably unfairly just because it doesn’t live up to the image that’s been conjured up in the mind of the fandom.

I sometimes wonder if Renier Knizia suffers from this. But before I even have a moment to speculate, another one of his game designs is announced to the world. My City: Roll & Build is the 2022 follow up to 2020’s My City, both published by KOSMOS. My City: Roll & Build takes the essence of My City and reduces it down to a much smaller package, and one that feels much more replayable.

In My City: Roll & Build, 1 to 6 players will create 12 unique cities by rolling dice and marking off the resultant shapes on their terrain sheet. The two blue dice contain a number of squares on each side, and every side has a little semicircle. Press the two semicircles together to reveal the shape you must plop into your city. Unlike My City however, you’re free to flip and rotate the shape of the building to your heart’s content; you’ll never be cursing that you got the wrong L shape, like I did in every game. The white dice, on the other hand, dictates the texture of the city which is important for scoring purposes. Like My City, each chapter of the game introduces a main mechanic, and every episode of the chapter builds upon and twists that mechanic.

Also like the parent game, everyone is given the exact same tools and situations. Everyone will draw the same shape at the same time, but it’s the decisions that each person makes that will spiral off into interesting and unique boards. There’s nearly no interactions between the players, and the ones that do exist are just “whoever can cover these spaces first gets an extra 5 points”. Which leads me nicely into the scoring, every individual game has slightly different scoring opportunities. In the first game, the only thing you really care about is covering rocks and empty spaces while not covering your trees. Throughout the campaign, you’ll be trying to cover plains tiles, gold ore, ensure churches are touching all 3 types of buildings, surround wells and bandits, and more! Every game you play will earn you a score, and your final score is assessed at the end by a table of results.

I’m generally not a fan of “score attack” types of games, and this is no different. I don’t really care about trying to break that 300 point threshold, and when I play against other players, I struggle to really care about who wins or loses each individual game. With no interaction, the competition feels hollow, but that’s okay. My City: Roll & Build doesn’t have to be a fiercely competitive game. I found a lot of joy just in just drawing my little buildings on my pads of paper. Overcoming the puzzle of how to jam as many pieces onto my board at a time.

Part of my apathy toward the scoring is that there can be large swings from play to play. Breaking past that 300 point upper threshold could be simple if you roll a lot of small buildings. Meanwhile, a string of bad luck can see half a dozen large C shapes that don’t work together and can cost you a whole games worth of points. It’s marginally better when you’re comparing your score against people who played the exact same game that you did, but trying to get a high score feels too luck dependant for me to invest my time into it. You can’t plan for a specific shape to enter into your city like you could in My City. Here, you’re at the whim of the dice rolls.,

My City: Roll & Build is a charming, calming little dice game that you can take anywhere. You don’t need to play through an entire 12 game campaign with the same group, playing a single chapter in 35 minutes is absolutely adequate to give a satisfying gameplay experience. It’s the kind of game that I’d play on the train, or plane with friends or intrested strangers. The moment to moment decisions of drawing buildings, and the elation when the perfect building gets rolled feels great. While I still prefer the larger My City experience as it felt more tense with the tile placement restrictions, and the tactile nature of tiles is more satisfying for me, there’s space for My City: Roll & Build to exist on nearly any shelf.