What is the best city-building board game of all time?

From sprawling suburbs and mad castles to ancient hubs and tidy villages, these tabletop builders span quick family fillers and brain-burning heavyweights. Which one gets your vote?

1. 1
   Suburbia

   Ted Alspach's 2012 tile-laying game where you grow a borough by balancing income, reputation and population.
2. 2
   Castles of the Mad King Ludwig

   A 2014 tile-placement game in which players build an ever-stranger castle to please a capricious king.
3. 3
   Rebuilding Chicago

   A WizKids game of rebuilding the Windy City after the Great Fire of 1871 through placing buildings on a shared map.
4. 4
   Foundations of Rome

   A dice-and-cube-tower game where players construct Roman monuments and districts from stacked blocks.
5. 5
   Rolling Heights

   A dice-drafting game where players erect skyscrapers and shape a rising city district for the most points.
6. 6
   Antiquity

   Splotter's brutal, deep game of managing a medieval city's resources, pollution and food supply across a growing map.
7. 7
   Carcassonne

   Klaus-Jurgen Wrede's modern classic where players lay tiles to build cities, roads and farms around a medieval fortress town.
8. 8
   Catan

   The gateway hit about trading resources to build roads, settlements and cities on a hex-tile island.
9. 9
   Alhambra

   Dirk Henn's Spiel des Jahres winner about buying tiles to build the walls and gardens of the famed Granada palace.
10. 10
    Between Two Cities

    A cooperative-competitive draft game where each player builds two cities with their neighbors at once.
11. 11
    Imperial Settlers

    A card-driven civilization builder where you grow your own settlement by constructing buildings and raiding rivals.
12. 12
    Machi Koro

    A light dice-and-card game of building a small town's businesses and landmarks to be first to finish.
13. 13
    Tiny Towns

    A puzzly resource-placement game where players arrange materials on a grid to construct a tidy little village.

Comments