# 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?

*By YPB Team · Published October 13, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-city-building-board-game-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Suburbia**
   Ted Alspach's 2012 tile-laying game where you grow a borough by balancing income, reputation and population.
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. **Rebuilding Chicago**
   A WizKids game of rebuilding the Windy City after the Great Fire of 1871 through placing buildings on a shared map.
4. **Foundations of Rome**
   A dice-and-cube-tower game where players construct Roman monuments and districts from stacked blocks.
5. **Rolling Heights**
   A dice-drafting game where players erect skyscrapers and shape a rising city district for the most points.
6. **Antiquity**
   Splotter's brutal, deep game of managing a medieval city's resources, pollution and food supply across a growing map.
7. **Carcassonne**
   Klaus-Jurgen Wrede's modern classic where players lay tiles to build cities, roads and farms around a medieval fortress town.
8. **Catan**
   The gateway hit about trading resources to build roads, settlements and cities on a hex-tile island.
9. **Alhambra**
   Dirk Henn's Spiel des Jahres winner about buying tiles to build the walls and gardens of the famed Granada palace.
10. **Between Two Cities**
   A cooperative-competitive draft game where each player builds two cities with their neighbors at once.
11. **Imperial Settlers**
   A card-driven civilization builder where you grow your own settlement by constructing buildings and raiding rivals.
12. **Machi Koro**
   A light dice-and-card game of building a small town's businesses and landmarks to be first to finish.
13. **Tiny Towns**
   A puzzly resource-placement game where players arrange materials on a grid to construct a tidy little village.

Tags: strategy, board games, tabletop, city building