We recently got a game in of Citadels using a copy owned by a friend, and then another game at the club. In both cases we immediately wanted to play another game, which is always an indication of an excellent game.

At the beginning of each round of Citadels, the players pick from a selection of eight ‘character roles’, like the King, the Bishop, the Warlord and so on. Each of these roles affects your options during the round, as first of all the roles are numbered from one to eight, which determines the order in which each player takes their turn, depending on which role they picked.

The objective of the game is to build districts in your city, by collecting gold and paying gold to lay a ‘district’ card in front of you into your ‘city’. The cards include Docks, Taverns, Temples, Universities and such, colour coded into five colours. If one player builds eight districts, the game ends. I think it was one point per district, bonus points if you build eight districts or if you build a district of each colour.

All very simple really, but many of the character roles can put a spanner in the works. The Warlord can destroy a district per turn, the Bishop earns extra gold for blue districts, the Thief can steal gold from another character, the Assassin can murder another character, the Wizard can swap his cards with another player, and the Architect can build two districts per turn (the usual limit is one district).

The character roles are important is determining your strategy, because if you build several blue districts for example it is worth picking the Bishop, if you have a lot of spare gold you might want to pick the Architect. Bear in mind though that it is the King that makes the first choice of character, after which the other players pick their characters in a clockwise order.

This makes the King very useful, as he also gains one gold for each yellow district in your city, but he is also a target for the Assassin. The player that picks the Assassin has the first turn, at which point none of the other players will have revealed their characters, as you only do so when you have your turn. This means that the Assassin chooses to murder a character and not a player, similarly the Thief can only steal from a character, with the slight advantage of knowing who the Assassin is at that point.

So the Assassin is only useful if you can spot what characters a player is likely to pick based on the districts in their city, although it is always worthwhile killing the King or the Architect. Some players continue to pick the same character during the course of the game, so if they are winning or you just want to frustrate one of your friends it can be relatively easy to guess what character a player is going to pick.

There is an expansion called the Dark City Expansion, and the Fantasy Flight edition includes the expansion. It increases the player count to eight, and adds a new set of eight characters, which are slightly more complex, but definitely add lots of theme and strategy to the game. These characters are numbered one to eight, and it is recommended that they are used to partially replace some of the original characters.

The artwork on the cards is very pretty, and the art on the characters is very good, in some cases slightly caricatured in a suitably medieval fashion. The game usually moves along quickly, and only lags when players can’t pick what character to play. It has enough interactivity to mess with other players strategies, without stalling their progress, unless half of the players pick on one player in particular. Excellent game.