Grayson and I have played it twice now, and it is a clever spin on building cities by creating walled areas, and scoring towns and "palaces" inside. It reminds me a lot of Carcassone, and has kind of a "reverse-area-control" thing going on with the cards. Rather than control the pieces on the board, they are open for any player to use if he has the right cards to play. It's one or two of your cards played during the scoring phase that determine how many points you make. You set up your cards ostensibly by placing walls, and having a limited choice over what color village (town?) piece to play. These are determine by die rolls, with three dice being thrown after placing the wall, and the colors representing what gets put on the board.
It was perhaps this mechanism that intrigued me most when considering the purchase of the game, as most German games do not use dice, although they often have random elements (typically cards or tile-pulls).
Like many other games, it will probably play best with folks who don't mind having only some control of the outcome. There is almost no way (that I can see) to interfere with the plans of your neighbor very much, although you can close cities down, or build in open areas, there are generally multiple plays for each player each turn - so it becomes a game of personal optimization on an open board, like a lot of Euros (German games).
It will probably only come out as a rare "desert" game, or such - I typically see it taking the space of a game of San Juan, Through the Desert
(I've bought three copies of this one), St. Petersburg, etc. Since I love those games so much (especially the first two), not sure if this will get a lot of play.Heading to visit Tab for the weekend, and we will probably play TtD and or Capitol if we play anything.
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