Last night I played the game Infinite City.

This was after playing a horrible game of Alhambra, which is more or less an Arabic Carcassonne, only less fun.

Infinite City is not infinite. There are a limited number of tiles. This disappointed me, because when you’re playing a game called Infinite City, you start wondering if you have a table big enough to play the game. People do not like when you call it Infinite Shitty.

So, it has really crappy ratings on BoardGameGeek, but I can say definitively after playing it – it seemed like it was fun. I say seemed, because nobody had played it correctly before, and nobody really knew how to win, and a last minute rule clarification right before I took the last turn caused me to go from last to second place, missing first place by a single point that the guy in first place didn’t know he should get.

The premise is that you’re building a city, which is not infinite, thus making the game a lie. Each tile that you use to build a city has some kind of rule on it that can cause you to modify other tiles, or the city, or your tokens, or someone else’s tokens, which you use to claim tiles. There are bonus points for doing certain things. You should wait to mention these things until right before my turn, which is the last turn of the game, due to another rule clarification. It really isn’t our fault – the rules are horribly written and open to lots of interpretation, and the only guy who had played it before had only played with his ten-year-old son.

The game has the capacity to be horribly unbalanced – it is feasible that you could play an entire game without having a single useful tile. I suspect this is why it rates so low on BGG.

Anyway, I think the game had potential. We’ll probably add it to our lunch rotation and see how it goes, since I’m currently on a 15-0 run in Carcassonne at lunchtime with co-workers. And I never want to Race for the Galaxy ever again.