Each round a player adds a new city tile from her/his hand to the city, places a skyscraper or an ecology utility on one of the 4 spaces of the city tile and draws a new city tile. And it’s the players’ task to arrange these city tiles to create attractive districts. Not everything must fit when playing one tile next to another, but of course you’ll only be able to score if fulfillments are met. That’s where skyscrapers and utilities come into place: there are four different types of skyscrapers for each of the four different underground types of the game. So a skyscraper with the water symbol must be placed on a water field. Skyscrapers also have different heights from 3-12.

The higher the more victory points you will get, but only, if requirements are met. So, the height also tells you how many adjacent spaces of the same underground as the underground underneath the skyscraper you need, to fulfill conditions. Perhaps you can guess that this gets more and more difficult the more the game progresses. If on the one hand you have a 10-skyscraper on a green (meaning that you need 9 more adjacent greens for this) and a 6-skyscraper on a brown underground in the neighborhood, you can see that life is getting complex.

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Utilities on the other hand, have different conditions depending on the utility type. Some of them demand to arrange the adjacent underground tiles in a specific position, let’s say a L-form. Others must be placed on a specific position of the final city, e.g. on a corner city tile and still others have complex fulfilment conditions that depend on parks and sports facilities that can be found on some city fields.

What is easy at the beginning, can end in a disaster, because skyscrapers and utility that do not meet the requirements count as negative victory points in the same amount as their positive effect.

Neoville is a typical BLUE ORANGE product. And I say that in the most positive meaning! It’s attractive, easy to teach and learn, and is a lot of fun. City building was never easier, but on the same time, it’s kind of a puzzle if you really want to get as much as you can out of your city. In comparison to Kingdomino, I would say it’s slightly more complex, but nevertheless you can play it with the whole family again.