Boardgame Bulletin 24-2 ~ Shaking in the New Year with Shake that City (AEG, 2023)

Christmas and New Year’s was a bit of an adventure this year. Unlike previous years, all three of us who live at home are working five days a week while the youngest was home from college. This meant there were a few opportunities for gaming, but certainly less than I desired.

Shaking things up

It was hard to get the RockyMountainNavy Boys together for some gaming but we did get a Game Night in featuring Shake That City (AEG, 2023). This game is a tile-placement, puzzle-y game that I selected as my Family Game of the Year for 2023. This play proved once again why I made that call.

Shake that City is easy to teach and quick to learn. While every player starts with the same board, the rules for laying out the bonus tiles which keeps the same relative orientation to the first board means every board becomes different depending on where you sit. While my board may have scoring across the bottom and right sides, the player sitting across from me see that on their top and left sides. Likewise, a player sitting next to me at the table sees that those same scoring tiles on right and top.

The gimmick of Shake that City is, of course, the tile shaker. This small box lays out a pattern of nine cubes every turn. The active player picks a color that only they can use while the other players can pick cubes of any other color. The challenge is you must lay out matching tiles in the same relative orientation on your board.

It had been a while since we played Shake that City so the first game was a relearning play. The second game was full-on intensive. I warned my college boy that his brother, despite a history of learning challenges, has excellent spatial awareness and would clean our clocks. Sure enough, he did just that. Most importantly, though, we all got to spend just over an hour being a boardgaming family again.

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Feature image courtesy AEG

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