Ginkgopolis

The story of Ginkgopolis is that somewhere in the distant future, you are architects charged with building a sustainable city (Ginkgopolis itself).

The game is played by the placement of three different types of tiles (red, blue, yellow) in an ever-growing expansion in the middle of the play area representing the city. At the start of the game, Ginkgopolis is represented by a 3×3 grid of tiles, with both columns and rows bookended by letters A through to L. Players are dealt a hand of cards and tiles that they keep behind their screen, and play proceeds with each player, on their turn, taking one of three possible actions:

You can play a card by itself, representing the use of a building in the city. Red buildings give you resources, blue buildings supply tiles, and yellow buildings simply produce victory points. Cards also have alluring bonuses, that help increase your income when playing subsequent cards, as one card triggers another.

You can play a card with a tile. In this case, the card dictates (via the letters by the rows and columns) where you can place the tile, as you add it to the expanding city and place resources on it to show this tile is – currently – under your control. When you build in this way, you get to use adjacent buildings, which again gets you points, resources, or tiles.

Finally you can also play a tile that goes on top of a previously laid tile in the city by playing a card that matches the number of a building already constructed. The catch is that having done so, you need to place an amount of resources in the building that matches its level – so two resources for level two, three for level three and so on. The numbered building will usually be higher than the building you’re going on top of – you can place a lower-numbered building, but the cost is somewhat prohibitive. It’s also – crucially, as we’ll explain below – possible to build over other players buildings in this way, removing their resources from the board in the process (though they do get some consolation points for being displaced).

But what are you doing all this in aid of? Well, come the end of the game (either when a player runs out of resources, or when the tiles are used up) players will score for points collected during the game, any points bonuses on their played cards, and for control of areas in the city, which is defined by having the most resources in any contiguous area of the same type (red/blue/yellow) of building. So key to the victory is managing your presence in the city, and manipulating the layout in your favour as much as you can…