There’s a weird number of card-based citybuilders out there. It’s a mash-up of genres that, on the surface, shouldn’t make sense, but then occasionally does, until you look at it too hard and realise it is, once again, not making sense. Having a city rely on cards removes the planning and aesthetic satisfaction of a citybuilder, while having a deck construct something solid and varied requires a different set of cards than a deckbuilder usually uses. It’s a combination that shouldn’t work.

And yet, I have a deep soft spot in my heart for them. There’s something about using cards to build a city that’s just satisfying. No one told the game it shouldn’t work, and so it doesn’t bother not to. It just does.

Tasers for Everybody indeed

Cardboard Town is a combination deckbuilder and citybuilder. Players build their city using a deck of cards, with the deck being frequently augmented with new cards and new abilities. Each card builds a particular building or completes a particular action. These buildings, in turn, require and provide resources, with the town’s continued survival being reliant on a steady positive flow of resources. Run out of too many resources or fail too many challenges, and the town self-implodes, ending the run.

One commonality across most deck-based citybuilders is cosiness, with these games relying on a generally cosy look and feel. Cardboard Town is no different, with its town at least visually being a cosy one. Beneath that, though, is a more complex set of gameplay mechanics, with timed cards and disasters providing more robust challenges than one might expect, given its outward appearance. Building a town requires balancing resources, building placement, and deck management, all of which are more difficult to manage than it feels like they ought to be.

One example of this is in the deck elements. Buildings are placed through playing cards, with each card having a resource and money cost. Most buildings can only be placed on roads, making roads and road infrastructure planning essential for the city to grow. Each deck starts with a certain number of roads, though over the course of the run, more and more cards are added to the deck, essentially diluting that number of roads and making it difficult for the city to expand.

The obvious solution to this in most deckbuilders is to provide ways to prune or cycle through the deck. Traditional deckbuilders allow the player to build decks specifically to draw and discard a large number of cards, while most deckbuilders provide at least some sort of engine for removing cards. Cardboard Town, while it does have some card removal, doesn’t have it to the degree needed to actually be able to prune the deck. Similarly, its card draw is abysmal, with players generally only being able to draw one or two cards per turn. In practice, this leads to decks that are filled with useless chaff and no way to move past them or weed them out. This, when combined with a limit on hand size, leads to a set-up where it’s easy to soft-lock a hand. It’s fully possible to have a hand with the maximum number of cards in hand, none of which are playable, and with no way to actually remove any of them. Barring this, it at the very least leads to sub-optimal play as players place buildings just for the sake of getting the card out of their hand.

Sometimes having to make suboptimal plays is a perfectly normal part of both deckbuilders and citybuilders. There are occasions where a city doesn’t come together quite like it’s supposed to, or where a deck just hasn’t come together quite right. The difference, however, is that those are conditions that can be worked through. It’s difficult to soft-lock either a deckbuilder or a citybuilder to the point of being unable to do anything. It happened in every run I played of Cardboard Town.

Exhibit A of "I do not like this hand and do not know what to do next."

This is the contradiction that bothers me with Cardboard Town. On the one hand, its aesthetic and general play is lovely. It’s highly reminiscent of Dorfromantik, and putting together a city is genuinely pleasant.

On the other hand, hanging over this cosiness is the knowledge that it will end, not because of a misplay on my part, but because the deck will become so filled with useless, unremovable chaff that I have no further options for how to actually play. Any city planning I do has a sword of Damocles dangling over it, knowing that my lovely set of parks and houses and libraries will soon have a power plant next door because there is nowhere else to put it and I need it out of my hand.

hello would you like to live next to the asphalt factory

I want very badly to like Cardboard Town. It’s cute, cosy, and very much lands in that particular way that only the combination of cards and city-planning can. However, it’s difficult to overlook that its very design is flawed to the point of the game being difficult in a way it was never meant to be. I find myself fighting the game and its mechanics more than I find myself enjoying the process of building a town, and in so doing, the town itself becomes doomed.

Developer: Stratera Games
Genre: City Builder, Deckbuilder
Year: 2023
Country: Turkiye
Language: English
Play Time: 1 hour/run
Playthrough: https://youtu.be/k8uyFWJFjTc