Skyline

I used to play this a lot in my late 20’s, sadly not so much these days, anyone got any ideas?

Last weeks quiz picture was from Octopus' Garden quite a sweet tile laying game with some nice simple mechanisms and lovely artwork.

Part of the Forbidden Desert

Great Western Trail player board

Table 1 – Russian Railroads, The Bucket King

Table 2 – Forbidden Desert, Kakerlakensuppe, Cockroach Poker

Table 3 – Great Western Trail

Table 4 – Power Grid: The First Sparks, City of Spies: Estoril 1942, Flamme Rouge, Skyline

No time this week for anything in depth so I will cover Skyline a light filler game about building high rise buildings and which uses dice as the building blocks. The box contains three types of dice (base, middles and tops), some victory point tokens and a base board. A player may build three types of buildings, purple (2 high), blue buildings (2, 3 & 4 high), and orange buildings (3, 4, 5 & 6 high), a building must first have a base die, the player may then build a top on a purple base or blue and orange middles on their respective bases (these are all on the middle die) the top die has 2 blue tops, 1 orange top and three blank faces.

The different dice types

The centreboard showing what may be built

On a turn a player may choose any three dice or they may choose the “pool dice” which contains 1 of each type and any other dice that the players have placed there on their turn, they roll their chosen dice then may use as many of them as they wish for building, provided they build at least one block they may re-roll as many of the other dice as they wish, before re-rolling you may place any other dice they want to keep to one side this re-rolling process may continue so long as they build at least one die each time. Difficulties occur if they cannot build in such a case they have a choice, they may put a die in the “pool” or they may destroy one their buildings under construction. At any point in their turn after building or placing in the dice pool/destroying a building a player may stop their turn and returned unused dice to the correct dice piles. Any buildings completed collect the player points, the higher the better e.g. 2 stories 4 points, 4 stories 16 points, 6 stories 36 points.

A players position with several buildings partially built

The game lasts 9 turns, is short (about 10 minutes 2 players if they know the rules) so it is an ideal filler however I would say that the luck factor is very high, generally a player who is lucky enough to roll orange blocks will win, it is not a game that will set the world alight its rating is 6.0 on the geek and I do not feel it should be any higher.