Paris: La Cité de Lumière is a short but involved two-player game from 2019, bringing polyominos, tile-laying, and a unique drafting mechanism into a tight 30-minute playing time. It received a major expansion late last year in Paris: Eiffel, which debuted at Gen Con 2021 but hit the mass market this year, bringing further scoring cards to allow players to change strategies – but it doesn’t address my core issue with the game, the way the drafting forces you to potentially stop selecting building tiles.
Each player begins the game with eight square cobblestone tiles, each of which is divided into four squares that can be blue, orange, or purple, or just show a streetlight. One player is blue and the other is orange, while purple squares can belong to either player; you can only place a building on squares of your color or grey. In phase one, you may either place one of your cobblestone tiles on the game board, which is actually set inside the bottom of the box, or take one of the polyomino-shaped building tiles from the supply – but once you’ve placed all 8 of your tiles, you can’t take another building.
In phase two, players alternate placing the building tiles they’ve taken on to the board. There are also eight Action cards placed around the board/box in each game, out of a set of 12 possible cards in the base game, which you can use to gain additional points or sometimes violate some of the rules of the game; each player has four action tokens that they will use to claim those cards during this phase, and once used a card can’t be reused. At game-end, you score for each of your buildings that is adjacent to a streetlight, earning the product of the number of lights and the number of squares covered by that building; and for your largest contiguous group of buildings, one point per square. You also gain a point for each postcard you used that shows a stamp, and lose 3 points for each building you took but failed to place (surprisingly easy to do).
The postcards are a huge part of the game because they’re so powerful. One allows you to place a fountain tile on cobblestones of your color or the neutral color, and then you get 3 points for each of your buildings that touches it. Another gives you a giant streetlight that lights up buildings two squares away rather than just adjacent spaces. Another gives you a purple cobblestone to place on a square of your opponent’s color, after which you immediately place a building on it. The game comes with a recommended set of eight cards for your first game or two, leaving some of the cards with complicated scoring for experienced players, although I don’t think there’s that much of a gap.
Paris: Eiffel adds eight more action cards, mostly based on actual landmark buildings in the city, and add new ways to score along with 3-D cardboard buildings you might place on the board. You still use just eight cards in the game, but can now mix and match from 20 choices rather than 12. The Eiffel Tower card lets you place the tower on a 4×4 area that contains at least one streetlight, after which those lights double their point value for scoring, while you also get two points for squares of your player color under the tower. The Obelisk (found in the Place de la Concorde) gives each player two points for every building they place that falls in the same row or column as the obelisk sits. Notre Dame and the Catacombs let you piggyback on one of your opponents’ buildings for more points or to count it in your largest building group. Quartres Pauvières lets you score for the number of board edges your buildings touch – 1, 2, 4, or 8 points.
The soring is definitely point salad-y, although the cards mean that the players get to pick their own scoring methods to some extent, and I think that’s probably the game’s greatest strength. It’s a novel approach to the asymmetrical two-player game. The weird drafting mechanism at the start just sinks the game for me, unfortunately. People do really love this game, though – it’s highly rated on BGG, which skews towards more complex games, but also has sold well enough to merit an expansion. It just isn’t my cup of thé.