Rebuilding Chicago is the sequel to the thematically similar Rebuilding Seattle, released in 2023. The premise is that following the great fire of Chicago in 1871, the city needs building back up and its citizens need appeasing (they are obviously a bit grumpy after seeing their city burn down) and to do this you must build amenities so the citizens have stuff to do like go shopping, dine out and the place needs to look nice so it needs monuments, special buildings and you need to clear the rubble.
Rubble is, after all, unsightly, and some of the points in the game are gained or lost based on aesthetics - clear the rubble and build nice things. We were originally attracted to the game after seeing one of Paul Grogan’s excellent playthroughs; he really does set the standard now for tutorial and playthrough videos. My playing partner prefers games set more in the reality space rather than the fantasy space, so it went on pre-order, and it arrived not long after we got back from UKGE, and it hit the table.
How it Plays
The game is played over three rounds and the difficulty is based on the number of “unhappy” people you have to appease - standard difficulty has 12 unhappy people that need satisfying in each of the three rounds, and to do this you need to build restaurants, nightclubs and shopping precincts and this will increase your appeal to the citizens and close the gap between happy and unhappy people- this is really important when it comes to scoring which can happen at any time and is one way to gain an advantage on your opponents but you have to time this right as you don’t want to leave yourself too far behind before triggering scoring.
Scoring is also influenced by the quality of the activity your citizens are experiencing. This can be improved via playing the purchased cards or a main selection card - the better the quality, the better your score and importantly the lower the impact of the gap between the number of unhappy citizens and your building level when you score that particular activity - it is probably the most complicated element of the rules, which by and large are well written and easy to pick up - this was unboxed and played through first time with no dramas.
You drive your gameplay ambitions by either purchasing and playing cards from a row of increasingly costly cards or via central cards that affect each player. You can, for example, select an event to place a nightclub, increase your appeal, and then everyone scores the blue scoring track, or place new district tiles, and similarly, all players get to do the selected activity. Player interaction is good when playing the shared cards from the table.
This is the most fun part of the game - random tile selection and placing your tiles to expand your city is a challenge of tessellation (great word!). You have to connect different areas of your board to achieve greater coverage - but expand too soon, and you can fall foul of the On The World Stage card, which compares your rubble to your monuments and can be very punitive the further into the game you go. Expand too soon and don’t cover your rubble, and you can be in Barney (Barney Rubble….? Trouble…!). Each district tile you place has rubble on it, but you need tiles to build more buildings and increase your appeal, so there is always the expand or consolidate decision.
The game doesn’t really have much jeopardy hence why I’m classing this more as a light to medium level game, new gamers could pick this up, and grasp it pretty quickly and whilst you might not be able to grab the market card you quite wanted, there are so many cards (perhaps too many) to not be able to usually place the building type you need to place to improve your appeal or meet your end game scoring needs.
There has clearly been a lot of thought put into the shape and icon distribution of the district tiles and the shapes of the buildings you can place, and whilst it does introduce a bit of randomness, you can always place your new district tiles. Hence again, why I don’t rank the game as particularly challenging or precarious - there is no real jeopardy, money can be tight but not obstructively so if you plan or place your buildings well, and there are lots of opportunities from the cards to improve your experience quality to improve your
scoring or economy.
An area that we’ve found a little weak are the end game scoring rewards from market cards and end of round bonuses from the same market cards they don’t quite feel rewarding enough to warrant them as a purchasing priority - 2 extra points or 2 extra money at the end of a round versus say 2 quality improvement steps on a quality track is not a difficult choice, the latter will always take precedent. If the end-of-game or round rewards were a little stronger, it would make for a different decision quandary.
So far so good then, it's fun to play, it's not too taxing, it's intuitive, and with lots of crossover player involvement from card selection, there isn’t huge downtime.
There are a few issues with this game, though. Firstly, it doesn’t feel thematically intuitive somehow. What I mean is, if I were a resident of a city that had just had a major disaster, would I be unhappy at the absence of nightclubs and fancy restaurants…I’m not sure I would. Maybe I’m out of touch with the needs of the historic residents of Chicago, perhaps Michelin stars and a good foxtrot were high on their needs, but I would have thought essentials were more important, like schools, hospitals, markets, not shopping and monuments…so, thematically this game leaves me dry at having to appease unhappy residents longing for a good night out or the latest handbag.
The Components
And then there are the components. Everything is nice and functional, the asymmetric boards are okay, but could they have been dual-boarded instead of cut out? A bit more stable on the surface when you are trying to place buildings or district tiles, which can be fiddly, or keep your tiny meeples in the right place. That would have helped.
The box inserts are great for storing the tiles, money, and cards, but when you have all the tiles in the bag and the inserts and special building tiles, the box doesn’t close properly. That is so frustrating. But by far the biggest gripe is the special building tiles. These are the high-scoring, high-cost buildings that come with end-game points and a placement challenge due to their size and shape.
The problem with these tiles is the image design. For most of them, you can’t tell what they are supposed to be - is it a building? A market? a sports ground? In an effort to offer design variety, in most cases, half the image is missing - the baseball field, for example, is half a baseball field. It’s a bit of a reflection of the game as a whole for me, too much feels like an afterthought or even half a thought. Why have different special buildings and then chop half the image off? Why have so many district tiles that once punched, you can’t fit them back in the box (this is by no means the only game guilty of this), but it feels a tad contradictory - two great storage units for tiles and cards, and then dump everything else in the box (if you can).
Overall Thoughts
All this, when taken into context of what I’ve said about the theming, the difficulty (our very first game on normal difficulty, we scored 200+ points each), level, and lack of jeopardy, has left us feeling, well, a bit underwhelmed. It's not a bad game; the gameplay is generally good, it’s fun, it's quick to pick up and play, and it all feels intuitive when you buy cards, place your districts and buildings, and not every game has to be migraine-inducing to be highly rated or brilliant.
But this feels like 80% of a game. The production and components feel a bit on the economic side, the money is unimaginative, the player boards and meeples are fiddly and easily knocked or nudged, and the special buildings just don’t feel special or complete for that matter. And then there is the theme, the biggest issue for me by far. I want to rebuild Chicago, but I’m not bothered to rebuild it with dancehalls and shopping malls; it’s a major flaw for me. Rebuilding a disaster-struck city for me feels like you should be building infrastructure and essentials. Three years after Rebuilding Seattle, this is a light re-imagining, not a new concept. Given that a lot of this is not new, I feel like they could have gone a bit further with the production.
So, who is this for? It's for those who want a fun, not too taxing, easy-going tile-laying, jeopardy-free experience. That is totally fine. It's not particularly deep or strategic, aside from a few key choices.
Around your timing. It’s quite interactive and as it plays up to 5, higher numbers might provide alternative challenges - refreshing the market, for example, would become much more important.
We will play Rebuilding Chicago again for many of the reasons above, but after a dozen or so plays, it goes back on the shelf for now and will most probably come out when we have casual gamer friends round, as it doesn’t provide the level of challenge that more serious gamers might be looking for.
