Machi Koro
Review

Machi Koro (2012) is a world-building game where you create a thriving city full of different buildings and landmarks. You play by rolling dice, collecting money and buying buildings with unique powers. It is a game of building big and building quickly and struggling to stay ahead of your competition till the end.

You play as a newly elected mayor building a city by placing cards in front of you. It's like Monopoly, but everyone has their own city that generates income from shared dice rolls. You choose which Building cards to purchase with an eye for their special powers.

As you progress, you can afford ever more complex buildings, with better powers. Some buildings let you steal from other players. For example, a Cafe gains two Income tokens when three is rolled and one Income token from the player who rolled it. The challenge is balancing spend on new buildings while having enough to pay your opponents when you have to. The winner is the first player to build all four of the expensive Landmark cards.

What starts as a simple world-building game, quickly becomes a cutthroat money-making endeavour, where you must build a more powerful city to take money from other players. It's more expansive than Monopoly because the multiple versions of each building let you build things how you want.

Our examiner, Rob Prior, first checked Machi Koro 18 months ago. It was re-examined by Jo Robertson and updated 9 months ago.