Hi! It’s Ryan from Nights Around a Table. Here’s how to set up Underwater Cities.
To set up the game, put the main board in the middle of the table, on the 1-2 player side or the 3-4 player side depending on your player count. Shuffle and deal out six Special 3-credit cards to this section of the board. Shuffle the 1- and 2-credit Special cards and place them here, and then turn over the top card. In a 4-player game, put the action-cloning tile here.
Everyone picks a colour and gets a player board, a one-as these, one-a these, and the insulting assistant in his or her matching colour. Take the three… pieces of 10th grade musical costume jewelry… in your colour. You start with 1 city at the bottom right of your board, and a randomly-dealt brown metropolis here, and two random blue ones here and here. Everyone gets a kelp, a steelplast, a science, and 2 credits to start the game.
The boards are double-sided. The flip side has these red-outline surcharge areas where you have to pay extra to build there, but it also has these double- and triple-payout icons that amp up the production benefits of certain structures.
Put a token for everyone on zero. Shake up another set of tokens and place them on the play order track. Then take the last set of tokens and put them in reverse order on the Federation track – so the top guy here goes on the bottom, and then on up. Whoever winds up here gets an extra credit to start the game, and this player gets 1 extra credit and 1 extra steelplast to start.
Most of the resources in the game are unlimited, but some aren’t. The white city domes are limited to 17 per game. The purple symbiotic city domes are limited to 7, 10, and 13 in a 2, 3, and 4-player game. The tunnels are limited too – once they’re gone, they’re gone. The 3-credit Special cards are limited to whichever 6 cards you deal out off the top of the game.
If you’ve opted to play with these government contract cards, deal 3 of them at random to the main board.
To play solo, use the 2-player side of the common board… and the advanced side of one of the player boards. Don’t play with the government contracts. Set up the game for 2 players, but if you deal this brown metropolis, get rid of it and deal something else.
Block off the rightmost action going clockwise using another player colour’s… C3PO’s nipple clamps. Your token starts at the bottom of the Federation track. Since you always go first, you don’t need to put another token on the other half of the track.
When a round ends, rotate the action tiles to block the next spot in order. If you’re still at the bottom of the Federation track, you suffer the penalty of another blocked slot. Draw a card from the era deck, add its digits together – so here, it’d be 2 + 6, so 8… and starting with this green action space, count 8 spaces clockwise – 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. If the space you land on is empty, add another non-player tile to block the space. If it’s already occupied, move the tile clockwise until it hits an empty space to block.
To win the solo game, you have to finish with at least 7 connected cities and at least 100 points.
And now you’re ready to play! If you’d like to know more about how to play, click the link at the end of this video or in the description below to watch my complete How to Play video, which includes the setup segment you just watched. And if you like what i’m doing, click the badge to subscribe, and the bell to get notifications. And now, we dance!
