I have been continuing my online games of Innovation with my younger daughter, Chen Rui, who is currently away from home. We have recently started using the expansion called Cities of Destiny. I am sure we will eventually go back to playing with the other expansions later. Although the newest rules for Innovation have been updated on sites like Yucata.de and BoardGameArena.com, we are still playing with the older rules on BGA. I find that they work just fine for us.

I originally thought that the Cities of Destiny expansion would be quite simple. I had played it a few times in the past, but it was mixed in with other expansions. I only skimmed the rules back then, and because it was combined with other sets, I didn’t look at it closely by itself. This is a result of being a bit sloppy when playing games online. The cards from the Cities expansion do not have any dogma powers. Instead, they all have six icons rather than the usual four. Cities can help you gain a majority in specific icons. You get to draw a city card when you play a new color, or when you splay a color in a new direction.

Cities introduces some new icons to the game. The arrow icons allow you to splay your stack in a specific direction. The flag icon counts as an achievement if you have the most cards visible in that particular color. This is considered a temporary achievement. It only counts when you fulfill the condition and the flag is still visible on top of the stack.

Plus signs on the cards let you draw more cards. The special achievements that come with Cities are unique. For example, you might meld a city which allows you to splay in a direction even when the stack is already splayed that way. Another example is tucking a city card that has a fountain or flag icon. You don’t draw city cards very often, so achieving these goals is not easy.

There was one unusual situation during our play. Chen Rui had four Age 10 cards, but her top green card was still an Age 1 card, the city of Jerusalem. She also had many cards in her blue and yellow stacks, but up to that point, they were not yet splayed. We are currently playing with a variant that requires one extra achievement to win the game. This makes our games go a little longer, and we reach the later ages more often. It is always exciting to get there because many of the powers in Age 10 are crazy.

In this particular game, Chen Rui and I were tied at 6 achievements. We both needed two more to win. I had the Kuala Lumpur card in my hand, which has a fountain icon. The fountain icon counts as an achievement as long as it is visible. It is better than a flag because it doesn’t require you to have the most cards in that color. On my turn, I managed to claim the Age 9 achievement and then play Kuala Lumpur to gain two achievements on the same turn. That ended the game. Chen Rui told me she could have gained two achievements on her turn as well. She had the Taipei city card, which also has a fountain. It also had two clock icons, which would help her achieve the special requirement of having 3 icons in all 6 types. So she just needed one action: to play Taipei. It was a very close game!

Cities of Destiny introduces the endorse mechanism. You can use the dogma power of a card twice if you have a city which has the icon associated with that dogma, and you are willing to spend a card. Endorsed dogmas pack double the punch. This expansion is not as simple as I expected. I had thought it would feel like a mini expansion, but it feels close to a full expansion experience. I am quite happy playing with just this one expansion by itself. It doesn’t need to be combined with other expansions to make a more satisfying game. And hey, Kuala Lumpur is in the game. That’s certainly a plus!