Foundations of Metropolis Review

There's something special about a board game that has a shared central board. It draws everyone in to a singular focal point, where all of your energies are directed, and it really feels like you're taking part in a communal activity—the eponymous "board" in "board game."

Shared central boards are less common these days, and that's why Foundations of Metropolis initially caught my eye. It harkens back to a time when gamers gathered around the table and duked it out in that enclosed arena, the kind we see in classics like Monopoly, Scrabble, and Clue. It feels familiar and nostalgic, except now with modern design sensibilities and an incredible production that leaves its own kind of mark.

Back in 2022, Arcane Wonders conked the board gaming sphere with the lavishly produced Foundations of Rome, which came in a comically large box packed with massive plastic minis. In 2024, they redid the entire production, shrinking it down to just cardboard and tokens and slapping a new title on the same core experience: Foundations of Metropolis. For those who couldn't justify spending $150+ on a single board game, this was a godsend.

What is Foundations of Metropolis like? Is it worth it now that it's available in a far more accessible package? Is it a good game for you and your group? Here's my experience with it and everything you need to know to decide whether Foundations of Metropolis is right for you.

This review is based on my own personal copy of Foundations of Metropolis, which I bought new from Amazon. Not a free review copy.

In this review:

• Overview
• Setup and Table Footprint
• Learning Curve
• Game Experience
  • Decision Space
  • Luck Factor
  • Fun Factor
  • Pacing
  • Player Interaction
  • Player Counts
  • Fiddliness
• Replayability
• Production Quality
• The Bottom Line

Overview

In Foundations of Metropolis, you're a property developer who's competing to own land and construct the best layout of buildings to earn the most points. All of this happens on a shared city board, where you'll be racing to claim limited spots and strategically placing (and replacing) different building types that earn you points in different ways.

Buildings are represented by polyomino pieces that range in size from 1 to 4. Everyone has the their own identical set of building pieces, from a handful of 1x1 pieces (size 1) up to the largest 2x2 and 4x1 pieces (size 4). These building come in three types: Residential (which boost your Population), Commercial (which boost your income), and Civic (which score points based on adjacent buildings in the city).

Before you can construct a building in the city, you need to purchase and own lots. For a 1x1 building, you can place it on any lot that you own (designated by a marker of your color on that spot). For buildings larger than 1x1, you'll need to own a clump of lots in the same shape as the building piece you want to construct. Once a lot is bought by someone, they own it forever. There's no trading or negotiation here.

But not every lot is available to purchase whenever you want. There's a deck of Deed cards (with one card corresponding to every potential lot in the city grid) and there are only six Deeds available at any given time (so those are the only lots available to buy). Deeds are priced at $2, $3, $4, $6, $8, and $10. When a Deed is bought, all of the more expensive Deeds come down in price, then a new Deed is drawn and priced at $10. In other words, lots start out pricey and get cheaper over time if left unbought.

On your turn, you can take one of three possible actions:

• Buy a Deed: You purchase any of the available Deeds for its listed price and immediately have ownership of that lot. Existing Deeds shift down in price and a new Deed becomes available.
• Take income: You earn $5 as a base income, plus the total value of all your Commercial buildings in the city grid.
• Place a building: You add a building piece from your player tray to the city grid at no cost. You can replace existing buildings (of your own) by overlapping them, as long as the newly placed piece is larger than all the ones it overlaps. Overlapped pieces are returned to your player tray and you retain ownership of lots that are made empty by removed buildings.

Foundations of Metropolis is played over three Years (rounds), with each Year comprised of one-third of the Deeds deck. Meaning, you're only going to see one-third of the lots per round, but you will see all lots by the end of the game, and your goal is to score as much as you can each Year with what's available to you. Nothing resets at the end of a Year.

Scoring in Foundations of Metropolis happens at the end of each Year, and these are the main things that earn you points:

• Population. Each Population (from Residential buildings) scores a point, and whoever has the most Population at the end of a Year scores bonus points. But here's the twist: if you aren't leading in Population, you score the Population of the player ahead of you. For example, if you have 7 Population and the next player ahead of you has 16 Population, you score 16 points.
• Commercial buildings score points, with larger buildings scoring more points.
• Civic buildings score points for all adjacent buildings that match their scoring conditions. A building is adjacent if it touches edge-to-edge.

Whoever has the most points at the end of Year 3 wins!

Setup and Table Footprint

Thanks to its premium production, Foundations of Metropolis is relatively quick to set up. The dedicated player trays—which hold each player's pieces—can be distributed in seconds. Then you just have to take out the main board, the tracker board, the Deeds board. Lastly, shuffle up and deal out six Deeds to each player, then split the rest up into Year Decks 1, 2, and 3. Oh, and everyone gets their starting coins.

All in all, it takes about 5 to 7 minutes. The only real delay to setup is when you're playing with two or three players, in which case you need to go through and remove any unused Deed cards for that player count. Other than that, it's pretty darn straightforward.

But Foundations of Metropolis has a huge table footprint relative to its gameplay. On a typical 3-feet-by-3-feet card table—where I normally play all my board games with minimal issues—it barely fits even for just two players. It's just unnecessarily big, annoyingly so. (See the "Production Quality" section down below for more on this.)

Learning Curve

Foundations of Metropolis is one of those games where a not-so-complicated ruleset leads to a deeper, emergent gameplay that's more complex than the sum of its parts. Or put another way, it's easy to learn but very thinky—you might understand how to play, but not how to play well.

I mean, you can only do one of three actions on your turn: earn income, buy a Deed, or place a building. Anyone can grasp that, and the actual execution of each action is a snap. But the why behind each decision and when to take a certain action over another? There's a lot to consider and it can be overwhelming, especially for non-gamers and casual gamers.

I firmly put Foundations of Metropolis in the hobbyist tier of games. It's weightier and less accessible than, say, Ticket to Ride or Waterfall Park or Azul, to the point where I've seen casual gamers get overwhelmed and frustrated. This is more of a gamer's game than a family game, and I wouldn't suggest it with a non-enthusiast group.

Game Experience

Decision Space

At first glance, Foundations of Metropolis deceives. You see the board, you see the lots, you see that bigger buildings offer more points and resources, you see that you need adjacent lots in order to build those bigger buildings—so you think it's all about clumping lots, about racing to snatch up those adjacent spaces to give yourself the space to build big.

But Foundations of Metropolis is deeper and more clever than that, all thanks to the inclusion of Civic buildings. The thing is, upgrading to bigger Residential and Commercial buildings might be the main way to earn points... but Civic buildings let you piggyback off those buildings in play, earning you points just for being in their vicinity. If an opponent builds a huge Condominium, all you need a single lot next to it to plant a Civic building that scores for adjacent Residentials.

In other words, every lot is valuable to everyone at all times, but for different reasons. Usually in games like this (e.g., Acquire or Waterfall Park), the most valuable lots for you are the ones next to the lots you already own because expanding is the most important thing. But in Foundations of Metropolis, the most valuable lots are the ones next to the biggest buildings and the ones next to the most number of buildings, no matter who owns them.

What this means is that snatching up clumps of lots as quickly as possible and rushing the biggest buildings isn't necessarily a winning move. You might just end up burning through cash and setting up ways for others to score big points off of you. Instead, you want to develop your properties slowly and set up winning paths for yourself while simultaneously scoring off others. If you can make it up to the largest buildings, great! But only if you benefit the most from them.

All that being said, the trouble in Foundations of Metropolis is that players can always replace their buildings on the board by upgrading—and in doing so, they can change the types, sizes, and even positions of those buildings. You might've planted a Residential Civic building next to their Hotel, but they could easily pivot and upgrade that Hotel (Residential) into a Shopping Mall (Commercial) and deny you those points. Now you need to figure out a way to replace that Residential Civic with something more useful.

And that's the other big aspect of Foundations of Metropolis: the spatial reasoning puzzle. In this game, upgrading buildings isn't just for earning more points—it's about reclaiming previously planted buildings so you can use them again elsewhere on the board. So, in order to move a building from here to there, I first need to reclaim it by replacing it with a larger building. But larger buildings aren't always easy to fit. And I might have a building of the right size and shape to do it, but maybe it's of the wrong type. Is it still worth putting out there to get that piece back?

Plus, there's the economic puzzle. You need money to buy lots, but you need to burn a turn to collect income—income that's determined by the number and size of your Commercial buildings. Not only do you need the right balance of buildings to sustain a solid income, but you also need to time your purchases. Is that one lot so important that you're willing to burn $10 on it? Or are you going to wait for it to get cheaper over time, at the risk of someone else snatching it up because you waited one turn too long?

As you can tell, Foundations of Metropolis has a lot going on. It's far more layered than just churning out money, rushing lots, and building the biggest stuff. It's constantly re-assessing the board, adjusting your plans, exploiting and denying your opponents, solving spatial problems so you can even execute your plans, all while figuring out which actual sequence of actions will net you the most points.

And on that note, it should come as no surprise that Foundations of Metropolis is seriously prone to analysis paralysis. With so many different ways to earn points and so many potential actions you can do at any given time, inevitably there's a lot of number crunching and min-maxing. It's right there in the game's DNA and it's unavoidable.

Luck Factor

There's very little luck in Foundations of Metropolis, which is partly what makes it such a phenomenal strategy game. The only luck-based aspect is the random order in which lots become available and not knowing whether a given lot is going to pop out in Year 1, 2, or 3.

But this is called "input randomness" — or when something random happens and you can react to it — and that's fine because you have enough options to work around it. Newly available lots are priced at the highest end and it's rare for someone to snap it up right off the bat, so you often have time to adjust your plan whenever new lots show up. Plus, you know that every lot is going to come out eventually, even if it's in Year 3. That really helps take the edge off the uncertainty.

Apart from that, nothing else is random. Anything a player does can usually be foreseen because multiple steps need to be taken to get there (e.g., take income, buy lots, build stuff, upgrade stuff), and when the game ends you know that the winner didn't get there by mere chance.

Fun Factor

Foundations of Metropolis is, when you strip back the impressive production and distill it down to its essence, a puzzle strategy game—one with lots of ever-changing circumstances that constantly force you to re-assess your plans, plus the added spatial reasoning layer that complicates what you can do and how to implement whatever plan you have.

All this means that Foundations of Metropolis is a heads-down, think-to-yourself experience where most of your time and energy is spent ruminating on your schemes. There's very little table talk, except for the occasional plea to not take that lot you've been eyeing, or groan when someone blocks you, or moment of surprise when someone shifts gears.

Pacing

Foundations of Metropolis has a strong game arc, starting with a near-empty board brimming with possibilities. Your initial distribution of lots may start you down a particular path, but you get to decide where that path ultimately ends up. As the game progresses, the board fills up, you race against the other players to claim what remains, and your best-laid plans get choked out when they beat you to the punch.

Even so, you always have room to pivot. When someone is able to snatch up a clump of lots and construct a high-value Commercial building, you can exploit that with a single lot and a cleverly placed Civic building. Right up to the very end, you're developing your own properties while trying to profit off everyone else's properties, and that tension constantly ramps up.

As mentioned above, Foundations of Metropolis is a thinky game that's prone to analysis paralysis, and that means lots of downtime between turns. You might appreciate that time to think through your own plans, or you might not—that'll depend on your personality and your group. It's engaging, but it's far from a breezy game.

I do think it's nice that the game is broken up into three Years. Those breaks offer a minor reprieve from all the strategizing, where you can take a moment to regroup and gather your thoughts while everyone tallies scores. It helps keep the game from being too much of a slog.

Player Interaction

All of the gameplay in Foundations of Metropolis takes place on a shared central board, and the whole conceit is about vying for limited resources—not just ownership of lots, but relative positioning of buildings.

Everyone has a plan for how they want to colonize the board. Those plans are going to overlap. Multiple players will want the same spots, so as soon as someone buys a particular spot, everyone else who wanted it is going to feel "blocked." Think Catan or Ticket to Ride, where it feels like you're racing against everyone else to claim things before they're gone.

I wouldn't call it mean, but it's easy to be frustrated in Foundations of Metropolis. If your strategy relies on a specific lot, and that lot comes out during someone else's turn, then the player before you buys that lot just to thwart your plan, it's a real kick in the nads. For some, that's a juicy strategic experience; for others, it just isn't fun. You have to be the judge of that for yourself and whoever you intend to play with.

Player Counts

Foundations of Metropolis goes from 2 to 4 players and it plays well at all counts, but it's a markedly different experience between them.

At 4 players, it's somewhat chaotic as players fight over spots and you rush to buy them before the opportunities slip through your hands. The board is bigger, so you have more flexibility for your strategies—but so do the other players, and that means the board state constantly shifts and changes between your turns, sometimes dramatically so. There's more you can do, but also more you need to think about and less in your control.

At 2 players, Foundations of Metropolis is far more cutthroat. You're playing on a significantly smaller board and you're up against one other player, so you can more easily predict how the board will change from turn to turn. But it also feels meaner, as this is a zero-sum game—when your opponent blocks you from buying a spot, or when they exploit your big building for massive points, it feels more personal. The scoring of Population also feels somewhat broken at 2 players (someone can just sit at 1 Population and rake in unearned points) and that can disincentivize some strategies.

While it's a solid game at all counts, my ideal player count for Foundations of Metropolis is 3 players—it's not as chaotic as 4 players, it's not as cutthroat as 2 players, and it walks that line for the best of both worlds.

Fiddliness

Foundations of Metropolis looks like it might be fiddly, what with so many pieces entering and leaving the shared central board. But it's not so bad, and I say that as someone who's sensitive to fiddly components. Adding and removing pieces on the board is fast and clean.

The only bit I don't like is the Population tracker, which requires manual bookkeeping whenever someone adds or removes a Residential piece. It's been forgotten more than once, resulting in misread game states and scoring issues. Not a huge deal, but annoying.

Replayability

I find Foundations of Metropolis to be satisfyingly replayable, with lots to discover in its puzzly, strategic gameplay over multiple plays. And it's not the kind of replayability that's forced through variability or modular setups—the replayability is in the gameplay itself.

I mean, there's almost no variability in this game. The only thing that changes from play to play is your starting set of lots and the order in which available lots come out. That itself is what drives the replayability, as the game is all about assessing what's out there, making on-the-fly tactical decisions, adapting to ever-changing circumstances, and planning the best path forward without backing yourself into a corner with hasty decisions or overcommitting to a strategy that leaves you without options.

Foundations of Metropolis has a great mixture of strategic and tactical depth, with just the right blend of individual planning (working on your own plans) versus player interaction on a shared board (working around others' plans). You're constantly pulled in several directions and never feel like you can do everything you want to do, and that tension is delicious. At game's end, you know you could've played better—and so you want to try again.

Overall, it's thinky and takes a good chunk of time, so I wouldn't want to play Foundations of Metropolis twice in a row. Maybe not even twice in the same week. But the gameplay is compelling and I do find myself wanting to come back to it regularly. For fans of strategy board games with player interaction, Foundations of Metropolis hits the spot.

Production Quality

Foundations of Metropolis is the pared-down and more affordable take on Foundations of Rome, which was so lavishly overproduced that it sat outside the reach of most gamers. Yet even so, despite Metropolis being the reduced version of Rome, it still feels overproduced. And I'm not saying it's bad for having premium components—I'm saying the overall production is far bigger than the game itself, to the point that it's detrimental to the experience.

There's really no reason why Foundations of Metropolis has to take up this much space on a table. For starters, the main city board has wide borders all around that serve no purpose. Why? The board itself could've been shrunken down, or the Prestige tracker could've gone there to free up all the space taken up by that supplementary board.

The player trays are really nice—and they actually add tremendous value to ease of gameplay—but they also have a large area of empty space at the top that goes unused, when that space could've been for each player's individual Population tracker. That'd eliminate the separate tracker board entirely.

And don't get me started on the Deeds board, which is unnecessarily large to a comical degree. Why are the Deed cards so big? And why is there so much wasted space between the Year decks? The cards should've been smaller mini-cards, like the ones in Waterfall Park (see my review), allowing for a tighter and more compact board. Nothing would've been lost.

Despite the overproduction, I'm actually surprised that Foundations of Metropolis left out a crucial component that'd make the gameplay more accessible: markers for lots currently on sale, so you can immediately see which spots are up for grabs. Just six black cubes would've been enough. As is, I've been using $1 coins to mark open lots.

Quality-wise, though, the components in Foundations of Metropolis are top-notch. Thick cardboard, great visuals, accessible theme, with a lot of attention paid to making sure gameplay is smooth. You're definitely getting your money's worth with this game. Again, I love the player trays for how easy they make it to tally up the coins and points earned by your buildings placed out on the city board. I also appreciate the box insert, which significantly reduces the friction of setup and cleanup, and the well-made rulebook.

The Bottom Line

Foundations of Metropolis is a fantastic strategy game that rewards spatial reasoning, tactical decision-making, and number crunching. A simple ruleset deceptively hides a complex, multilayered gameplay that's greater than the sum of its parts, and those layers make it super replayable.

But it's tense, stressful, and edges into mean territory as players are basically forced to block each other and thwart strategies. It's also prone to analysis paralysis and periods of downtime because there's so much to think about. It's clearly a hobbyist's game, not a casual or family game.

Its popularity is well-earned, but Foundations of Metropolis isn't for everyone. If you're looking for something meatier and more engaging than Ticket to Ride, this might just be the perfect step up.

Buy it from:
Amazon • Miniature Market • Noble Knight Games

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