I like word games and party games, but unfortunately Link City fails at both. It's missing that special sauce that makes word association so fun, and it ends up being little more than a flop of vague hints, randomness, and awkward silence. I won't be coming back to this one.
Grab it at Amazon • Noble Knight Games.
If you buy using these links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It's one way to support me and this site. Thanks!
Cooperative word association games have been hot for a long time. Just look at the sustained popularity of classics like Codenames, Werewords, and Taboo, or more recent successes like Decrypto and So Clover.
There's just something so satisfying about giving out clues and clicking with others—that moment when they finally catch your wavelength and arrive at the answer you're leading them towards, all despite the restrictions and limited information you have to work with.
Link City by Blue Orange Games is another entry in that style, a cooperative tile placement game where one player is trying to mind meld with the rest, to get them to guess where they've placed their tiles, all without speaking.
But does Link City have enough juice and staying power to sit among the greats? Is it a proper party game? Or does it fall short? Here's my experience with it and everything you need to know to decide if you'll like it.
This review is based on my own personal copy of Link City, which I bought from Amazon and played with my family. Not a free review copy.
Link City is a cooperative tile placement game, where each square tile in the game represents a building or landmark that might exist in a city. For example, "Police Station," "Community Center," "Library," "Hospital," "Skate Park," "Organic Supermarket," "Ice Cream Truck," etc.
The game starts with a central "City Hall" tile plus four randomly drawn location tiles placed around it, one adjacent to each edge. Then, players take turns as the Mayor (i.e., clue giver) each round. When one player is the Mayor, the player after them is the Deputy Mayor.
Each round, the Deputy Mayor places three colored construction cones around the city, indicating where this round's new location tiles will need to go. The Mayor then secretly draws three new location tiles (hidden from everyone else) and secretly assigns each location tile to one of the cone spots using corresponding cone tiles.
Once the location tiles are assigned to cone spots, the corresponding cone tiles are flipped over (to hide how the Mayor assigned the location tiles) and the round's location tiles are revealed to everyone.
All non-Mayor players discuss how they think the Mayor assigned these location tiles, using the existing location tiles in the city as logical clues of where certain tiles may have been assigned. The group assigns a separate set of cone tiles to each of the round's location tiles, with the goal of matching the Mayor's assignments. (If the group can't reach a consensus, the Deputy Mayor ultimately decides.)
When the group's cone tile assignments are done, the Mayor's cone tile assignments are revealed. Location tiles that are correctly matched are placed into the city at their respective cone spots. Incorrectly matched location tiles are placed on the outskirts of the city at a diagonal to an existing location tile. (Each adjacent edge-to-edge tile connection earns 1 point, while diagonal tile placements don't count for points.)
So, the goal is to collaboratively build out the city and make sure location tiles are placed to maximize touching edges. After six rounds, all adjacent edge-to-edge tile connections are tallied up to get a final score for the group. The higher, the better!
There's one more thing: if you perfectly match all the location tiles in a round, you draw a bonus tile that's freely added to your city and you unlock a fourth (white) cone to be used in future rounds.
In any party-style game, a fast setup is crucially important—and Link City pretty much delivers on that, especially if you use the included baggy to keep the City Hall tile, cone tiles, and cone pieces separated.
All you have to do is place the City Hall tile, take out the cone pieces and cone tiles, then draw four random location tiles. You're ready to go! All of the location tiles can be kept in the box for easy shuffling and drawing, which makes setup and cleanup that much simpler.
As for table footprint, Link City doesn't take up that much space. Even if you were to play a perfect game and earned bonus tiles every round, the entire city would only comprise 34 tiles (including the initial City Hall and location tiles), making it playable on any coffee table.
Apart from the city itself, the current Mayor needs a little bit of personal space for secretly drawing location tiles and assigning cones behind the included privacy shield. Meanwhile, the box of tiles can be kept off to the side and passed to each Mayor as needed.
All in all, Link City is rather compact and minimal.
Link City is simple enough that it feels like a party game, but it's a step more gamery than a true party game like Just One or Telestrations or Monikers. It's more on the level of, say, Spyfall or Dixit or Concept—again, very simple, but with a smidge more complexity.
The trickiest bits to explain are probably the cone placements, the bonus tiles, and the scoring. Even so, anyone who has command of the English language and understands the meaning of the various location tiles should be able to catch on quick, within a round or two.
I usually love word games and party games, but Link City fell pretty flat for me and the ones I've played with. Why? Well, the more I think about it, the more I realize that Link City misses the mark on what makes word association games so compelling in the first place.
The chief draw of word association is that you have the full power and creativity of language at your disposal. It's the challenge of coming up with a word/phrase that bridges unrelated concepts together, or a word/phrase that subtly conveys an idea without giving too much away. Armed with the infinite potential of language, it's up to you to thread that needle—and that infinite potential allows you to be as precise as you need to be.
Or when you're on the receiving end of clues, word association is a riddle to be solved. You have to filter the vast possibilities of language and figure out exactly what the clue giver meant to convey. Untangling that puzzle is a real challenge, and that moment of mind melding with a teammate is only so satisfying because of seemingly impossible odds. You feel clever for decoding the hidden strands that connect those words.
Link City doesn't have that. Instead of exercising creativity to forge word associations yourself, you're given three (or four) words and you only have three (or four) spaces to put them. As Mayor, you don't have much to go off as far as forging those associations, so your rationale for choosing one spot over another is often vague and nebulous. Sometimes you're forced to place tiles in spots that make little sense because you have no other options—not satisfying for you, not satisfying for the guessers. Without the flexibility of language, you lack the preciseness that makes word association fun.
Not to mention the possibilities are extremely finite here. With only three words and three spots, you literally only have six possible ways to assign them; with four words and spots, that goes up to 24. Guessers can guess correctly from sheer luck. And given how vague everything is, guessers will end up guessing a lot because there's so little to go off.
The end result? Link City is just sort of... dull.
As in any clue-giving game, there's a back-and-forth of downtime between clue givers and guessers in Link City. Each round, everyone sits in silence for a minute or two as the Mayor figures out their secret assignments; then, the Mayor sits in silence while the rest make their guesses together.
It's pretty quick, though. With less to think about, the back-and-forth goes much faster than in, say, Codenames. And with a fixed six rounds per game, Link City reliably tends to wrap up in about 30 minutes. Scoring is easy and takes less than a minute. All in all, Link City is fast and simple.
In my experience of Link City, there's very little player interaction. The game clearly wants players to interact, but I've found it doesn't happen.
From how I see it, there's meant to be discussion among the non-Mayor players each round as they to try to decode the Mayor's placements. But because there isn't much basis for reasoning and a lot of it feels random—see the "Fun Factor" section above—there isn't much to discuss.
In the games I've played, no one talks. The Deputy Mayor simply makes their suggestions and everyone else nods along because arguing one way or the other feels pointless. It fails to evoke the kinds of discussions that naturally arise in games like So Clover and Codenames.
Link City goes up to six players, but it feels best at two.
If the gameplay actually encouraged meaningful discussion, it'd be fantastic with more players. But when everyone's sitting in relative silence as the Mayor and Deputy Mayor do their thing, it can get awkward. Again, there really isn't much of anything to discuss except vague associations, so you end up matching tiles based on feel more than anything.
And that's why I say it plays best at two. One player can think quietly to themself as Mayor, then the other can think quietly to themself as Deputy Mayor. At least when played like this, there's some semblance of a mind meld going on—you have to be somewhat in tune with your partner and how they think. In a group, a lot of that is lost.
In terms of design, Link City is quite replayable. The shape of the city is different from game to game, as are the cone placements and the batches of location tiles that are drawn. You could play it with the same group dozens of times and it'll feel different each time due to sheer variability. It's not like Taboo or Anomia or Monikers, where once you've gone through all the cards, you've "seen it all." If you like it, you can get a lot of mileage out of it.
But I personally won't be playing Link City again. Or, at least, I won't ever suggest playing it. If someone else wants to bring it out, I'd probably be down—if only because it's so simple and harmless. But I also don't think it's interesting, satisfying, or entertaining. For me, it has no replayability.
Link City's production is fine. It's functional. It looks good enough on the table that it isn't a turn off, plus it's inoffensive and child-friendly (for the most part). But it could be better.
The cardboard location tiles are on the thinner side, but they aren't flimsy and I'm not worried they'll get damaged. The glossy sheen is a little off-putting, reminiscent of the texture on Kingdomino tiles (another game by Blue Orange, if you've played it). I like that each location has its own vibe thanks to the different colors and fonts used, and I appreciate that tiles are legible from opposite sides. Plus, they're double-sided for variability.
The cones are plastic and fun to play with. Unfortunately, I've noticed a problem with the cone tiles—not only are the yellow and orange cone tiles similar in shade and easy to mistake for each other, the yellow cone has a different shade than the yellow cone tile. More than once has this caused an issue with mistaken cone assignments and guesses. (Yeah, you can also tell each cone apart by the number of white rings on it, but in practice those rings are easy to miss and no one seems to see them.)
If there's one thing I've noticed about Blue Orange Games, it's that their rulebooks tend to be pretty good. They're clearly laid out, clearly explained, and clearly proactive with examples that address potential ambiguities. That's the case here, with Link City easy to pick up and get started with.
I love the box size. It's decently portable, which is great for a party-style game, and it's still large enough to house all the components—all the tiles and cones—with ease. You don't have to wrestle with it during cleanup, and you don't have to worry about pieces getting damaged.
After several games of this, all I can say is that I appreciate what Link City tried to do and that I really wanted to like it. The concept sounded great on paper, and as a fan of So Clover, I thought this would be right up my alley.
Unfortunately, Link City is pretty dull and uninteresting. It's missing that special sauce that makes word association so fun—the challenge of creatively using language to forge and decode conceptual clues—and it ends up being little more than a flop of vague hints, randomness, and awkward silence.
I won't be playing it again and I can't personally recommend it. But if you're still interested in it, consider buying it with one of these links:
Grab it at Amazon • Noble Knight Games.
If you buy using these links, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It's one way to support me and this site. Thanks!
