Cardboard Town

So Cardboard Town can be fun or frustrating depending on the mode one is playing in as well as the luck of the cards. Some card effects can doom your run if you use them without realizing what they do. I've played for over 100 hours but still haven't been able to unlock some of the other modes. So far I like blessed mode the most and learned to build roads to leave space for red cards that may come along later. I had much more fun with the game when I ignored the red card to unlock education. Some cards have good synergy if you can get them in your deck and remember to pick cards that can also generate and/or destroy cards. If you have a bad start can always just abandon that instance and start anew.

strategic and cozy game, love it

This game will be nice for people who like card and board games. It's calm and leisurely and is perfect after a tense, busy day. The brief description: This is a deck-management city builder. You will be given several cards to play each turn. Cards will be added to your deck as you progress in the game. To play cards, you need money that is being renewed each turn. The maximum amount of money is increased as the city's population grows. There are also 4 basic resources: "energy", "water", "safety" and "environment". If any drop below 0, you are given an alert. 3 alerts bring defeat. It is quite easy to maintain resources on its own. So there come "disasters" – they bring some problems to manage. The disaster meter progresses each day + there are some buildings and conditions that add disaster points. Also there are "red buildings" – they must be built in some time, otherwise the permanent alert is added. And these buildings are also needed for winning the game. The game itself can be both challenging and relaxing and depends on the players' choices.

Very promising game but lack of onboarding or even tooltips (or explaining what constitutes a card since they call some things cards and it doesn't actually count as one / has a special rule OR something isn't a card but it still blocks certain mechanics). Overall, I see why it deserves the initial negative review and hope to see it get better. EDIT: It does get better when you get used to things but there's a lot of stuff I'd like... maybe a reminder/info UI for like handsize vs max hand and which draws go to hand versus which go to discard. I think with those tooltips and better reminder tooltips on hover for the 'unlocked resources' would go a long way.

This game is beautiful but it's infuriating to play. You are given very little control over what cards you take and how many. This means you can't really build for anything in particular, and the game forces you into a huge mess of a deck. Surviving becomes very RNG heavy, and you can easily end up in a situation where you go 10-20 turns without being able to draw the one thing you need to avoid failure.

CARBOARD TOWN IS NOT A COZY GAME. It is an interesting city-builder with card game mechanics and a cozy aesthetic, but it plays more stressful than satisfying to me. There are no perfect moves in this game. The limitations and random events can be brutal, and it feels like a lot of positive effects take a coin flip and only happen 50% of the time as a result. Improving money generation is also fairly difficult. I was drawn to the deck-building aspect but most playthroughs generate so many new cards you rarely get to go through the draw pile again, which means you're often fighting the RNG rather than being able to plan ahead. This is not a bad thing in itself, it just makes the gameplay quite punishing and much more random than I would like. Most of the time, a playthrough of this game feels like you're constantly putting out fires and fending off disasters, which ultimately means that you rarely, if ever, get to make a really satisfying, perfectly planned play, and are mostly limited to just doing the best you can with what you have available. It doesn't really matter that the perfect card is in your deck somewhere when there's 68 cards and you're drawing 2ish per turn. At that …