You've finally been able to amass enough gold for an insanely expensive building, but you're looking at the character cards and the thief is missing! Which means either Uncle Bob or Mom has him, and will try to take your hard-earned treasure. Or the thief could be lying face-down in the middle of the table, out of reach of those potential..uh..thieves. But you can't take that risk! What character will they think you'll pick? Should you pick the Magician, because no one would ever think you'd pick the Magician. Or would they think you thought they'd think that, and steal from the Magician anyway? The game's afoot!
Citadels is a deceivingly simple card game of city building, gold, and power. Play revolves around 8 characters with unique powers, which players shuffle and choose from every round. You hoard gold in order to build districts, using the characters to boost your income or hinder your opponents. The real meat comes when a player is attempting to hurt another. Assassins or thieves must state a character(not a person) to attack, but no one knows for sure who is playing what character. You can make educated guesses off of what characters you saw when you were picking yours, or other small details, but there's almost always the chance of attacking a unused character or the wrong person.
Aside from character intrigue the game is simple: On your turn you can take two gold or two cards and keep one(these are city district you can build). You can build one district if you wish, and use your character special. That's it, and play continues until someone builds 8 districts and you tally up points, which is largely the cost of all your districts.
The art is great but has a slight grisly feel, depending on the different cards.(Ex.The prison has a very different feel than the ball room) But it's nothing a sharpie can't fix, My brother turned a falling guy into a bird with the power of Sharpie.
The game is very compact. In fact, I've been carrying it to school hoping I can fit in a game during one of my hour breaks.
Picking characters is a little slow, especially when first learning and no one knows what the characters do.
The edition that I have comes with the Dark City expansion, which adds new characters you can replace old ones with as well as more special "purple" district, both of which boost replayability.
One of it's main good points is that anyone can play it, but the game rewards those who think deep about the possibilities of who has what character. What's fun is when the deep thinkers are so wrapped up in competing against each other that they don't notice when the "lesser threat" wins the game by being completely unhindered.
11/2/2010 Edit: The character cards can get rather frayed after a lot of games, I recommend getting some plastic card sleeves. It makes them harder to fit in the box (there's enough room) but eliminates the possibility of "He's got the thief since the thief has a ripped corner!" Which takes 60% of the fun out of the game. If I can't spend my board game time stealing my friends' money, what's the point of playing? :)
4/15/2011 EDIT: I made an article about Citadels for small groups of people here.
Summary
Publishers: Fantasy Flight Games
Players: 2-7, but it's built more for 5+
Ages: 10+
Game Length: 40-60 min.
Pros:
-Very well designed
-Simple
-Bonus cards help replayability
-Great art
-Very compact
Cons:
-If you don't like intrigue, a fair bit of back-stabbing and deep thinking, this is definitely not your cup of oatmeal
-Some card art is disturbing, keep your kids in mind. Sharpie Time!
I give it a 8.9, a little bit better than Castle Panic.
Photo from Board Game Geek User Shadow Dragon
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