Game Preview: Cranking Out Cable Cars in Knizia's San Francisco

I lived in San Francisco for two years, and I never rode the cable cars, despite being on the corner of California and Divisadero and seeing cable cars every single day. Such things happen when you are a resident in a town rather than a tourist.

Like me, you will not ride the cable cars in Reiner Knizia's San Francisco, which is due out in Europe in late June 2022 from Polish publisher Rebel Studio, but you will have the chance to build a cable car network in your role as an urban planner who is trying to lay out how the city should be developed.

In the game, each player has their own game board that features five rows (districts) with five spaces in each row; at the bottom of each column on your board sits a cable car depot. On a turn, either you draw and place a project card in the pool of available projects, with three different projects being underway at all times, or you finish a project by picking up all the cards from a single project column and adding none, some, or all of these cards to your player board. (Each time you take a project, you must take a contract token, and on future turns you can't take a project unless it contains more cards than the number of contracts you hold. If all players have contracts, you discard contracts equally until at least one player has zero contracts.)

Sample project cards

Cards are color-coded, so you must place them in the matching district on your player board in the leftmost available space. Some cards feature cable car tracks on the bottom and right sides, and if these tracks connect to a depot, then you place a cable car token on this card. No depot nearby? Well, luckily some cards feature a cable car depot, allowing you to connect existing tracks later in the game.

Most cards have a value on them as indicated by workers in hard hats, but city squares have a variable value: 4 when placed adjacent to a card in your cable car network and 0 otherwise. Some cards count as foundations for skyscrapers, and when a foundation has orthogonally adjacent cards with at least 7 value, then you place a skyscraper on that foundation. By developing the seaside at the top of your player board, you can lower the minimum value needed to erect skyscrapers.

Set-up for four players

When you place the second card in a district that contains a bonus icon, either you take cable car tracks and place them on a card that lacks tracks or you claim the bonus associated with that district, such as a baseball stadium, a cable car depot, or a token worth 1½ points. Yes, really.

The game ends once a player's board is full or the final foundation has been laid. The first player to place the fifth card in a district claims a 1-point token, and other points are gained in equally sparse amounts. Each skyscraper is worth 1 point, and whoever has built the most skyscrapers gains an additional 1 point. The collective value of each type of district is compared across the various player boards, with a player gaining 1 or 2 points depending on their standing — or losing 1 point in a four-player game should their district rank the worst. Players also gain or lose points based on the total number of cable cars tokens they placed, and whoever ends up with the most points wins.

San Francisco will debut on June 22, 2022 in Poland, with the game scheduled to be available at Gen Con 2022 in August.

More project cards