I was so excited about this expansion that I spent time ahead of our first game going through the components, sleeving the cards and reading the rules (again as I had read them online prior to buying it). One odd thing I found is that I received two less -1 debt tokens than it stated in the rules, and instead got two -1 conflict tokens it didn't mention; maybe just an edition thing? Anyways, in all the games I have played so far we have never come close to needing all the debt tokens it comes with. Every thing fit perfectly into the organizer (see post on it here), with still lots of room left.
My wife and I played a game not long after that, with just the base game + cities, with the two new wonders, just to get a feel for it. I ended up with Petra, while my wife played with Byzantium. One of the first things I noticed is that my focus on the coins grew very quickly; many of the black cards cost coins, my second wonder stage cost 9 coins, and I was paranoid about the debt cards. It also didn't help that before we started playing with cities I often found myself with very few coins (something about my playing style, still haven't exactly pinpointed why). I enjoyed the new flavor that the black cards added, and I appreciated the fact that they added without really changing the game too much.
Our first Cities game (from my wife's side of the board) |