City Quarter
| City Quarter | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Info | |
| Cost |
 |
| Type(s) | Action |
| Kingdom card? | Yes |
| Set |
Empires |
| Illustrator(s) | Matthias Catrein |
| Card text | |
|
+2 Actions Reveal your hand. +1 Card per Action card revealed. | |
City Quarter is an Action card from Empires. It is a village that draws cards only if you have Actions in your hand already. It is one of the cards from Empires with a 
cost.
FAQ
Official FAQ
- Cards with multiple types that include Action, such as Crown, are Actions.
Strategy
City Quarter is a powerful draw card that rewards you for building a deck with high Action density. In a large hand with lots of Actions it can draw 10 or even 20 cards, but if you draw it in a hand without any other Actions, it won’t draw anything. It also provides a village effect, though due to how expensive it is, it’s inefficient if you’re buying it primarily as a village. Because it relies on having hands with many Action cards, it is useful almost exclusively in engines.
City Quarter is a poor buy in the early game when your deck has few Action cards in it. As a rule of thumb, try to avoid buying City Quarter until you expect it to draw at least two cards.
City Quarter’s cost presents a unique set of incentives as far as when to buy it. Buying City Quarter right before you shuffle with some left over is often a good play. Taking a City Quarter as your last buy is also generally good since you can leverage the to get good cards in your deck sooner than if City Quarter cost 
. Don’t be afraid of having a lot of in Dominion, you don’t have to pay any interest on it.
Since City Quarter likes decks consisting mostly of Action cards, trashing your starting cards and using Actions rather than Treasures as payload are beneficial. Start-of-turn draw is especially helpful, since it makes it easier to kick off with a big City Quarter draw. Similarly, methods of seeding good cards into the starting hand (for example with Tracker or Church) can snowball one good turn into many more good turns. These reliability boosters can make City Quarter reliable as a main source of draw even if the board lacks trashing or Action card payload. Conversely, handsize attacks and curser attacks can make it more difficult to get value out of City Quarter. Looters aren’t nearly as much of a problem, and in some cases are even friendly. On boards where City Quarter isn’t reliable as the primary source of draw, but you’re still building an engine, it can be a good buy later on when you are already drawing a large proportion of your deck.
Since City Quarter often provides large amounts of overdraw, it is especially good with gainers and other ways of taking advantage of overdraw. Way of the Chameleon is a notable example, since playing a City Quarter using Way of the Chameleon can generate large amounts of economy. Another powerful synergy is with Patron, which gives a coffer every time it is revealed by one of your City Quarters.
Versions
English versions
| Digital | Text | Release | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
 |
+2 Actions Reveal your hand. +1 Card per Action card revealed. |
Empires | June 2016 |
Other language versions
| Language | Name | Digital | Text | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dutch | Stadswijk | +2 Acties Toon je hand. +1 Kaart voor elke getoonde actiekaart. |
(2016) | ||
| Finnish | Kaupunginosa (lit. neighborhood) |
||||
| French | Faubourg |  |
+2 Actions Dévoilez votre main. +1 Carte par carte Action dévoilée. |
||
| German | Stadtviertel |  |
 |
+2 Aktionen Decke deine Handkarten auf. +1 Karte pro aufgedeckter Aktionskarte. |
2. Edition (2021) |
| Japanese | 市街 (pron. shigai, lit. city) | +2 アクション 手札を公開し、その中のアクションカードと同じ枚数のカードを引く。 |
|||
| Polish | Dzielnica (lit. district) |
 |
+2 akcje Odkryj swoją rękę. +1 karta za każdą odkrytą kartę Akcji. |
(2017) | |
| Russian | Городской Квартал (pron. gorodskoy kvartal, lit. city block) |
Trivia
A sign outside one of the buildings is the VP symbol.
Preview
but you don't need any 
up front. You can buy it with 
and a leftover Buy. But you'll be paying it off before you buy more things and well I went over that already. So uh City Quarter. It looks snazzy. You could draw so many cards. And it's a Village too, which helps you play those cards you had to have to draw those other cards.Secret History
cards was +3 Cards +1 Action, for some large amount of that I tweaked some. It was an interesting card to consider. It's two Laboratories in one card; that's different in various small ways from actually having two Labs. In the end it seemed too strong too early. I tried a version that either drew 3 cards or got two Treasures from your discard pile, that cost more up front. I tried a giant Pawn briefly. Then, a Village that had you draw a card the next 2 times you played an Action; it addressed early power level some but had tracking issues, especially in multiples. Finally it turned into the published card. It can go nuts, but you have to set it up; you do not want it turn one.
Why cost Debt?
, and to make that work, they had to have abilities that you wouldn't want turn one. So Royal Blacksmith punishes you for having Coppers, and City Quarter depends on you having a bunch of Actions. They could have had normal costs... but, the entire idea was to have 
. People loved debt so that all worked out, it's okay that I made cards with debt costs.
