About Downtown, from BoardGameGeek:
Welcome to Downtown, a game about creating a metropolis from nothing but sweat, tears, and hexes! You know the saying "Rome wasn't built in a day"? That's just because the Romans weren't trying hard enough.
In Downtown, players compete for victory as they build a new town together. The game is played over a series of rounds, called visits, where you take turns placing buildings with different abilities on a shared board.
Each visit, you'll select and bid for city features to add to your draw bag. Your bags will begin to diverge as you place and replenish unique tiles. Your strategy will evolve and pivot as you play across different zones of the city, and you'll have to adapt to the tiles that enter your hand and the tiles that others play to the board. Here, the bag building is less about constructing an engine and more about steering your strategy.
You'll juggle many priorities including residential dominance, park popularity, business location optimization, and transportation convenience. Meanwhile, you'll try to get an edge by bidding for turn order and drafting the perfect special tiles and landmarks for your strategy.
Where most tile placement games let players claim spaces anywhere and everywhere, Downtown focuses everyone's attention on one zone at a time. The sequence of zones is randomized each game, and it's always in your benefit to connect your tiles across zones because your largest contiguous group of tiles (that is at least partially in the active zone) will determine your income for that visit.
Each visit you must decide whether to take your income as all money or all victory points. Victory points help you win the overall game, but money keeps you competitive from one visit to the next. After the final visit, the player with the most victory points wins, proving themselves the most savvy city planner.
-description from the publisher
