Citadels

Citadels first appeared in 2000 from designer Bruno Faidutti and has gone through several editions since, most recently published by Z-Man Games. It’s a card game about building a medieval city, but the city-building is almost a backdrop. The real game happens during the character draft, where players secretly select roles with unique abilities, try to guess what their opponents picked, and then deploy those abilities to gain advantages or sabotage rivals. Community reception has been consistently positive across more than two decades, with players praising its accessibility, social deduction elements, and the amount of tension it packs into a small box.

The game earned a Spiel des Jahres nomination in 2000 and won several other awards in its early years. It’s widely considered a gateway game, one that can bring newer players into the hobby without overwhelming them while still offering enough to keep experienced players engaged. That said, opinions split pretty sharply depending on player count, tolerance for direct conflict, and how much time the group takes to make decisions. Citadels at four players and Citadels at seven players are practically different games.

Characters Done Right in Citadels

The character draft is the engine that makes everything click. Each round, a hand of character cards circulates the table, and each player secretly picks one. The Assassin can kill another character, preventing them from acting. The Thief can steal someone’s gold. The Magician can swap hands. The Warlord can destroy a building. Every pick is a gamble: do you take the character you need, or do you grab the one your opponent is counting on? This hidden information creates a layer of social deduction that keeps every round interesting regardless of what’s happening on the board. Figuring out what someone else took based on what’s still available is consistently one of the game’s most satisfying puzzles.

Accessibility is another major strength. The core rules are simple enough to teach in about five minutes. On your turn, you take income (gold or cards), then optionally build a district card from your hand by paying its gold cost. That’s it for the mechanical side. All the complexity comes from the characters and how players use them against each other, which means the game teaches itself through play. New players catch on fast because the abilities are clear and the strategic implications become obvious after a round or two.

The 2016 revised edition and later printings added a deep roster of alternate characters and bonus district cards that keep the game from going stale. Instead of playing with the same eight characters every time, groups can swap in replacements that change the dynamic significantly. This modular approach gives the game legs that the original set alone didn’t quite have. Groups that play regularly can keep things fresh for months by rotating in different character sets.

Player interaction is constant and meaningful. Unlike games where you’re building in your own space and only competing for shared resources, Citadels puts you directly in conflict with specific opponents every round. Stealing gold, assassinating characters, and destroying buildings are all part of the standard toolkit. For groups that enjoy this kind of direct confrontation, the game creates memorable moments and running rivalries that carry from session to session.

Where Citadels Falls Short

Downtime at higher player counts is the most common complaint. With seven or eight players, each round of character drafting takes longer, and the resolution phase stretches out as more characters act in sequence. A game that runs a tight 30 minutes at four players can balloon past an hour at eight, and for a game with this level of mechanical simplicity, that’s a lot of sitting and waiting. Players who pick characters that act early in the turn order end up watching everyone else take their turns, and the wait isn’t always riveting.

The Assassin role is polarizing. Getting assassinated means you lose your entire turn. You sit there while everyone else plays. In a short, snappy game, losing one turn stings but doesn’t ruin the experience. In a longer game with more players, losing a turn can feel like a genuine punishment, especially if you’re targeted repeatedly by someone who correctly guessed your character pick. Several community discussions circle back to the Assassin as the single most frustrating element in the game. It works in theory (it’s a powerful deterrent that shapes the draft), but in practice it can sour the mood at the table.

The “crabs in a bucket” problem emerges in games with experienced players. When someone gets close to ending the game by building their eighth district, every other player has strong incentive to use their abilities to slow that person down. The Warlord destroys one of their buildings. The Thief takes their gold. The Assassin targets the character they’re most likely to pick. This can extend the game well beyond its natural length, creating a frustrating stretch where the leader gets hammered and nobody else can quite cross the finish line either. Some groups love this political dynamic. Others find it tedious.

Mechanical depth beyond the character draft is thin. The actual city-building side of the game involves collecting gold and playing cards, and the decision space there is limited. Draw cards or take gold, then build if you can afford something. Without the character interaction layer, the underlying game would be forgettable. This isn’t necessarily a flaw for a game that knows what it is, but players looking for deep engine-building or complex economic decisions will find the infrastructure here pretty basic.

The Social Game Wearing a Strategy Game’s Clothes

The thing to understand about Citadels is that it’s fundamentally a social deduction game with a city-building scoring mechanism attached. The buildings matter for points, but the game lives and dies on how well you read the other people at the table. Can you predict which character your biggest threat will take? Can you bluff them into picking the wrong one? Can you take a character you don’t need just to deny it to someone who does? The best sessions happen when the table is full of second-guessing, fake-outs, and dramatic reveals. If your group treats it as a puzzle to optimize, it falls flat. If they treat it as a contest of wits, it sings.

Should You Play Citadels?

Citadels is ideal for groups of four or five players who enjoy reading opponents and don’t mind games where someone might wreck their plans on purpose. It works as a gateway game for newer players thanks to its simple rules and short teach time. It also holds up as a filler or warmup game for experienced groups, especially with the expanded character roster adding variety.

Skip it if you hate direct conflict or if losing a turn to the Assassin would ruin your evening. Think twice about playing with seven or eight players unless your group is comfortable with longer playtimes and extended downtime between turns.

The Verdict on Citadels

Citadels is a classic card game that turns role selection into a tense bluffing contest, and it’s held up remarkably well for over two decades. The character draft is where the real game lives, and it rewards reading your opponents as much as planning your own moves. Higher player counts introduce downtime that can drag the experience down, and the take-that elements will rub some groups the wrong way. But for four or five players who enjoy getting into each other’s heads, Citadels remains one of the most accessible and replayable bluffing games around.