La Citta
Rio Grande Games
2 to 4 players (best with 4 players)

This is another Rio Grande game (publishers of Torres, Java, Tikal) where you are an Italian prince developing your cities and competing against your rival princes for the population of their cities.

If you're familiar with other Rio Grande games (like the ones mentioned above), you'll recognize the concepts like Action Points and turns. This makes the learning curve a bit shorter. If not, the basics are still simple to learn, but it might take a couple games to get the hang of it.

The idea is that you must support your city in food to keep it alive, but then to further your population growth you must also develop your cities' education, culture, and health.

With those three components, competition begins. At the end of each year, you find out what the people of the land value most among the three. If your city has more of that than neighboring cities, then you can steal the population of neighboring cities. But be careful! Pull too many people to your cities and you could have a starvation problem.

It's a fun game about economic and population warfare rather than the traditional military warfare. If you're a fan of other Rio Grande games, a fan of the Settlers of Catan line of games, or just curious, give La Citta a try.