Cubyria: Architects of a Lost City Board Game Preview
This is a preview copy sent to us for our early opinions. No money exchanged hands. Some art, rules or components will change in the final game. Find out more here.
Some games catch your attention because of a clever mechanism. Others do it because the table looks completely unlike anything else around it. Cubyria is very much in the second camp, although there is a surprisingly clever spatial puzzle hiding underneath all that three-dimensional plastic. And some amazing multiplier scoring options that will blow your minds!
This is a preview based on a prototype copy, so the final components, materials, presentation and production quality are still subject to change. That matters particularly here because Cubyria has been designed around its physical structure from the beginning, and the team is still working towards a manufacturable version that retains the distinctive look of the original 3D-printed pieces. I am therefore focusing primarily on the gameplay, building system and overall experience rather than judging the prototype as finished retail production. Although, for a 3-D printed prototype, this is exceptional.
Build Me a Palace
Cubyria casts two to five players as rival architects hired by a rather demanding Vizier. Everyone contributes to the same palace on the same board, but you are competing individually for points, with the idea being that the architect who best satisfies the Vizier’s tastes earns the most favour.
The designers describe it as something close to competitive 3D Tetris, and that is probably the quickest way to understand the basic appeal. Players are dealt three cards. Cards correspond directly to physical building components, and on your turn, you use as many cards as you wish to add rooms, roofs, stairs, balconies, and structural pieces to the growing palace. Each card shows the building's scoring potential based on what floor it is built on. Some want to be higher, others like the Crypt, like to be low. There are multipliers based on matching buildings of the same category next to each other, as shown on the symbols on the left of the card. And most conveniently, there is a grid reference showing where you can find the attached building in the building container's storage unit, which works so well. I love it.
Every room has a base value, and that value is multiplied by the floor on which you build it. A room worth four points on the first floor is therefore worth considerably more if you can somehow position it safely several levels higher. But this will not always be possible. And your fellow players will be looking for those high placements too.
The Vizier Has Opinions
Of course, your employer is not content to let architects build wherever they like. Certain rooms have preferred locations, while others can comfortably sit anywhere. A Dungeon, for example, belongs down low, and the Vizier's own chambers score negative if it sits on floor three or below. He wants to be up high! If you ignore those preferences you can still place the room, but you will suffer a penalty equal to its value.
That creates a nice little tension. Sometimes the correct thematic placement is also the obvious scoring choice, but there can be reasons to accept a penalty if a badly placed room creates the foundation for something much more valuable above it. The scoring therefore encourages efficiency without completely dictating your decisions.
The larger and more complicated rooms tend to be worth more, but they are also more difficult to support as the structure rises. Most rooms need to be completely supported underneath, so the palace naturally becomes a puzzle of foundations, useful surfaces and increasingly awkward gaps.
Doors, Windows and Actual Architecture
But that is not even half of it. Cubyria does not let you build a nonsensical pile of boxes either. Every room must ultimately be connected to the rest of the palace through a continuous path, most commonly by matching doors. You only need one valid connection, which keeps the rule manageable, but it still forces you to think about how your new room actually joins the existing structure. And each room only has a few doors, sometimes just one. Sometimes even none!
Secret doors make that easier because they can connect to normal doors, other secret doors or even blank walls. Gallery windows work the opposite way and cannot be blocked, which creates another spatial consideration as the palace becomes more crowded. Once placed, a building with a window can never be blocked, and this will affect every turn for the rest of the game, so think carefully about where you will be place these tricky rooms.
What I like about that system is that the complexity remains mostly visible. You do not need to remember some buried internal network once the palace becomes enormous. You are primarily looking at the exposed edges, open doors, available support, and useful building locations, which is exactly where a game like this needs the information to live. As you can see, as the game progresses, you will have a lot of rooms built. It's nice to not have to worry about what's under or in between previously built rooms!
Going Up
Vertical construction is where Cubyria starts to get especially interesting. Internal stairs acquired via cards just like the rooms, create a connection between one room and the room directly beneath it, opening access to a new floor and allowing further construction around it. Once that vertical route exists, other rooms on the same level can connect normally without needing their own staircase. And mostly, the higher you go, the more points!
Roofs score slightly differently, using their base value plus the floor they cover rather than multiplying by height. Support columns are effectively structural wild cards that can go almost anywhere and help hold up rooms or roofs, although they do not create a valid route through the palace themselves.
Then there are external staircases, and these are where the scoring can really explode. Rooms attached to them can be doubled, and linked staircases can stack those multipliers again and again. A clever player is therefore constantly looking for ways to combine height, room value and multipliers rather than simply placing the next convenient piece.
Balconies and Bridges
Balconies loosen the normal support rules. Balcony spaces can overhang empty areas as long as more than half of the entire piece remains properly supported, allowing the palace to stretch outward rather than becoming a neat vertical tower.
Some specific components even reward that overhang directly. The Juliet Balcony and Bridge Tower can score bonus points based on the empty space beneath them, encouraging you to create those dramatic suspended structures rather than simply filling every gap underneath.
It is exactly the sort of rule that gives Cubyria personality. The game wants the final palace to look strange, ambitious and slightly improbable, and it rewards players for embracing that.
Introductory and Core Games
There is an introductory mode designed to teach the basic building rules. Players have cards in hand alongside a shared open display, and on a turn can use up to five cards from the combined selection before everything is replenished. Play continues until the deck is exhausted.
The full game then adds Affinities, which are symbols representing the style or function of various rooms and components. Matching affinities between adjacent pieces creates bonus points, with rooms gaining extra value for matches and roofs potentially doubling their total value.
This is where the scoring becomes much more tactical. Building high is already valuable, staircases can multiply scores, and then affinities can increase them again. The result is a system where an apparently ordinary room placement can become extremely lucrative if several scoring opportunities intersect at once.
The Whimsy of Cubyria
The full game also introduces Whimsy cards, which are secret personal objectives representing whatever strange architectural demand the Vizier has whispered into your ear. Each player has one hidden goal, and the first person to complete theirs doubles the score from their entire turn. This allows for insane scores. The highest we achieved on one turn using a Whimsy was 180! And most early game scores are more like two or five!
The particularly nasty twist is that when somebody completes a Whimsy, everyone loses their current card. They are shuffled back together and new goals are dealt out, so you can spend several turns quietly preparing for something only to watch another architect complete theirs first and wipe your plan away.
That injects a welcome bit of urgency into what could otherwise become a purely contemplative spatial puzzle. It also helps explain some of the enormous scoring swings the designers have seen, with height, affinities, stairs and a completed Whimsy all potentially combining into one ridiculous turn.
Shared Building, Shared Problems
Because everyone is working on the same palace, Cubyria is naturally quite reactive. The perfect position you were eyeing up may be gone by the time your next turn arrives, and another player can unintentionally create exactly the support, doorway or affinity connection you needed.
That also means long-term planning has limits. Some early players have noted that card draw and the rapidly changing shared structure make it difficult to plan several turns ahead, but the other side of that is that you are constantly solving a new spatial problem rather than executing a script you decided upon ten minutes earlier.
For me, that feels appropriate for the design. Cubyria looks like a puzzle, but it is really an opportunistic puzzle, where the challenge is not simply identifying the perfect move but spotting what the palace currently allows and exploiting it better than everybody else.
The Physical Game
Cubyria’s biggest strength is impossible to separate from its physical form. This game began life as an attempt to represent vertical movement properly on a tabletop, before the designers realised that constructing the environment was more interesting than the chase game they had originally intended.
That history makes sense when you see the system. The castle is not a decorative representation of something happening elsewhere. Building the object is the game. The doors, windows, stairs, balconies, support and height are all meaningful parts of the rules rather than plastic scenery added afterwards.
The challenge has been manufacturing that vision at a sensible price. The current plan is for foldable semi-flexible plastic components that arrive flat and permanently snap together, recreating the look of the original 3D-printed rooms without requiring prohibitively expensive multi-part moulds. Because this is still a prototype, the final success of that production solution is something I would want to see before giving the game a full review.
Final Thoughts
Cubyria is immediately distinctive. Plenty of games involve laying tiles, building cities or constructing shared landscapes, but physically assembling a competitive three-dimensional palace gives this one a very different presence and creates spatial decisions that simply would not work on a conventional flat board.
There is also more game underneath the spectacle than I initially expected. Height multipliers, preferred floors, architectural connections, stairs, balconies, affinities and secret Whimsy objectives all interact to create some potentially huge turns, while the shared structure means you are constantly reacting to what everyone else has built.
There are question marks that only the finished edition can answer, particularly around final component quality, durability and how successfully the production version preserves the prototype’s table presence. But as a prototype preview, Cubyria already has the most important thing going for it: it feels like its own game, rather than another familiar system wearing a new coat of paint.
