Overview: City of Wonder is Social City, minus a couple thousand years. It takes the familiar city-buidling mechanics and adds a few new layers of complexity to move it closer to a true simulator and less just a sandbox. It’s still a fairly simple, timer-based game, but there are a number of engaging features and it’s clearly leveraging the successful Social City platform to make a very solid game.

The basic game is just like Social City – click residences to add population, add cultural buildings and decorations to build happiness (and therefore expand your population limit,) and use the “factory”-type buildings to generate cash on adjustable timers. The difference becomes apparent with the Research tree. Researching new technologies unlocks more buildings and bonuses, and eventually moves your culture through the various Ages, from stone-age thatched huts to fully modern apartments and factories. This would be purely cosmetic, except for Expeditions.

Expeditions add a whole new layer to your city-building choices. On an Expedition, you pick a random player and match your stats against theirs in either culture, trade, or conquest. The rewards are nice, and it gives the tech more meaning than just building unlocks – you can follow one tree and be very strong in any one of the three brackets, or go for a more evenhanded strategy to “win” your expeditions. (The advisers seem to know their stuff, and you’re not likely to “lose” if you pick the path they predict success in.) Adding military buildings that don’t directly increase your population or wealth can be a good alternative path, since you’ll likely have plenty of culture and trade just by building your city, and it’s an interesting way to get an edge.

The art style is fairly realistic, and, like Social City, care was obviously taken with each building and with the random tiny people who wander the streets to make them interesting and adorable. There’s also a lot of humor in the various descriptions – for example, the description of the Religion technology is “It’s the only way to explain why Bad Stuff Happens.” Also, City of Wonder and Social City talk to each other – for example, when you reach level five in City of Wonder, you’ll get a coliseum for Social City if you have both games installed.

The addition of just a couple more systems onto the very solid (in fact award-winning) Social City base makes City of Wonder a more complex and interesting game. If you liked the tiny adorable people in Social City but didn’t find it stimulating enough, give City of Wonder a try – it’s definitely a big step closer to complex world simulators like Civilization.