Sagrada co-designer helps resurrect Lords of Waterdeep-inspired steampunk game City of Gears after six years stuck in development

After six years in development, Lords of Waterdeep-inspired steampunk worker-placement game City of Gears has been brought back from the dead.

City of Gears was originally created back in 2012 by Roll for It designer Chris Leder, who was motivated by the idea of applying dice-based randomisation of resources to the beloved D&D spin-off.

The game evolved somewhat from Leder’s original concept, with the dice becoming variable actions used by players to claim ownership of an abandoned clockwork city, and was later announced as the winner of The Game Crafter’s Steampunk Design Challenge that October.

In 2014, Leder signed the game to Arcane Wonders, with interest from tabletop video figure Tom Vasel expressing an interest in including City of Gears in the publisher’s Dice Tower Essentials series of games.

Despite the interest, City of Gears was never released and floundered in development, ultimately resulting in Leder reclaiming the rights to the game and shelving the idea for a few years.

The seemingly dead project was resurrected early last year after Leder worked with Sagrada co-designer Daryl Andrews, who offered to partner with Leder on the project to refresh it and begin re-pitching it to publishers.

The pair attracted interest from Deception: Murder in Hong Kong studio Grey Fox Games last summer, which recently announced it would launch a Kickstarter for the title in the next few weeks – potentially bringing to a close more than half a decade of board game purgatory.