Open Cities guide: which envelope to open and when to craft

How Open Cities actually works

The loop is one tap wide. Four envelopes sit on a shelf. You tap one to buy and open it, tap again to break the wax seal, and then tap each thing that flies out to collect it — tickets, tokens, and, almost always, an illustrated city card that arrives face down and waits for one more tap. The rarity word that lands over the scene tells you what you got: Common, Rare, Super rare, Epic, Mythical, Legendary.

There are eighty-four cities in three decks. Forty-eight Base cities come out of envelopes. Twenty-four Pro cities and twelve Elite cities do not — those are forged from duplicates, which is why the second half of this guide is about crafting rather than opening. Tap the deck to browse everything in one long scroll, tap any card to look at it up close, and tap the plus at the end of a deck to see what a craft costs.

Nothing in the game can go wrong. No lives, no timers, no fail state, no energy bar to wait on — the only real resource is your patience with the odds.

The four envelope tiers, and why Basic is not the consolation prize

Basic is free and never runs out, and it pays one to three tickets per opening. Travel costs ten tickets. VIP costs eighteen tokens, Royal thirty. The prices are the obvious difference; the odds are the real one. A Basic envelope gives a Common card seven times out of ten. A Royal envelope gives a Common only six times in a hundred.

That gap is what makes each ticket a decision rather than a formality. Spend it now on a Travel envelope and you get a card sooner; stack tickets and tokens toward a Royal one and you get a better card later. Neither is wrong, but the practical Open Cities tip is this: the Basic envelope is the engine of the whole economy. It is the only thing that generates currency out of nothing, so a session that never touches it starves. Open Basic envelopes freely, and treat paid tiers as something you buy with the proceeds.

One asymmetry is worth knowing before it surprises you. The Basic envelope brings a city in three openings out of four; in the fourth there is no card at all and the currency payout doubles instead. Paid envelopes always give a card. So an empty Basic opening is not bad luck — it is the tier paying you in fuel instead of collection.

Duplicates are the best thing you own

The instinct from every other collecting game is to groan at a repeat. Unlearn it here. A second copy of a city raises that card's level, and every copy beyond the first becomes crafting material — the material that Pro and Elite cities are made of. A duplicate is never wasted, and a shelf full of duplicates of dull Common cities is closer to a bank balance than to clutter.

There is one catch, and it costs people hours: material is tied to region. The four regions are Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East and Africa, and a pile of European duplicates does nothing for an Asian card. Check which region a target belongs to before pouring copies into it — working one region at a time is far faster than working the whole map.

Crafting: the twelve-copy floor and the point where repeats stop making sense

A Pro city is forged from duplicates of Base cities from the same region — twelve for the cheapest one, more for rarer targets. Your collection is never emptied by this: only copies beyond the first are spent, so the card you already own stays exactly where it is.

Forging the same Pro card a second time costs twice as much, a third time three times as much: twelve, then twenty-four, then thirty-six. New cities do not do that. So there is always a crossing point, and finding it is the whole of Open Cities crafting strategy — craft the cheapest card in a region first, then keep an eye on the price of a repeat against the price of the next city you have never made. The moment the new one is cheaper, move on. Nothing is capped and nothing is forbidden; the frontier just walks forward by itself if you let it.

Elite cities are a different road. They need Pro duplicates plus elite tokens, and elite tokens fall only out of Royal envelopes — about a third of them, in a handful at a time. There is no substitute. If Elite cards are the goal, Royal envelopes are the goal too, and everything upstream is tickets and tokens funnelled one direction.

Read the shelf: Lucky tags, doubled payouts, and the streak that cannot go on forever

The game tells you when luck is coming, which is unusual and worth exploiting. One envelope on the shelf can carry a Lucky tag, meaning its rarity odds are raised. The flag is decided before you tap, so the tag is a real promise rather than a tease, and it stays on that envelope until you open it. Only one envelope carries it at a time.

Because it waits for you, a Lucky tag is worth saving. Finish what you were doing, then open it deliberately — ideally at the highest tier you can afford, since raised odds are worth more on top of odds that were already good. Some envelopes also pay double currency, a straightforward bonus with nothing to decide.

And bad runs have a ceiling. Go twenty-five openings without pulling a Super rare or better and the next card is guaranteed to be one. A dry streak in Open Cities is always about to end, which is a good reason to keep tapping the free envelope through one rather than switching games.

Coming from Mystery Dumpling: what carries over and what does not

If you arrived looking for a Mystery Dumpling: Unbox ASMR alternative, the satisfying part is intact and it is mostly made of sound. Paper creaks, the wax seal cracks and drops away, the flap folds open, and every item that comes out has its own note — a ticket lands with a thump, and tokens climb a scale one step higher each time, so a rich envelope arrives as a run instead of a row of identical clicks. Card flips have a snap; a rare one gets its own chime. The music is a single quiet track that plays, disappears for a minute and a half, and comes back. Headphones are the right way to play it, and there is a mute button in the bar under the game for when they are not.

What is different is what the unboxing is for. Out of the envelope comes an illustrated city with a rarity, a place in a collection of eighty-four, and a use for its duplicates. Open Cities is its own game and is not made by or affiliated with the dumpling unboxing apps — it simply solves the same craving with a collection and a crafting tree attached.

It runs free in the browser on crokocat with no download and no sign-up, on desktop, phone and tablet. On desktop you can click anywhere on the opening scene to advance it, and Space and Enter work too; on a phone the entire game fits one thumb. Progress is saved on your device, and your player level, city count and best find travel to your crokocat account if you have one. If the pull of a satisfying tap is what brought you, Melon Merge and Pop Tap are the closest neighbours on the portal.

Melon MergeGrow the watermelonPlay now

Pop TapMatch three, pop the board, bounce off the pinsPlay now

Frequently asked questions

Guides & tips

• Games like Mystery Dumpling: Unbox ASMR you can play in a browser
• Bubble shooter strategy: drop the cluster, don’t just pop the group
• Games like the watermelon game: merge puzzles worth your time
• Watermelon game strategy: how to grow the big melon

Play it here

• Open Cities — Open envelopes, collect the world's cities
• Melon Merge — Grow the watermelon
• Pop Tap — Match three, pop the board, bounce off the pins