Played this game as part of a world-building session with a group I run for teens. Lead to a good deal more competitive gameplay than I think most playthroughs of this would tend towards! A lot of players cheering when their crew got to take over a rival holding, or cackling when they drew the right card to allow their evil empire to claim the city...
Anyway, it teased out some brilliant characters from the collective imagination, such as the Orator who rambled incessantly from the irreplacable cultural landmark of the Loose Stack Of Crates bang-slap in the middle of our map, or Kevin The Local Dead guy who of course predeceased the entire game but nonetheless caused a great outcry at the table when he was then run over by a train. The card prompts are really good for those big moments of reversal, because the questions asked left & right essentially give 3 players ownership of the scene – who are then going to remember what happened (a major problem in a chaotic group of kids, trust me) well enough to tie it back into later prompts.
I will say that Debt-Asset-Holding economy side of the game feels a little underdeveloped. For example, there's no downside really to picking up more & more Debts, besides the narrative weight of course (and I suppose the possibility that if you reduce them to zero, there's no consequence if you fail to Seize Control? if I'm reading those rules right) – and so my players didn't bother ever repaying them. It didn't help that like other commenters, I was a bit confused about whether you started with
Debts or Assets or not (you've fixed it now, but I think maybe I was
operating off of an earlier pdf?), but once we realised the mistake & went back and defined our starting resources, that did actually add great colour to each crew. I will say though that the headlines & Overhear Gossip aspect definitely suited our style of play! The person-on-the-street perspective after every event really brought this beautiful aftertaste of callousness or comedy or craziness (and so on) to everything, and personally shaped so much of how I thought about that city.
All in all, the game achieved exactly what I hoped it might: a fun 2-3 nights of zero-prep gaming, some interesting footholds to boost me up into creating factions & character-motivations & politics, and this now-familiar map of a strange strange metropolis we could start to dig deeper on... Oh, and the kids managed to end the game by recreating fantasy 9/11, but I had NOTHING to do with that!