Sunrise Lane
Designed by: Reiner Knizia
Sunrise Lane is a game for 2-4 players, where together you build the houses and apartment blocks of a city. But who is the best builder?
The game takes place on a board showing numerous plots of land, each with a numeric value between 1-5. Everyone takes a bunch of houses in their colour and are dealt three cards, then the game begins with the youngest player.
On your turn, you can either pick up two cards (and discard down to 5, if you have more) or build and take one card instead. Building is a matter of discarding cards that match the plot colours to build there, following a couple of simple regulations: you can only build next to previously built-on plots, or next to the fountain in the centre of the city. Discard one card to build a house, or two to build two houses (one atop the other) or even three or four to build skywards. Whilst this costs you your precious cards, you’ll score points equal to the plot value multiplied by number of cards spent: for example, if you discard three green cards to build on a green plot with a value of four, that’s twelve healthy points earned.
Your other options is to discard any colour card to build a park: this gets you no points at all, but can be used to sabotage opportunities for your opponents, blocking out high-scoring plots or hemming in their expansionist tendencies. And that’s important because of the end-game scoring: the board is divided into four quadrants: two blue and two red. The players with the tallest building in the blue areas will score some healthy bonus points. In the red area, occupying the most plots gets the bonuses. And finally the players who have the most connected buildings pick up bonuses as well.
Sam says
The game takes about 10 minutes per player – possibly less – and if it doesn’t feel like it represents the way a city is really built (at all) – it’s a surprisingly sneaky and interactive game in how overtly aggressive it is. Turns are largely super-fast: either pick up a couple of cards, or build and get one. You might snag a row of plots with a bunch of different cards, or build a huge tower block, ideally in a blue quadrant for those bonus points. Players need to make sure no one person is engineering themselves into all the bonus points because with a potential 50 available – admittedly, this is rather unlikely to claimed by a single player – it can be a huge swing in points at the end of the game. For me, it’s not up there with designer Reiner Knizia’s hall-of-fame games, but it is a goodie.
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Take That!
Getting in each other’s way is at the heart of what Sunrise Lane is about. With little ones you can certainly take a more gentle, getting-on-with-your-own-business approach: like Ticket to Ride, there are different angles of approach here between gentle and feisty. But we like the feisty version.
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Fidget Factor!
Low, unless someone is really agonising. Give them a nudge!
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Brain Burn!
The rules couldn’t be much simpler – do you play and get one card, or pass and get two? If you play, then it’s a balance between furthering your own goals and getting in the way of others’. If you can do both – that’s the ideal turn.
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Again Again!
I wouldn’t argue Sunrise Lane offers a roller coaster of different experiences. But there’s a nice easy moreishness to it, where most turns feel productive and the luck of the draw can be balanced out, usually, with some canny play.
