Designed by: Danny Devine,Paul Kluka,Steven Aramini
Primarily a solo game, Sprawlopolis can also be played co-operatively with up to four players. During the very brief course of the game, you – and a friend or two, perhaps – will be adding cards to an expanding tableau on the table, sprawling your city in what you hope is the most points-productive fashion.
Sprawlopolis is a deck of cards: every card has a sprawl side (with which to build your town) and an objective side. Before play begins, three of them are flipped onto their objective sides and form the criteria for points-scoring in the current game. Then the game itself is merely the placing of cards on their sprawling side – every card is made up of up to four different categories (residential/commercial/industrial/parks) as well as a road or two. Cards can be placed adjacent or overlapping a half or quarter of previously-placed cards.
In every game you’ll score a point for each segment of your largest cluster of the aforementioned building categories and parks, and minus a point for every incomplete road. But the three objectives make every game different – first, they supply three more ways to score points: it might be having residential buildings and parks adjacent, say, or a big points haul for your longest circular road. Or maybe keeping the industrial buildings around the edge of the city…
But just as pertinently, the three objective cards also have a points target and their cumulative value is what your city must score to win the game! Triumph, and you are celebrated throughout the city in the way the city planners often aren’t. Fail, and your fledgling career will be found smouldering in the nearest dumpster.
None
Depends who you're playing with. Sprawlopolis does seem to come across largely as a solo game, with the load of decisions spread out amongst the players with more than one, and it is a game that invites pauses.
Probably the largest box>>decisions ratio we've seen, Sprawlopolis holds a huge amount of crunchy decision-making in a tiny package.
With every card containing different objectives and three selected each time, and then the cards themselves coming out in a different order, there's a huge amount of replayability here.
1-4
Players
8+
Years
5-15
Mins
Sam says
I don't play Sprawlopolis a lot mainly out of circumstance - I'm not by default a solo gamer and there are very few titles I'll sit down to play by myself (though there are notable exceptions) But every time I've tried Sprawlopolis, either solo or with others, I have just been so impressed with what emerges out of a small deck of cards to give you such a weighty, brain-burning challenge, that almost reminds me of chess and yet is done and dusted in ten minutes or so. Don't expect to feel like you're a real city planner, unless it's a city planner in the middle of a psychotic nervous breakdown due to forced constraints, but do expect a brilliantly simple and yet super-tough abstract game of making patterns and connections.