Showing posts with label Sprawlopolis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sprawlopolis. Show all posts

Monday, July 22, 2024

This Sprawlopolis is really good

I have to confess that I have largely admired the Sprawlopolis family from afar. I have always thought the games were downright brilliant but, until quite recently, I played their parent game Circle the Wagons more than the entire family put together.

That’s really because I have a black and white printer and I’m colorblind on top of that. The textures in the original game aren’t super distinct and even when I printed out the game in color, the colors were diffuse enough that it was hard for me to tell some of them apart.

Both Agropolis and Naturopolis do a much better job at both texture and color contrast but I was already derailed by the original game. Which is a shame because the family is very good.

Micro tile-laying games were already a well established concept, including ones with overlapping cards. Variable scoring conditions were also established. Sprawlopolis also has a variable winning score depending on the scoring conditions, which I hadn’t seen before but I would be surprised if it wasn’t already out there.

What Steve Aramini has done, though, is a really good job of packaging all of these elements together into a tight, well balanced, challenging game. 

Revisiting Sprawlopolis, what I am really struck by is how many tough and annoying decisions there are in the game. I look at a lot of 18 card games because, well, they’re really easy to print out and play. And from my experience, Sprawlopolis has a lot of weight for a micro game.

I feel micro games and more minimalist games have become more a part of the gaming culture. This started a ways back since both Love Letter and Qwixx helped get that ball rolling in their own ways. (Feel free to tell me how I’m wrong)

And I feel that a design goal that some micro games pursue is for the game experienced to feel like a “big“ game. It doesn’t always work and sometimes the results feel cluttered and fiddly. And it isn’t always the goal of a particular game. In the first set of Pack O Game, HUE is solid but feels intended to be small. On the other hand, TAJ feels ambitious but fiddly and GEM actually feels like a bigger game.

Sprawlopolis feels bigger than eighteen cards. More than that, the gameplay is intuitive, not fiddly. Scrabble and Carcassonne and other games have made tile laying second nature to so many of us. You don’t have to concentrate on how to play but on the actual choices you need to make.

I revisted Sprawlopolis because I signed up to playtest Casinopolis. Now, I want to re-examine the entire family.

Friday, May 3, 2019

Finding your perfect city in Sprawlopolis

I have finally tried Sprawlopolis, last year’s shining star from Button Shy games. Took me long enough and my first impression is that it lives up the the hype.

Sprawlopolis is the spiritual sequel to Circle the Wagons. In addition to being by the same design team, they are both 18-card tile laying game where the flip side of the cards are the scoring conditions. The big difference is that Sprawlopolis is a cooperative game.

Which was not a selling point for me. I love Pandemic but, as a rule, cooperatives are not my cup of tea. (Watch is our child fall in love with them and I play nothing but until he goes to college) But I think that being a cooperative actually was better for the core concept.

Okay, in Sprawlopolis, you are city planners, working together to design a city. At the start of the game, shuffle the cards and draw three. Those will be the special scoring conditions for your game and you won’t be using the map side of those cards this time.

Something that is actually quite clever is that the scoring conditions don’t just tell you what you score or lose you extra points in the game. They also each have a number on them. The three numbers on your cards add up to the target number for that particular game. You have to score at least that many points to win.

Now, I’ve just played the solitaire rules, where I have a hand of three. With two to four players, you pass the hand around. Every one has a card but the active player has three. They pass the two cards they didn’t use and draw a new one. I like that a lot. It adds a lot of interaction to the game.

Each card has four quadrants (one in each of the four different colors), as well as some roads. Placement requires that at least one quadrant must share an edge an a quadrant on the board. You can overlap but you can’t tuck your card under.

After all the cards are placed, you get points for your largest area in each of the four colors, lose points for each stretch of road and go over the special scoring cards. If you meet the target number, you win!

You know, showing someone how to play the game using examples would be a lot easier than writing all that out :D

As you already know, I like Sprawlopolis a lot. Circle the Wagons is a solid game but Sprawlopolis takes the core ideas and makes a cleaner, more streamlined game. And being a cooperative helps that. You can have more players and you create a larger tableau. You have a variable scoring target as well as variable scoring. Sprawlopolis is a puzzle with a lot of permutations. It’s a great use of eighteen cards.