Image taken from https://boardgamegeek.com/image/4654146/sprawlopolis

Designers: Steven Aramini, Danny Devine, Paul Kluka
Publisher: Button Shy
Artists: Loic Billiau, Dalton Cara, Danny Devine, Karolina Jedrzejak

Funny story about this game: I was really interested in it, so I kept trying to find a hard copy for cheap, to no avail, so I ended up settling on the PnP version. Thankfully, I have a printer at work, so I was able to print it when I received it but guess what: it’s not a color printer! So, I then spent a chunk of time coloring the blocks on the cards with highlighters so I could finally play. Truth be told – totally worth it!

In the solo game of Sprawlopolis, you are playing cards in a grid (no bounds) to maximize points. Each card has the same four terrain types and one or two roads in different patterns and configurations. During the game, you will be laying one card at a time to score points by having groups of the same type of terrain adjacent, and by minimizing the total number of roads in the city (those cause negative points at the end). You also have three goal cards each game (they vary) of which you are working to meet the conditions.

A few important rules: you can overlap the cards but you cannot tuck any cards, at least one block always has to be adjacent to a previously laid card (no corner kisses allowed), you can rotate the cards 180 degrees but they have to be played horizontally, each turn you draw up to three cards in your hand and select one to play, the deck actually sits face up so you can anticipate the next card you’ll receive, and it behooves you to connect roads but they won’t all connect unless you’re a wizard, so small unconnected segments of road are acceptable (but cost you points!) as are open spaces or gaps in your city (assuming you follow the rest of the rules).

There are a lot of things to like about this one! It’s compact, portable, doesn’t take up too much table space unless you go ham on making the biggest city possible, the rules are straightforward but there’s still an enjoyable spatial puzzle to be discovered, the replayability factor is pretty high based on the natural randomness of card shuffling, but also the three goals each game create new paths and strategies and complexity.

For what it sets out to be, Sprawlopolis is a winner! It’s simple, quick, and fun but still quite thinky. While I haven’t played it multiplayer, I can attest the solo mode works perfectly. It’s a beat your own score game, where the goals dictate the target score you need for success. I find this detail/mechanic super intriguing. The scoring goals can definitely affect your strategy, but it also increases the variability in the difficulty of the game. And then again, adds another layer of replayability.

Despite my self-inflicted hardship at the offset for being a cheap-o, this game is a keeper! It actually lives in my backpack, so I have it on me whenever I go to work and whenever I’m travelling. For the record, I 100% support buying the actual game on this one, unless you’re a professional PnP player with a color printer, unlike me.

I actually originally wrote this review months ago and since then, I have purchased a physical copy for the record.