Urban Sprawl Board Game First Impressions

Urban Sprawl sees a small town become a Metropolis.

Also, they host the Olympics!

Players assume the roles of entrepreneur, tycoon, and politician—each helping in the development of a hypothetical “Anywhere, USA.”

Urban Sprawl Game Play

TL: DR Players use action points to draft cards and build buildings that score points.

Theme

This is “just” a fairly abstract town builder. The job roles that move around the table are thematic.

Setup

The setup looks straightforward. It is definitely one of those games that are easy to set up IF put away neatly. It’ll save on sorting out cards and putting the tiles in the right place.

Components & Artwork

The components are the same as they are for every GMT game.

Also, they usually go with substance over style and they have here too, the artwork is very minimal.

Ease of Teaching

It’s an incredibly simple to-play game, teaching would be no problem.

Adjacency rules are an issue. They’re simple to understand but hard to explain. Even the rulebook doesn’t clarify them very well.

Urban Sprawl Summary

Suburbia is my go-to city-building game. To be fair, this game isn’t that much heavier, it’s just more fiddly.

The action points are a good way to make you think about what cards to take on a turn. You also need to look at your cash to see if you can afford to build what you want where you want to.

The whole way of paying for building and scoring is really good too. The more a building costs to place means that when it scores, it’ll score more.

However, there is a card that lets the lead player set the prices. This means they can up the value of their buildings which seems wrong.

Also, the end of some turns can take AGES if multiple event cards come out. Then there can be multiple checks for job roles too which can really drag on. I mean you’re involved in all/most of it but you just want to get to building stuff.

This game is 11 years old and feels it, it could do with an update.

Jesta ThaRogue