Kris Hall: A Rules Preview of Urban Sprawl

GMT Games is primarily known as a wargame company, but they have occasionally published euro-ish games (Manifest Destiny is one example).  This week they added two non-wargames to their pre-order webpage along with the announcement that one of them would be published in 2010.  The two games are Dominant Species, another game about competing prehistoric species, and Urban Sprawl, a game about city-building from designer Chad Jensen.  The rules for both games are already available online, and so I downloaded the rules to Urban Sprawl, a game on a topic that seemed especially familiar.

In Urban Sprawl, two to four players compete to erect buildings and parks on a mapboard that is divided by streets into city blocks.  The players will have opportunities to manipulate the value of whole rows of buildings as they try to accumulate holdings that will generate the most prestige points.

A player begins his turn by deciding whether or not to discard any of his permit cards in exchange for wealth points. After discarding permit cards, a player may spend his turn’s allotment of action points to acquire new permit cards, to build contract cards (which results in placing a building tile on the board), or taking a favor (grabbing a contract to be used later).

Buildings come in four flavors: commercial, government, residential, and industrial.  (There are also parks to be built which have no zoning restrictions).  A player can only build a contract if he has enough permit cards of the appropriate flavor to fulfill the contract (there are some wild cards which can be used for any flavor contract). 

When a player builds a contract, he places a building tile of the appropriate size and color on the board, and marks it with one of his ownership cubes.  Buildings cannot be placed next to a building of a different flavor unless it is already adjacent to a building of the same flavor.

Many contracts trigger events or payouts when they are built.  For example, building a corporate headquarters may result in payouts for owners of commercial buildings.  Players have a choice of taking their payouts as either wealth or prestige.

Complicating the game are vocation tokens and political offices.  Vocation tokens are chits that players acquire by constructing certain buildings (building a school might yield an education vocation token).  Vocation tokens may lead to payouts if certain events occur. 

Political offices are cards which grant the owner some kind of game advantage.  The Mayor gets an extra action point each turn, the Police Chief gets both wealth and prestige when scoring vocation tokens, the Treasurer collects two wealth points from each opponent each turn, the Union Boss gets a one-permit discount on building contracts, and the District Attorney doubles neighborhood bonuses when he builds a contract.  Each of these offices has a different qualification at election time: the Mayor goes to the player with the most vocation tokens, the Police chief goes to the player with the most residential buildings, the Union Boss goes to the player with the most industrial buildings, the Treasurer goes to the player with the most commercial buildings, and the District Attorney goes to the player with the most government buildings.

Late in the game, a new role--the Contractor--appears, and he is allotted to the player with the fewest victory points.  The Contractor can remove old buildings as long as he can replace them with buildings that are equally big.  This role should help the game avoid a runaway leader syndrome. 

At the end of the game, the various roles earn their owners additional prestige points based on the number of buildings of the appropriate flavor owned by the player.

Urban Sprawl reminds me of a more complicated version of Big City.  The added complexity may offer players more opportunity for strategy, but there seems to be enough event cards and other random elements to keep the game from seeming like an urban chess game.  In short, Urban Sprawl looks like fun.  I hope it gets published.

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