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Jesse Dean
United States
Orlando
Florida
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
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On Saturday I received my much anticipated copy of the new Chad Jensen game Urban Sprawl. I’ve been looking forward to this one for quite a while. I absolutely adored Mr. Jensen’s Dominant Species, which was released in September ’11, and pre-ordered Urban Sprawl fairly soon afterwards, hoping that it would be as great of a game as Dominant Species was. After two games on Sunday, I have to say I am fairly impressed. While it is definitely a very different game than Dominant Species, it shows some of the same general talent for making heavy, complicated euros, and I see a lot of potential for this one to be another winner. However, there are still some potential flaws that might sink it for me, and I think I need to play it more before I put together a full review.
The first thing you should be aware of is that Urban Sprawl is a very heavy game. I did not feel nearly the same level of brain burn after my first two back-to-back plays of Dominant Species as I did after my two plays of Urban Sprawl. I think there are three parts to this. The first is that each contract card has a one-shot largely unique special ability that frequently has a pretty big impact on play. At any given time there are anywhere from six to eight contracts available (at differing action costs), and processing these special abilities can be daunting when you are still trying to grasp how the various parts of the game work together. Even after you learn the dynamics of the cards are still going to be a significant amount of information to track. The second part is that you typically have to keep three to five intersecting majorities in mind with any given placement, with a slightly different location resulting in different majorities, and placement costs, to account for. The third is the low level of planning you can do on your turn. This is impacted by the number of players, but the available cards are likely to be quite different from the end of your turn to the beginning of your next one so it is likely that any choices you make will change after any individual players turn, and when your turn comes around again the game state will have changed enough that you will have to make the majority of decisions on your turn, adding both to the game length and the amount of cognitive load you are subject to.
Because of this reduced capability to plan between turns, and the additional play time that is added with a fourth player, I suspect that 3-player will be my favored configuration unless I am playing entirely with experienced players. I do like the additional dynamism that comes with the fourth player, but I am just not sure it will be worth it. That being said, with only one play at each configuration I haven’t made a firm decision about this. I plan on trying out both the three and four player games as much as possible in the near future to see if my perception of the additional dynamism vs. downtime trade off is a bit off and the four can be just as rewarding as three with less experienced players.
I wasn’t sure at first how I would feel about the Urban Renewal cards and the ability of the Contractor to knock down buildings when placing their own, but I found out in play that it didn’t really bother me that much. The Urban Renewal cards just end up being another powerful tool in the overall arsenal of powerful tools that you could potentially grab to take advantage of. The Contractor role has some potential for kingmaking, but I suspect that with more experienced players it will be less relevant, as people will be able to identify who is actually in the best/worst position and then take advantage of that situation. Additionally, choosing to get into a slightly worse victory point position might end up being a tactical choice as players seek to grab the Contractor card in order to be able to get free access to building destruction in order to set themselves up for taking control of a particular political office or row and to protect themselves from a similar sort of reaction from other players.
People who dislike chaos and luck are probably going to have issues with the game. Event cards exist in both the contract decks and the planning deck, and when they hit can have a reasonably large impact on the game. Also, only about ½ to 2/3 of the contract cards will emerge in any given game, meaning that you cannot expect any particular card to show up. In our last game we had a particularly ridiculous series of events where one event card showed up three times, due to forced reshuffles, in one end phase resulting in a payout of 9 vps and 9 dollars. We just sort of shrugged it off and resolved to shuffle better in future instances, but if that sort of situation could potentially bother you then you probably want to be careful about this game. The lack of specific contract cards showing up is probably going to be slightly less problematic to most people, but it can result in individuals being able to hold on to political offices more effectively then they would be able to otherwise. On the positive side, a different array of contract cards does increase the games interplay variability quite a bit; the first and second games did feel quite different, and suspect that was not just because we moved from three players to four.
Overall I am pretty fond of the game. I am not sure how much I like it quite yet, as I still need to work my head around the strategic implications of both certain player decisions and the card mix as well as whether the chaos of the game is significant enough to override player decision making, but I am looking forward to exploring it further in the next few weeks. Once I have come to conclusions about the previously mentioned items I will write a more comprehensive review. I generally write my reviews once I think I have a pretty strong grasp on the game, usually in the 3-5 play range, but I suspect this one might take a bit longer before I reach that point. Until then, I will probably post additional thoughts as I develop them.
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Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious predator on Earth!
