Naturopolis Game Review
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WONDERFUL NATURE
Are you tired of the hustle and bustle of the city? Tired of the constant noise and distractions? Maybe you should take a break from the hustle and bustle and escape to the idyllic countryside. Enjoy the pristine beauty of the countryside and remember: it is your responsibility to keep it pristine and lush.
Naturopolis is the latest pocket-sized game from publisher Button Shy, and is a direct successor to the Sprawlopolis line of games. This game, along with Sprawlopolis and Agropolis, and their associated mini-expansion games, share the same core gameplay mechanics. Solo or in pairs, you play cards from a deck of eighteen cards and create a specific landscape with different scoring mechanisms. However, Natuoropolis takes a different approach to the theme, focusing on creating natural beauty and scenic landscapes, while punishing you for spoiling that beauty with an excessive amount of roads and asphalt.
BUILDING A BETTER WORLD
Those familiar with other games in this series will recognize the gameplay pattern. Setup only takes a few minutes. Shuffle all eighteen cards together and draw the top three. One side of the cards depicts the aforementioned landscapes, while the other side of each card features a separate scoring target. These first three cards will be placed with the targets facing up, indicating your unique scoring mechanisms for this particular game. You will then deal three cards to the first player and one card to any additional player(s). Turn over the top card of the deck to begin, and you’re good to go!
The moves are simple: you simply add a card to the table in front of you. Each card contains one quadrant of each biome in the game: forests, grasslands, mountains, or lakes. Some cards depict rivers, some depict roads, and some depict campsites. You can place your card so that it overlaps or lines up edge to edge with any card already played on the table, and it can even create gaps in the landscape if you follow the other placement rules. After placing a card, you pass the two cards remaining in your hand to the next player. This repeats, with each player placing one card over and over again until the deck is completely empty.
A COMPROMISE IN BEAUTY
After all, you have a beautiful natural landscape to admire… but what does that mean? Looking at the three objectives you drew at the beginning of the game, you can sum up your target score by adding the numbers on the three objective cards. In general, scoring options that are harder or less common to complete may only add a couple of points to your target score, while easier objectives will add more to your target score. Beat that score and win the game. Can’t beat it? It’s a tough game—you lose, and your park will be ugly.
In addition to your specific goals, there are some standard scoring rules that help give your landscape an edge. For each of the four main biomes, you'll receive one point for each card that falls within your largest contiguous area of that biome. This encourages you to try to build large, sprawling forests and massive lakes. However… you'll also need to manage your roads, as each individual road will reduce your total score by two points. This is the biggest difference from previous games in the Sprawlopolis series, and reflects the thematic emphasis on the beauty of nature.
CONCLUSIONS
Thematically, Naturopolis achieves its goals. The tension of choosing between starting a new path and continuing to develop your sprawling biomes is at the heart of the gameplay decisions. Balancing your moves between setting up big point wins and managing negative point values leaves each of your fifteen card turns on a razor's edge. Given the context of the other games in the series, it's easy to see how this game repeats the formula and tweaks it a bit to make it seem new. There are also combo expansions that let you add this game to the other two in the series to combine cards and create mega-landscapes with a mix of natural beauty, cityscapes, and farmland. On top of that, it all fits comfortably in your pocket or purse, perfect for a quick game at the brewery or while waiting for your meal.
That said, the same minor flaws as the other games in the series are present here. While Button Shy positions these games as co-op, in our testing they really felt more like a solo experience. Much of that is due to the game's limited size. The eighteen maps feel much better for a solo player than when you're sharing your card draws with someone else. Another minor issue I ran into while playing was that the road penalties are so severe compared to the points you're earning that the game almost always requires you to manipulate the placement of roads rather than actually scoring points. The fact that the theme is combined with the mechanics seems intentional, but as a player, actively working to reduce losses was less fun than creating the perfect landscape for my target maps.
However, at just $12 and with a few free add-ons, it's hard to pass up such a challenging solo puzzler in such a small package. Be prepared: you'll probably lose most of the time. While Naturopolis isn't likely to win over those who didn't like Sprawlopolis or Agropolis, it offers much of the same compact gameplay and will please fans of the series. If you're new to the series and are wondering whether to get involved with this game, don't worry. It's affordable and works reliably as a standalone game, and it can also serve as a great introduction to the world of Button Shy's wallet-sized games.
