Sprawlopolis is a game where you work together to build a new city by placing cards. It's a tiny game comprising just 18 cards but creates endless city-building challenges where you have to balance costly roads and point-scoring neighbourhoods. This would be hard on your own, but the challenge to cooperate and communicate with your fellow city builders makes this really stand out.

To start you take the top three cards and turn them over to specify how you score points with your city in this round. For example, maybe you get points for businesses on the edge of the city, or maybe you get points for the longest row of houses or parks. This means that each time you play you get a different combination of challenges and a related score to aim at.

You then take turns placing city block cards from your hand and drawing more from the pile. The aim is to build a coherent city out of factories, parks, businesses and houses. Connecting four matching areas scores the most points. At the same time, each separate road takes points away.

As you progress you work with other players to grow the city and meet the (often competing) conditions on the scorecards you picked at the start. This is made more complex and interesting as you can lay cards on top of others in your city to try and create more matching areas. However because you can't show other players what cards you have, you need to be careful not to ruin someone else's carefully crafted plan. When you've played all the cards you add up your score to see if you have met the specific combination of challenges for this round.