Greatest Little Cities: Urban Sprawl

Your sleepy little city is on the decline and some new investors want to help change that. Now you’ll compete with other cities, securing the best building projects to gain the most prestige, becoming the Greatest Little City.

In Greatest Little Cities, players will change between two different types of actions. The investment phase, players will compete with one another to acquire new projects for their city while in the building phase, they’ll be adding these projects, hoping to score in a myriad of ways.

Almost all of the gameplay revolves around the two actions of acquiring tiles and placing them. As the game progresses, the stacks deplete and, once four stacks are empty, the game ends. Turns are incredibly fast as each player tries to adapt to the changing conditions the best.

The first action, which is the most interactive, features a large roundel loaded with a variety of buildings. As you move your investor, you’ll claim the topmost building and the current market marker moves forward to the next investor in the line. In this way, you can gain multiple buildings but possibly block yourself from higher scoring potential. Do you stay close to the other investors to ensure your turns come quicker or do you jump ahead, grabbing the tile you really want, but at the risk of waiting longer before you can choose again?

Now that you have a tile, you must add it to your city. Fortunately, that's where your City Planner comes in handy. They can easily add tiles to your city but they are limited to locations directly adjacent to their current work site. After the tile is added, they will move onto the new tile, giving you limits to how your city can grow. While you may start with certain plans, you may have to abandon them for better opportunities you gain as the game progresses.

Of course there are rulebreaker tiles! They can be played at any time to help you gain the upper hand. Travel allows you to move your City Planner to any location in the city. Relocate let's you rearrange some tiles. Finally, Build 2 allows you to immediately take two tiles from below your Investor instead of just one.

There are a number of unique tiles with different scoring conditions. This can be a tad overwhelming at first but don't worry. Each player has a scoring guide with illustrated examples to help them learn the scoring opportunities in this game. As a special bonus, the opposite side of the Investor's Market tile is a dry erase scoring sheet.

How to Play Video

A review of the original mint tin edition.

"I feel like if it was just a little bit bigger, it would improve the quality of life of this game so much." -Wishes granted.

“I enjoyed Greatest Little Cities because while it’s a gateway game, it still provides opportunity for strategy which is important to me. I also really enjoy the different ways to score, it allows you to still feel like you can succeed, even if your original scoring plan falls through.” -Cassie of Making Magic Games

“Greatest Little Cities started as an ambitious entry in the Mint Tin Contest – It did not disappoint! It took second place out of 184 entries! When we finished up the first game, everyone’s reaction was to immediately play again! There are so many great features and mechanics to this game… the drafting mechanic really made us think about whether we wanted a specific tile or preferred to grab a bunch of random tiles. We all were very immersed in our city planning and as our turns progressed and we each had our own individual strategies. Overall, this game is a blast to play, was well received by all who played, and I highly recommend it!” -Chris Rossetti, Mint Tin Contest Judge and Rampage Games Founder

On January 29th, 2020, the winners of the Mint Tin Game Design competition were announced. Tinny Towns came in second overall. This scrappy beast of a game managed to fit 92 Hex Tiles, some cards, 8 meeples, and a pawn all into a single mint tin. This came at a cost, however, as these tiles were super tiny leading the game towards fiddliness. Regardless, goal of making a city builder in a tin was achieved. As the game met tiny revisions, it also underwent a name change to Greatest Little Cities while retaining the same great gameplay. But there was always a missing bit of feedback that I didn’t really put in place until now.

People wanted bigger tiles. Naturally the cost increase would play a significant factor and I wanted to do more than simply same game in a bigger format. I wanted to add a player, rebalance building numbers, and make scoring the game easier to understand. I wanted something more than a simple size upgrade. Since I was no longer restrained to a single tin, I could even look into making this compatible with a future game expansion. This “big” sprawling experience to Greatest Little Cities is what gives it the Urban Sprawl moniker and I hope you enjoy what I consider the best version of Greatest Little Cities to date.