Naturopolis Review

boardgamequest.com:

We review Naturopolis, a quick playing board game published by Buttonshy Games. In Naturopolis, players are working together to score as many points as possible using the 18 cards.

Our periodically benevolent publisher Tony Mastrangeli will often cater our assignments to the preferred gaming types of the staff. Need a dry solo-only Euro reviewed? Send it to Brand Bryson. Trick-taking games go to Andrew Smith or Jacob Daneman. And games with fun miniatures and lots of dice-rolling and luck-based events, well, Tony keeps those for himself.

So when he announced that he had a special review bundle in mind for me, I was excited. I assumed the contents were carefully cultivated to my gaming tastes. When I opened the shipment, though, it contained three wallet-sized games with a note from Tony that read, “After you review these, you can use them to finally replace the Velcro Alf wallet you’ve been using since 1987.” So sometimes games are sent to us for other reasons.

Naturopolis is for 1-4 players and plays in about 15 minutes. It’s designed by Steven Aramini, Danny Devine, and Paul Kluka.

And I will never replace my Alf wallet, Tony. Never.

Naturopolis is a cooperative tile-placement micro game. The game consists of 18 cards, and at the start of the game, three of the cards will be put into play as both the scoring conditions for the game and the target score for victory. From that point on, players will take turns playing through the remaining cards and adding them to their map.

There aren’t many placement restrictions to speak of, except that roads on the cards cannot connect to rivers and all the cards must be placed horizontally. Other than that, any placement is legal, even if it may not make sense for scoring