Casinopolis [Mini] [Preview] – What’s Eric Playing?

Base price: $XX.
1 – 4 players.
play time: 15 – 20 minutes.
BGG Link
Check it out on Kickstarter! (Will update link when Kickstarter is live.)
Logged plays: 3

Full disclosure: A preview copy of Casinopolis was provided by Button Shy. Some art, gameplay, or other aspects of the game may change between this preview and the fulfillment of the Kickstarter, should it fund, as this is a preview of a currently unreleased game. 

Alright, exciting stuff coming down the pipeline this week on What’s Eric Playing?. It’s “Polis Week”, where both the games I’m reviewing happen to end in -polis, which is always fun. City building! Mostly. I don’t do a ton of gimmicky weeks, generally speaking, but I’m always happy to have a bit of fun with the schedule where time allows, especially because it frequently … doesn’t. For instance, I’m typing this review with one eye closed in an airport because I’m half asleep on a trip and needed to get caught up. Time’s not allowing! But I digress. Let’s check out Casinopolis!

In Casinopolis, you’re planning the ultimate gambling town to rival Sin City itself. Your casinos are going to be either Roman, Medieval, or Egyptian, and beyond that, you don’t totally care what they’re doing. You obviously want one long road (The Strip), but beyond that the objectives will be set for you before you start the game. Just keep in mind that making a jackpot can really earn you some clutch bonus points before the game ends. This new entry in the ongoing Sprawlopolis family of games adds new challenges: now, your objectives give you different numbers of points! Left to right, you’ll earn 1 / 2 / 3 points. Additionally, the roads now have icons on them. Line three or more up and you’ll earn even more points for a jackpot! Draw cards, pass cards, and hope for good luck!

Contents

Player Count Differences

There aren’t a ton, here, beyond being able to strategize a bit more with more players since more cards are “technically” visible. You can still largely do the same thing solo, in that if you don’t want to play a card right away, you can just … not play it and play other cards, but knowing what’s potentially ahead for certain players can help you structure things out like casino placement or jackpots or the strip or something. This is one set of games that I really love playing solo for the puzzle, but I’ve enjoyed my plays at higher player counts so I don’t have as strong of a recommendation, here.

Strategy

• Jackpots aren’t a bad thing to go after while you’re working on something else. I usually go for the jackpot if I’m already trying to manage my roads, since then I can use the roads to cover up other partial roads and decrease the number of roads I have overall. I did have one game (the photographed one) where I wanted single-tile resorts, so going for jackpots was fine since I wasn’t trying to make one larger casino anyways. I could do more road-centric focusing.
• Your best scoring potential is going to be your three-chip objective, usually. There are times where your objectives clash, granted, but your three-chip objective scores 3 points per, which is a pretty tidy sum. You can use that to pretty quickly accelerate out of many scoring holes (especially roads).
• Watch out for too many roads! You don’t want too many roads, since each one is -1 point. This, of course, depends a bit on your objectives, as well; some objectives are all about having multiple roadsk, and the points they provide will help cancel out the penalty of having so many. But don’t place cards haphazardly otherwise; that negative score can really bring you down.
• Since there are only three colors, building large segments of the same color is a bit easier, at times. Not going to say it’s “easy”, but it’s easier than when you have to deal with a fourth color in the mix. This lets you potentially build larger groups of same-color tiles and potentially get more points.
• You need to prioritize your objectives over most things. They are the primary means by which you’re going to be measured, so if you beat your objectives, you win; otherwise, you lose. Naturally, focus on those.
• Communicate and strategize with your co-players where you can. Communication is key but don’t forget that if you show them a card, you must play it. Instead, describe what you have and where it can be helpful so that you can set things up for jackpots or objectives.
• When trying to balance completing priorities, try to make sure you don’t forget something. There’s a temptation to inadvertently overlook requirements or point-scoring things when you’re trying to balance too many things at once, and that’s just part of the game. You might end up not getting any jackpots, or you might place too many roads or something. Balance is tricky, but do your best.

Pros, Mehs, and Cons

Pros

• I really love this series of games. It’s one of my favorites! I really like city-building, and this is a very quick and easy one.
• The casino theme really works! I enjoy the rebranding of the longest road as “The Strip”. It’s very creative and there’s a bunch of fun little details. Plus, casinos as a theme are generally fun! They’re glitzy and a little garish and kind of entertaining.
• Every time there’s a smattering of new objectives, and I think that’s fun! They offer some pretty fun challenges and I like seeing how they leverage the new features of the current game for points (positive and negative). The pun names are pretty entertaining, as well.
• I’m looking forward to seeing how this integrates with the larger -opolis family of games. Can’t wait to try to manage a game of all four of them at once. Omnipolis or something like that would be fun.
• Still very portable. Part of the Button Shy advantage is that every game is basically 18 cards and a wallet, so I usually have a stack of them around somewhere.
• Plays quickly! You’re really only playing 15 cards per game, so you can move pretty fast. I once taught a game of Sprawlopolis to folks by playing it and showing the other players what I was doing and how scoring worked. It was extremely fast but effective, though I’m not sure if I won on that Speedrun.

Mehs

• The jackpot is one of those things that players tend to forget while they play, so make sure you keep it top of mind during your games. It just doesn’t necessarily jump out at you to try and get at least three matching icons on adjacent spaces on the same road, so players can often forget. Just try to have one player focus on that as their goal if you’re playing multiplayer, I suppose.

Cons

• The game does feel like it can be a bit swingy depending on what cards are in your one-, two-, and three-chip objective spots. Sufficiently high-value three-chip objectives can often earn you 40+ points if you play your cards right, which is usually enough to overwhelm any points requirements that you need to win the game. The high-value cards usually give more points to make up for the amount they contribute to the score requirement, so having them in two- or three-chip spots is more convenient than the low-value cards.

Overall: 8.5 / 10

Overall, I think Casinopolis is a lot of fun! What I was telling my friend, essentially, is that the -opolis series is like a citrus cola; they’re pretty much all good as long as you like the base soda, they’re distinct enough for you to have preferences, and you can kind of just drink whichever one you like when you’re feeling it. Casinopolis falls pretty nicely into that pattern. I think, difficulty-wise, it can be one of the swingier games in the series, just because the objective cards can fall in an order that’s pretty generous (highest-value card on the right) or more challenging (very low-value card on the right). But that’s luck and it seems on-brand for the casino-themed game. I do always appreciate how hard they work on making the objective titles clever, though; there’s a lot of fun to be had there and in the little details on the cards themselves, even if I’ll always miss having a fourth color to goof around with. The jackpot icons on the roads are interesting, but without them popping up in an objective, I worry that players will forget the extra scoring opportunity in favor of getting the more classic points. Not a ton to be done about that, but that’s okay. I’ll be interested in seeing how all of this fits together for a massive Sprawlopolis / Agropolis / Naturopolis / Casinopolis game, at some point, though. This is one of my absolute favorite game families, so it’s always nice to see another entry. If you’re looking for a quick city-building cooperative game, you enjoy the thrills of the casino lifestyle, or you just want to try your luck at a jackpot, I’d definitely recommend Casinopolis! It’s another fun game in a series I love.

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