Quadropolis & Public Services Reviews

Quadropolis is one of those games I never quite got round to reviewing when it came out last year; I have the perfect excuse to look back now! The Public Services expansion has come roaring down the street, sirens blaring, to add a quick boost of adrenaline to the game and to give me the opportunity to cover both in one double review.

Players: 2-4
Time: 30-60 mins
Ages: 8+
Designer: François Gandon
Artist: Cyrille Daujean, Sabrina Miramon
Publisher: Days of Wonder, ADC Blackfire Entertainment, Asterion Press, Edge Entertainment, Gém Klub Kft., REBEL.pl

Let’s not spend too long on the ring road circling, this time I’m taking the motorway straight to the centre. Quadropolis is a great little game. While city building might be nothing new in gaming its really just the thinnest venear over a mechanical puzzle that is like nothing else and always manages to entertain. Since Quadropolis is just about obsessed with the number 4, why don’t we break it down into 4 reasons why Quadropolis is a great game.

1) Simple elegant gameplay

Taking a turn in Quadropolis is about as easy as can be: pick a tile from the central market and add it to your player board. Collect 4 (obviously) tiles each and refresh the market, after (of course) 4 rounds the game ends. The different tile types all have their own scoring rules about what they are next to etc etc all very classic city building game. But it’s the restrictions that make Quadropolis fascinating.

To claim a tile, you take one of your arrow-shaped, numbered, cardboard architects, find a free space along the edge of the market and put it there. You’ll get the tile that is that number of spaces into the market. Which isn’t the only restriction as you must also place that tile on to your player board in the row or column equal to the architect’s number. Given you have (predictably) 4 architects numbered (you guessed it!) from 1 to 4 you need to be careful not to run out of options.

2) Perfectly pitched puzzle

Quadropolis starts off fairly sedate, almost innocuously so. The market and your personal city district are free and unrestricted. While spots in the market will tighten up over the course of a round as architects cram in shoulder to shoulder, your board remains blissfully empty. But as you build the spaces start to fill up. You need to be careful not to place too many tiles in one row/column lest that architect become useless. And you’ll begin to care so much more about what tiles you get!

While it may well seem almost boringly placid at the start, the tension grows and grows until by the final round you are agonising over where to play, over whether your opponents will block you from taking the tiles you want, no, you need! It becomes so intense you are left wondering how you were so carefree at the start, and so irresponsible as to put a factory in the middle of that row when now you can’t get any decent points from your park and oh God what about the pollution!? It makes for wonderful arc where the agonies of the present can be irrefutably traced back to the blunders of the past. You are the architect of your own destruction.

3) Anyway you want it

The driving force for frustration (the good kind that is) is in how scoring is determined by where in the city tiles are in relation to others. So ports want to be built in long rows, parks like to be surrounded by houses, factories belong next to shops and ports. Each choice you make directs your future desires, but the randomly organised tile market and the actions of your worst enemies – I mean, friends – ensures you are forever forced into making sub-optimal decisions. It is the player who is best able to let go of pursuing perfection who will triumph here.

But at the start you are completely free to choose whatever strategy you wish. With 6 different tile types in the basic game, that’s 6 different opening gambits to pursue, but all those will benefit from the presence of other tile types to a greater or lesser degree, either directly through scoring or because you’ll need some of the shiny plastic resources that those tiles provide. The meeple and energy markers are another layer to the puzzle, every tile needs to be supplied by one of these to score, and any left over will cost you points. Another opportunity for compromise! Fortunately pollution can be absorbed by parks and shops can be filled with the unemployed, giving you some relief.

4) Expert Mode

If the basic game is a finely crafted tower block, Quadroplis’ expert mode is one of those architectural masterpieces that’ll appear in textbooks for years to come, even if it looks kind of crazy to outsiders. Aside from being spread over 5 rounds, and adding an extra architect for each player, and giving you a larger player board to fill, expert mode mixes up the gameplay in two ways.

Firstly, you now share a pool of architects between players, possibly letting you use the same number multiple times in a row! A treat indeed! But also giving you more opportunity to screw with your opponents maliciously, or yourself by blocking up a row. With 25 turns and only 20 spaces on your board, you’ll have to be careful and make sure you build vertically with tower blocks and…

Skyscrapers! Two new tile types are added in expert mode, skyscrapers which want to be tall and have many next to each other, and monuments, which can cost you points if they end up next to factories and ports. But these also exponentially increase the interactions as the basic tiles score off of them too and the increased size of the player board increases the maximum scores you can get from given groups. More effort, more reward.

All of these changes intensify the challenge, doubling down on everything that makes the basic game great. The only issue with expert mode, the only one, is that I always want to play it and I can’t because new players need to learn with the basic game. It’s just too harsh and the puzzle too different to jump straight into.

I really do like this game, and am always happy to play it. Every so often I even get this craving, this “ooo, I could go for a spot of Quadropolis just now.” There’s nothing else that can scratch its particular itch because it such a unique game. But you’ll only get as much out of it as I have if you can enjoy a theme-light puzzle like I can.

Rating: 4 out of 4

Quadropolis: Public Services

Players: 2-4
Time: 30-60 mins
Ages: 8+
Designer: François Gandon
Artist: Sabrina Miramon
Publisher: Asterion Press, Days of Wonder

Some expansions come in big boxes full of new modules. Public Services takes a different tack. Coming in a teeny box with just 11 new tiles for classic mode and 13 for expert mode, this is an expansion small enough to be squeezed into Quadropolis’ expertly formed insert. Yes, this important. If I ever have to throw that away I seriously think I might cry…

So what can a dozen tiles do to a game? Actually, quite a lot. Public Services won’t see fire fighters racing through your streets (what streets?) sirens blaring, there’ll be no police action shows being filmed here, but this is Quadropolis after all. Instead, these tiles all add new little rules and scoring opportunities. The fire station earns points for being next to some factories, the city planning office wants to see the quadrants of your board completely filled. They offer you a question of how early to consider going for them, as early tiles direct you, but later tiles capitalise on what you have already built.

But how do you get them? If the image above didn’t clue you in, the new public service tiles are tied into the original game’s public buildings, one of the 6 basic tile types. Whenever you take one of these tiles, you can now choose to swap it for one of the public services buildings displayed in their own little market to the side of the board.

The public services behave exactly like normal public buildings, but they also feature their own unique benefit. Many of these are genuinely interesting to have around, encouraging you to really specialise in certain ways of building or releasing some of the pressure of other elements of the game. Cramming your city with shops and tower blocks to maximise the radio stations bonus is really fun! Not having to worry about pollution thanks to the air filters is fantastic for a factory heavy strategy, and that combos nicely with the fire station! The new tiles are almost always better versions of the generic public buildings.

This is both a good and bad thing. In the basic game, public buildings, as in life, were a little dull: they score for each separate quadrant you have one in, which means they don’t care what they are next to and nothing much cared about them (aside from monuments in expert mode). Now they have a much bigger impact on the rest of your city, so you could say they fix a minor issue with the base game.

But I also feel like they go too far, that if you play with this expansion you can’t really ignore these buildings. I guess if you were building a city you should damn well make sure to include some public services, not that Quadropolis has ever been about theme before. I don’t like feeling mandated to and it’s not just a feeling. A well accomplished public service tile can be worth 4 or 5 points sometimes, in addition to the usual public building score. There’s no where else to make up this deficit; the rest of the game felt solidly balanced before.

This makes Public Services an expansion I won’t want to play with all the time. But when I do choose to crack it out, I can definitely enjoy the new opportunities and challenges it presents. It enables more extreme play styles, and that’s exciting! Given that this is a cheap box as expansions go, it’s a solid addition for Quadropolis fans, and you won’t regret your purchase. But it’s hardly essential either.

Rating: Serviceable

My copy of Quadropolis: Public services was provided for review by Esdevium Games. You can pick it up from your local hobby store for £11.99RRP. My copy of the Quadropolis base game, I bought myself.