Wouter & Ymke 
Starting a new city sounds quite exciting. Empty land, no traffic problems, no badly planned neighbourhoods and no road that somehow ends exactly where you need to build something. Give it a few rounds of Scribble City, though, and you’ll probably have created at least two of those problems yourself.
Scribble City is a city-building game where everyone develops their own map using roads and coloured buildings. The game is modular, combining a city deck with a separate map pack, and each part changes what you’re working with. We played with the introductory Singapore city deck and tried it on both Waterway and Hillview. Singapore brings placement bonuses, bridges and tunnels, while the maps change the landscape, scoring and some of the things you’ll be trying to do with your growing city.
👥 1-4 players, ages 10+
⏳️ Playing time: 45 minutes
📝 Designer: Isaac Tan
🏢 Publisher: Nekomancy Games (review copy provided)
Gameplay Overview
Scribble City is played over three eras, with everyone playing mostly at the same time. At the beginning of each era, you receive three building cards and draw a new road on an empty space along the edge of your map. You then play four rounds before moving to the next era.
Each round starts with three cards in your hand. You choose two of them. One will be used for the building shown on the card, while the other provides a set of roads you can draw. The third card is reserved. You don’t have to build every road offered, and roads can also be simplified into single roads. Once everyone is finished, the two cards you used are passed to the player on your left. Your reserved card then joins the two cards received from your neighbour, and you start again with three.
Roads need to connect to your existing network, so where you draw them determines where you’ll be able to build later. Singapore includes normal roads and junctions, but also bus stops, bridges and tunnels. Bridges cross rivers, while tunnels let you skip across several grid spaces before reconnecting to the road network. At the start of every era you also get that new road from the map edge, so your entire city doesn’t have to grow from one starting point.
Buildings come in different colours and shapes. They can be rotated but not flipped, and must be drawn beside one or more of your roads. If a building can legally be placed, you have to build it. If there’s genuinely nowhere it can go, you draw a single-space green residence instead. Some Singapore buildings also have placement bonuses for being orthogonally beside particular building types or map features.
Constructing buildings gives you benefits that move you along the progress tracks printed on your map. Certain spaces contain rewards, which trigger as soon as you reach them. Depending on the reward, you might build the roads or building from your reserved card, construct a landmark or residence, move another progress track forward, or improve one of your end-game scoring conditions.
There are also three shared plans in every game: one city plan, one development plan and one route plan. These ask everyone to create particular arrangements of roads, buildings or other elements, but what you receive for completing them depends on the map. Waterway gives prestige for plans and also scores things such as bus stops, building next to woods and your largest connected group of buildings, while empty spaces can cost you points. Hillview introduces hills, landmarks and a bus system. Building bus stops moves your bus through the road network, marking buildings and features beside the route it travelled for City Attractions scoring. After the third era, all scoring bonuses and penalties are added to the prestige earned during the game. Most prestige wins.
Artwork & Components
Scribble City’s illustrated style fits nicely with the fact that you’ll be drawing all over it yourself. The map begins mostly empty, with a few woods, mountains, rivers or hills scattered around it. Roads are drawn in black, while buildings use pink, blue, orange, green and purple pencils. By the end, there’s usually very little empty paper left, and the clean landscape you started with has become something much more personal.
The two maps look quite different even before you’ve drawn anything. Waterway has a river running through the city, with woods and mountains interrupting the grid. Hillview replaces that fairly open landscape with hills and their marked edges. Progress tracks and scoring boxes sit around the main map, so almost everything you’re checking during play is on the same sheet.
The cards continue the city-planning idea. Building cards look like permits and planning documents, with handwritten names, coloured sections, paper clips and stamps. Plans look like blueprints, while the landmark cards use similar office-style details. I particularly like that none of it looks too neat. You’re about to attack the map with six pencils anyway, so a perfectly clean architectural style probably wouldn’t survive very long.
Component-wise, this is mostly paper, cards and pencils. There aren’t piles of tokens or wooden buildings to manage, but I don’t think they’re missed here. Drawing provides most of what you’ll actually see developing on the table. At the beginning everyone has roughly the same empty landscape, and by the end the maps can look completely different, including the occasional road that nobody is willing to admit responsibility for.
Our Experience
Our first game was mostly about trying to make everything fit. We looked at our three cards, picked a building we liked, found some useful roads and carried on. The reserved card was usually just the one we didn’t want. That worked, sort of, but after a few rounds we started seeing how often we’d thrown away an option that would have been useful one round later. In later games we started choosing that reserved card on purpose. Sometimes it was a building we knew we could place next round, sometimes a road configuration we didn’t want to lose. We also became much more aware of the cards we were passing. In our first game everyone was staring at their own map. Later there were definitely moments where someone looked at the two cards arriving from their neighbour and asked, “Really? These?” Completely accidental, obviously.
Roads caused most of our early mistakes. Initially, we drew them wherever they solved the immediate problem, because we mainly saw them as access for buildings. Several rounds later we’d discover that one of those perfectly reasonable roads had left us with a part of the map that was difficult to use. Eventually we started looking at roads as the framework for several future placements rather than just the current one. Bridges and tunnels helped us reach areas we’d otherwise cut ourselves off from, and we also stopped underestimating the new starting road at the beginning of each era. Having three separate chances to begin developing from the edge meant an early mistake wasn’t necessarily something we had to live with for the entire game.
Buildings created a different problem. At the beginning, an empty square barely registered because there was so much room. Towards the end, we were staring at those same little spaces wondering why we’d put something there forty minutes earlier. Placement bonuses, building shapes, colours and plans are all asking for slightly different arrangements, so we gradually became less interested in simply filling the map. Leaving the right gap could be more useful than filling it immediately. I mean, this is probably the only city-building situation where undeveloped land started receiving quite so much attention around our table.
We underestimated the progress tracks in our first games. Initially, we mostly treated their rewards as nice things that happened while we were building. Once we realised that benefits could be taken in an order of our choice, we started looking for ways to reach particular rewards at useful moments. That also changed how much we valued certain colours. We might begin an era wanting to push one track, only for the available cards, a plan or the shape of our remaining space to send us somewhere else. Once somebody looked close to completing a shared plan, an objective we’d been casually working towards could suddenly become something we wanted to finish now rather than two rounds later. That gave us another reason to occasionally stop staring at our own sheet and see what everyone else was doing.
Our priorities also changed quite a bit between Waterway and Hillview. On Waterway, we spent more time grouping buildings, using the available space efficiently and trying to get several scoring conditions working together. Hillview made us pay much more attention to infrastructure. The hills changed where buildings could comfortably go, while the bus made earlier road decisions matter in a completely different way. A road that worked perfectly well for placing buildings wasn’t necessarily the route we wanted our bus to take later. We preferred Hillview once we knew the basic system, but I wouldn’t start there. Waterway gave us enough to work out before adding public transport problems.
Our Thoughts
What I like most about Scribble City is that you have quite a lot of control over your city without ever having exactly what you want. The cards limit the shapes, colours and roads available, while the map and everything you’ve already drawn limit where they can go. At the same time, you’re still the person deciding where every road and building ends up. The drawing isn’t just how you record a choice made somewhere else in the game. The position and shape of what you’re drawing is the puzzle, and the finished map reflects the choices you’ve made throughout the game.
That means the same few squares can end up being useful for several different things. You might want to push one progress track, complete a plan and improve an end-game scoring condition, but the three cards in your hand might make another direction much easier. We rarely felt that an awkward hand decided the game for us. It might force us away from what we’d planned, but usually the question became what we were prepared to sacrifice to make those three cards work. Quite often, we weren’t looking for the perfect move. We were deciding which part of our plan we were most willing to abandon.
Scribble City does take some time to play, though. It’s longer than many drawing games we’ve played, and the final rounds can slow down once the map becomes crowded. Simultaneous play prevents normal downtime, but it can’t stop everyone from thinking at the same time. When you’re checking where a building fits, whether it helps a plan, what happens to a progress track and what you’re leaving yourself for later, a choice that looked simple can take a while. Let’s be honest, four people silently staring at coloured pencils is still four people thinking. If you’re looking for a quick game to finish in half an hour, this isn’t really trying to be that.
There’s also only limited direct interaction. Passing cards and competing for plans means you can’t completely ignore the other players, but most of your attention stays on your own map. If you want to block people, attack their cities or constantly interfere with what they’re doing, you won’t find much of that here. You do need to enjoy this kind of spatial puzzle, too. Every game is going to involve organising roads and building shapes on a map that keeps running out of room. Waterway and Hillview gave us enough reason to approach the same Singapore deck differently rather than feeling as though we’d simply started again on another layout. That’s also why I’m particularly curious about the planned Tokyo city deck, with multi-shape buildings, crossings and subways. I’m curious to see what happens when we’re not only changing the map, but the actual tools we’re building the city with.
Scribble City is more demanding and considerably longer than the lighter drawing games we might bring out as fillers, but that’s also why we’d choose it when we actually want the drawing to be the main game rather than a way of recording points. I particularly like looking at the finished maps and being able to trace how we got there. The useful tunnel, the bus route we planned properly, the strangely isolated building that clearly seemed like a good idea at the time. If you enjoy polyomino puzzles, route building, drafting and gradually working with less and less space, there’s plenty here that should feel familiar. But I particularly like that you can see all of those decisions on the finished sheet. By the end, we aren’t looking at a collection of scored boxes, but at the city we’ve actually built. We came away from our later games wanting to try different approaches, and I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when there are more city deck and map combinations to work with.
📝 We received a copy of Scribble City from Nekomancy Games.
