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Scribbletown is a roll-and-write with very low luck about building your own city. Any number of players can play simultaneously as all players use the same die results.
Players draw areas such as neighborhoods, businesses, factories, farms, and parks that each score in different ways along with drawing the roads to connect them all. Each game is made different by the inclusion of a set of special building cards that can be drawn under special circumstances for big points. These special buildings help direct players into a strategy.
But you must be careful when drawing. Certain types of roads and buildings generate waste and when you get too wasteful, an opponent can fill up one of your empty spaces with an unusable junk pile!
Since any number of players can play at a time, Scribbletown is a a great “thinky filler”–it plays in around thirty minutes, but has a ton of heavy tradeoffs without a lot of setup or teardown time. It can even be played easily over Zoom or other conference software.
Scribbletown Review
- Fast to set up and teach
- Minimalist art and icons
- Strong replayability due to 35 possible special buildings with 6 chosen per game
- Two-sided boards with basic and advanced sides for varied play
- Encourages flexible planning and interaction via junk piles
- Dice luck can influence outcomes and disrupt plans
- Junk piles can significantly hamper players' progress and require adaptation
- End-game scoring can be complex for new players
- Urban planning with a focus on placement strategy and variability
- A modular, city-building scenario where players place buildings and roads on a shared grid to maximize scoring
- Abstract/minimalist, with light thematic flavor conveyed through icons and scoring notes
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- dice drafting / dice-driven action selection — Roll four dice, pick two per turn to draft buildings or roads that match the results or the required city arrangement.
- Dynamic building replacement / special buildings — Six random special buildings from a pool provide varied scoring opportunities each game.
- End game trigger via filled plots — Game ends when a player fills all plots; final scoring includes road bonuses and per-building circles.
- Grid-based placement with adjacency scoring — Place buildings on a shared board in plots that maximize adjacency bonuses and route connections.
- Network/Route Building — Connect plots with roads; scoring tracks indicate road bonuses and shortest routes between road segments.
- Road networking and scoring — Connect plots with roads; scoring tracks indicate road bonuses and shortest routes between road segments.
- Tile Placement — Place buildings on a shared board in plots that maximize adjacency bonuses and route connections.
- Waste track / junk pile mechanic — Drawing waste increments and can trigger junk piles that disrupt opponents by shifting boards.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- scribbletown is a nice minimalist game
- it's super fast to set up and teach
- grab your friends and family to plan out cities
- art or iconography uses the simplistic minimal design to give you a great experience to build a city quickly