King’s Dilemma, Evergreen publisher to handle neighbourhood building board game Sunrise Lane
Reiner Knizia’s latest design goes back to an old well - civic planning
Sunrise Lane brings together well known designer Reiner Knizia and his longtime love of planning out city blocks for an upcoming board game called Sunrise City, which tasks players to plan and construct a block of residential houses from the foundation to the ‘for sale’ sign in the yard.
Sunrise City will be published by Italian studio Horrible Guild, which also handled The King’s Dilemma (and forthcoming queenly sequel) along with Evergreen and the recently announced Wilderfeast tabletop RPG.
Players will don hardhats and other OSHA-regulated safety gear as they set about the task of building a large and prosperous residential neighbourhood on the eponymous street. All of that framing fits around a card-matching mechanic where players match cards in their hand with matching coloured plots on the board. Doing so allows them to construct building worth various amounts of points, and matching more than one similarly coloured card allows multi-story homes and other massive structures to be erected on the plot.
Some structures will be worth more than others, which might lend the board game to support both lightning quick turnover strategies and longer, strategic choices. Adding parks may increase the price of adjacent properties at the cost of a valuable plot. The winner is the player who manages to accrue the most points from their portfolio of construction projects.
How exactly Sunrise Lane plays at the table is not yet known - the publisher doesn’t even have a pre-order or information page available on its website. Tabletop industry news wire ICv2 lists the only known box art image and provide a scant few paragraphs of ad copy. According to their report, distribution company Flat River Group will place Sunrise Lane onto retail shelves "soon".
For those not in the know, Knizia is an exceptionally prolific designer whose most famous titles include Tigris & Euphrates and followup Yellow & Yangtze, 2017’s The Quest of El Dorado and 2020’s My City (which is also getting a sequel), though the man continues to churn out credits like an hacked arcade machine. Dicebreaker has reached out to Horrible Guild for release date and pricing information and will update this story accordingly.