Guides

Updated

Rentopia's rules live on a few pages that do different jobs. This one is the map. The home screen is the game: create a room or join one. It is not the rulebook. Open a page below when you need it, in a full page load, and leave it up on a second screen if the table wants a referee.

Before anyone rolls

Read How to play once. It is the long guide: the private room, the forty-space lap, what a turn is, how a district doubles rent, and how a match ends. Then skim the rules quick reference for the default checklist: $1,500 to start, $200 at START, a $50 Lockup fine, auctions on, even building on, 32 houses and 12 hotels.

If you are the host, Play with friends is the invite and the lobby. Agree the house rules out loud before the first roll. The host can change salary, cash, timers, auctions, and building. The host cannot change the printed price of Cobbler Lane or the hotel rent on Skyline Point. Those stay on the board sheet.

During a match

Use the board sheet when someone asks what a street charges. Empty rent, the doubled rent for a finished district with no houses, and each house through a hotel are separate columns. Cobbler Lane is the short example on that page: $2 empty, $4 with Old Town complete and no houses, $10 with one house, $90 with three, $250 with a hotel.

Use the card list when a draw is disputed. It is every Fortune card and every Town Fund card, including the two Lockup exits, the station cards that charge twice the usual fare, the company card that rolls again for a ten-times bill, and the two repair cards. A hotel on a repair card is one hotel fee, not four house fees.

The quick reference is the one-page version of the same defaults. It does not repeat every house level. If the quick reference and the board sheet ever seem to disagree, the board sheet is the full ladder and the quick reference is the summary.

After a few games

Strategy, building, trading, and cash are advice. They do not add rules. They talk about when a $60 Old Town street is worth buying, why three houses spread across Ember Row are a different project from one hotel on a single street, and how large a cash reserve has to be before a repair card or Skyline Point's hotel rent arrives. Read them after the table knows the buttons.

What a match feels like is one fictional four-player table, used so the sequence is easy to picture: a cheap district, a blocked three-street set, one trade, then a mortgage that freezes a later plan. Your dice will not copy it. It is not a second rulebook.

The rest of the site

  • FAQ answers room size, accounts, Lockup, bankruptcy, ads, and how long a room is kept.
  • Updates is the change log, with the date each player-visible change shipped.
  • About says who operates the game and why the board is a private room with its own streets.
  • Contact is hello@rentopia.app. Privacy and terms are the policies. The home screen and a room do not load the ad script. These reading pages do, and they do not place ad units.