In the game Sunrise Lane, players take on the roles of construction companies trying to build a livable neighborhood. To achieve this, they need to choose prestigious plots to build houses and municipal buildings.

The game board depicts a grid showing 1-5 points in a single color, and each player has a set of colored house pieces, with the colors not related to the spaces on the board. In each round, you can either draw 2 colored cards from the deck and add them to your hand (with a maximum of 5 cards in hand) or discard cards to place a building and then draw one card.

When building, you must construct near an existing building (or the central point at the start of the game), and you must discard 1 or more cards of the same color as the points on the space where you want to build. You can discard 1-5 cards, after which you place 1-5 of your house pieces on that space and then score points equal to the number of points on the space multiplied by the number of house pieces you placed. You can build multiple buildings in one round as long as you build your next building near the last one you built.

When a player has 2 or fewer house pieces available, the game ends, players score end-game points, with two of the areas awarding points for the tallest buildings and the other two for the most buildings. Additionally, points are awarded to the player with the longest group of adjacent buildings.