With a glance you can see where everything is and understand the rippling outcomes of your next move. The clean design actively works to your advantage given the awareness you need to have for what’s going on in your opponents’ suburbs. And yet… once you adjust to its underwhelming appearance you realise that it’s functional and warm, reflecting both the innocence of the 1950’s and the cynicism of today. Let’s not beat around the bush, the standard edition of Suburbia could have been created using 1990’s clipart. Laws would incentivise the wishes of the government of the time, providing immediate bonuses for tackling popular initiatives such as building affordable housing or stimulating economic growth through industry.
SUBURBIA GAME ONLINE SERIES
It would consist of a series of laws that players could vote for at intervals through the game. I have an idea for an expansion that I’m calling Suburbia Government. There’s a generosity and friendliness beneath its clinical exterior. Importantly, it makes you feel smart as a result of good play whilst never making you feel truly stupid when you inevitably mess up. It’s tight, it’s balanced and it’s brilliant. The intuitive ruleset lets the game breathe, allowing you to fail or flourish as a result of your own decisions. Everything else flows naturally from there. People, cash and two symbols are essentially all you need to know to get started. Everything makes sense so completely that after a quick rules explanation there are remarkably few queries. Of course houses near schools attract more people than houses near factories – parents want their kids educated not irradiated. The diabolical population (score) track.Ĭity building games aren’t unusual but it’s the way that the mechanisms and theme interact that stands Suburbia apart. And if chaos is a ladder then it’s got nothing on Suburbia’s population track, a gloriously simple concept that keeps the game tense throughout and means that players are competing against their own success as well as each other. The satisfying joy of creating property synergies that work neighbourly, locally and globally.
The teasing balance between income and reputation and the way they intertwine with the tile placement system. The reason Suburbia grips my heart so ferociously is down to the puzzle at its very core. Suburbia is one of my favourite board games ever. When I was younger I knew that suburbs were the no man’s land between city and countryside, the worst of both with none of the good stuff. Since the winner is the player with the greatest population at the end of the game, the ‘score’ track doesn’t just sit off to the side like in most games but is fundamental to the whole experience, punishing success if you aren’t sufficiently prepared for it. Cross one of these lines and both your income and reputation immediately drop a level, representing the increased bills and reduction to your small-town charm that come from a larger population. The final twist is the population track, a long and winding road littered with thick red lines. Factories may bring in the hard cash but nobody wants to live next door to one. My oh-so-addictive yellow industrial tiles, for instance, generally provide cash or income rewards but often tarnish a suburb’s reputation, particularly if positioned next to residential tiles. What you receive when you place a tile depends on its attributes, its placement in relation to its surrounding tiles and its interaction with other tiles in both your own and your opponents’ boroughs. Money can be spent on new properties (tiles) for your suburb which provide you with boosts to your income or reputation, or just immediate injections of money or people. In Suburbia players compete to have the most populous suburb, walking a tightrope between income and reputation (the amount of money and the number of people who move to your suburb at the end of each of your turns).
And then I just shrug and buy another heavy factory. Sometimes I wonder if Suburbia is a Rorschach test, revealing my base desires for the material over the social. And then give me a lake to put next to it to contaminate for profit. Give me a landfill site over affordable housing any day of the week. I just want everything to be hexagonal yellow, spewing out money and repulsing people like there’s no tomorrow. Suburban StartĬhrist, but I love industry. These are scattered snippets of Suburbia. At one point it mentions a urinating sot. It’s also an article about failure, corruption and Christmas spirit. This is an article about the board game Suburbia, its expansions, app and sequels. “Sooner or later, all games become serious.” J.G.
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