However I’m very much of the opinion that Suburbia is one of those games that doesn’t really need more tiles or complication. It’s a pretty decent expansion introducing borders that can be used to grow your suburb even larger, new goals and new tiles. Suburbia has been around long enough to have a couple of expansions though I have only picked up Suburbia Inc. What will happen is that Dave will be putting down a lot of lakes so maybe he has the lake goal hidden, so should you compete with him to deny him the points, but there is that goal in the public for the fewest lakes, but maybe he is just trying to get money, or maybe he is just going for the most contiguous lake or maybe…… You get the idea! Maybe there will be a public goal for having the largest income at the end of the game and you’ll have a private goal for having the most money giving you the perfect synergistic strategy. I haven’t even really mentioned goals, another wrinkle that can warp how people build their concrete jungle, I mean energy efficient urban paradise. Every time you bump over one it’s going to suck one of your income and one of your reputation from you, meaning you have to balance growing too fast, with getting to the end. Your two resources of money and people are all important as we have covered, but as your little town grows those damn people are just going to suck resources out of you, and you are going to grow to hate the little red lines on the scoreboard. The scoring system is a thing of genius with an inbuilt catch up mechanic. You will grow to hate those horrible red bumps The neutral nature of the graphic design allows you to fill the town with your mind, imagining the lives of your citizens as you smack down another factory to get the money you need to maybe buy them another park, but probably you’ll just build a high rise because that’s just a better move. It looks like a planners town, one of those fantastic architectural models with minute details that you’re amazed anyone has bothered to create and also reminded me of the early SimCity games as all the little roads match up nicely. You are creating a story, one enhanced by the excellent plain art of each hex. Yes you are just laying down tiles, but that’s not what you are creating. Maybe the residential area you made earlier is now in the way of your industrial growth or you banked on airports being a thing, but now no other planner is buying them and to top it all you have totally run out of cash so you need to stick in a big lake for lots of cash (no I don’t know why lakes make money, it’s an odd wrinkle of flavour in an otherwise excellent design). Scratch that, they become more powerful, but the interactions aren’t complex due to the mechanics of each individual tile they are complex because by the time you get to pile C you have created some kind of teetering pile of mechancis. The game eases you into its more complicated ideas by splitting the tiles into 3 piles A, B and C with increasingly complex interactions. Just a selection of some of the tiles you might see in a game This is simple at first: the airport is placed away from residential tiles, fast food restaurant’s go next to residential areas and parking lots go next to civil and commercial buildings. Spending your vast sums of money, they won’t be that vast, on a new hex you’ll then be faced with the agonising choice of where to place it. Each turn you are going to grow your area of the town. It begins small but soon you will find yourself with a burgeoning neighbourhood before you know it. The heavy factory gives you income but every residential and civil building next door loses you reputation because no one wants to live next door to old smokey: simple mechanics, with deep flavour. The community park costs you some income, how much money you get in each turn, but increases your reputation, how many citizens you are attracting to your suburb every turn, because who doesn’t like a park. You start off with some houses, a park and a factory nearby, small beginnings that you can do amazing things with, but even these few tiles hint at the flavour they’ve managed to pack into the mechanics. and there is some wonderful flavour right from the off. Each tile represents it’s own little bit of the city: an airport, restaurants, retirement homes etc.
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