SinsofaStarcrafter

I'm a long time listener (pre idlethumbs/Zacny times). I found the episode interesting, so I finally joined the forums. I wanted to post some board games about city building from the past year that some people might find interesting, especially because of the varied ways each takes the SimCity concept and transforms it into cardboard. I'll add links to their BGG pages once the site is back up from maintenance. For now I'll post a link to Tom Vasel's reviews of each so anyone interested can see the components and get a decent rules explanation. Sunrise City is a tile laying game in which each player has different roles they draft which give them special abilities. Each round the players pick a role, zone the city, then build new buildings in zones they control or build upper levels on previous buildings. It focuses mostly on the zoning aspect of city building, and comes off more as an abstract. It's a fun game though, and really good for families once everyone understands how the different roles work. The weirdest part is the game gives you double VP's for hitting the ten mark on the score track, which is a unique mechanic. Suburbia is a game in which everyone is building sections of the same city. There is player board they add buildings/city sections to that can be purchased from a central board. There are basic government, residential, and industrial buildings, and then there is a row of increasingly expensive, randomly drawn buildings that have different powers. Here the game is more focused on the interaction of powers from different buildings, and the management of income versus population growth. You have an income level and population growth level: the former gives you money each turn that you can spend on new buildings, the latter increases your points. There are hurdles that represent your city's infrastructure needing to improve that lowers your population growth and income.This is considered one of the best board games of the past year. Gingkgopolis is a sort of weird fusion of multiple mechanics that results in a sort of city building game. It's a future where people are building some weird tree city thing... don't worry about the theme. The players use a combination of drafting, deckbuilding, tableau building, and area control to build a tile city on the board. It is sufficiently complicated and unique that describing it would only confuse all of us, so I suggest watching the linked video for a better explanation. I think what we see from these three games is that people want to play a city building game with other people. What we also see is that none of these are anything at all like SimCity. Part of it is the personal nature of people's SimCity cities. They become a reflection of what we find interesting and our values. This is the idea SimCity Societies played with, throwing much of the simulation out to instead give the cities character traits. Another reason there is a difference here is that these games mostly involves building on or around other player's stuff, or limiting the other player's options. SimCity is more of a sandbox than a competitive arena. Sorry this post is so long, but these are the things I was thinking of when I've read about the ways the new SimCity has added multiplayer.