Review #32: Suburbia

# of Players: 1-4
Playtime: 2-3 Hours

Core Mechanic: Tile Placement

Theme: City-Building
Type: Euro

Weight: Heavy

Year: 2012

Rating: 9*

SimCity was one of my favorite computer game series growing up. When I first started playing board games, I was quite disappointed that there wasn't a good implementation of city building. It seemed like it would be the perfect theme for a board game! A couple years later, this game was released under a lot of hype. Although it was city-themed and looking at the tiles laid out you could tell that you were building a city, visually it wasn't too appealing to me. Maybe it wouldn't exactly be SimCity: The Board Game but perhaps it could scratch that itch?

In the game, each player is actual building their own city that is part of a larger region with their opponent's cities. Each player starts off with three hex tiles - Suburbs, Community Park, and Heavy Factory. To expand their city, players will have to purchase new tiles to add to their city from the real estate market. There are four actions that are taken on a player's turn - placing a tile or investment marker in your city, collecting or paying money, adjusting population, and adding a new tile to the real estate market. The player with the highest population at the end of the game will be the winner.

There are always seven tiles available in the Real Estate Market. When tiles are taken from the market, they are moved from left to right to fill in the empty space of the tile taken and new tiles are added to the left of the market. The two on the right cost only as much as shown on the tile while as you move farther left, there is a premium added to the cost shown on the tile that must be paid as well. Once you have purchased a tile, you can take it and place it adjacent to any other tile in your city. Tiles can either be played either face up to activate the effects on the face of the card or face down as a lake. When played face down as a lake, you gain $2 per each adjacent tile, making it a good way to earn money when you are low on cash. But most of the time, the tiles will be played face up to take advantage of the interactions between tiles already placed in your city. There are also 3 basic tiles available that can be taken by just paying the cost on the tile - Suburb, Community Park, or Heavy Factory. After taking one of these basic tiles, remove one of the tiles from the Real Estate Market by paying the premium to keep the market moving.

Most tiles will interact in either a positive or negative way with other tiles in your city. For example, placing industrial buildings will likely have a negative effect on residential buildings while many commercial buildings will provide boosts to income when placed next to other commercial or residential buildings. There are 4 key parameters that can be affected - cash on hand, income, reputation, and population. Gaining cash is straightforward enough. For income, it can move up or down depending on the tiles in your city. After you place a tile into your city, you must collect money if your income is positive or pay money if it is negative. If you don't have enough money, you must give up population to make up the difference.

Population is of course what you are trying to increase throughout the game. After collecting income, you adjust your population based on your reputation. Positive reputation increases population while negative reputation causes you to lose population, which is very thematic. The population track is of course not as straightforward as it seems. Once your population passes a certain milestone, both your income and reputation decreases by one point each. These milestones are spread out early on in the population track but become very frequent when your population gets higher and higher. Again this is very thematic as it represents the difficulty in keeping your city growing once it becomes very large.

Instead of taking a tile, players can also use one of their three investment markers. These can be placed on any tile in your city by paying that cost of the tile again, at which point you can use the effect of the tile again. Then you remove a tile from the Real Estate Market, similar to when you select a basic tile. This is a good option when you really want to use a tile again or when there are no tiles in the market that you want to take.

There are three stacks of tiles labelled A, B, and C. They will be flipped over in pile order to fill the market, and this is done to make sure the tiles become progressively stronger and better. Eventually a tile will be revealed that states there will be one more round, giving players one last chance to max out their population. At the end of the game, additional population can be gained through the three public goals and or each player's secret goal. These goals will involve having the most airports or the least residential tiles. Each of the public goals are evaluated at the end of the game and whoever is the leader will gain the bonus points listed on the goal. For the private goals, if you are not the leader, then you will not gain the bonus points.

The game is all about managing your city growth. If your population explodes early and you aren't ready for it, you might end up very short on money and then begin experiencing a shrinking city as your reputation takes a hit. I think the game captures this feeling very well. I only wish that visually the city was more than a bunch of hexes. Unlike the semi-sequel Castles of Mad King Ludwig where castles would sprawl in every which way, cities in Suburbia all look the same, even if the tiles that make up the city all look the same. I don't really know if there would be a solution to this, other than making the tiles 3D, which would add prohibitively to the cost of the game.

That said, this is the best city-building game I have played yet and definitely belongs in the Heavyweight collection. Whereas Castles of Mad King Ludwig is a bit more straightforward in terms of tracking, in Suburbia the population, income, and reputation track lean on the heavier side of things. As well, you have to pay attention to other players boroughs because tiles that are added there may have an impact on your own city, which also adds a bit to the complexity. Even though I prefer Castles of Mad King Ludwig, I think the theme of Suburbia is a bit more mainstream and therefore it would better fit the Essential collection. I also think there is enough to differentiate the two games so that there is a place for both games in the Collector collection. This game, although not perfect, did scratch that city-building itch for me.