Suburbia

Overview

Congratulations, Mayor! You’ve succeeded in ascending to this position of much power and responsibility and you didn’t even have to win an election or anything of the sort. As the proud new Mayor, it’s time to put your dreams and vision to work to build a city that will be the envy of the world. Coincidentally, there are rival Mayors who’ve also just risen to power and will seek to do the same thing. The question is what kind of a city will you build?

Suburbia is a 1-4 player game in which you’re trying to build your humble suburb into a thriving metropolis! Along the way, you’ll be picking up building zones and adding them to your board to grow the city. Some zones like factories or airports will kickstart your economy and giving you the tax revenue you need to expand. But it might make your city an undesirable place to live. Residential areas will bring people into your yard, but you may run the risk of overpopulation and the undesirable effects of that. Build slowly, build prudently.

Or just snowball your growth. After all, your opponents will be looking to lay claim to the best zones out on the marketplace and invite the subcontractors to build that awesome office park or stadium in their next of the woods. An economy will be vital if you want to have any chance at competing for that same piece of prime real estate. And make sure you increase your city’s reputation with nice community parks, good schools, and even hire a PR firm if that’s what you need to do. Finally, when in doubt… BUILD A LAKE!

Core Mechanics: Tile drafting, Tile placement.

Victory Condition: You wanted to build a city, and you’ll want to turn it into a thriving metropolis! The winner of Suburbia is the one who has the city with the highest population. While population will generally be obtained through building residential districts and improving them with schools and parks to attract new residents, you can also achieve population through the hidden achievements at the end of the game, assuming you succeed in doing so.

Ease of learning: Describing Suburbia as a SimCity, the board game, tends to make it easy for people to conceptualize and it’s not hard to understand the order of play. What’s harder for people, generally, is all the bookkeeping that goes on when they place a tile down because the tile can so easily affect and be affected by neighboring tiles. But once people grasp that concept and are willing to take the time to do that bookkeeping, Suburbia is fairly straightforward, yielding a light game that’s pretty easy to learn.

Purchase at: