#Suburbia game expansion how to#

It’s such a significant effect that it threatens to overwhelm the game completely. At the start you’ll encounter these every 10-15 points, but they quickly pinch together, and before you know it you’ll be crashing through three or more each turn. Each time you do, both your monetary and population income drop by one space apiece. The driving force behind the FOO strat is the speed bump system, which positions Suburbia alongside Power Grid and Mario Kart as having the most influential catch-up mechanisms in gaming.Īs your score increases you’ll pass speed bump spaces on the scoring track.

I can attest that it can be done, however. It’s a FOO strategy, though an effective one, as balancing the wire once you go low-income or high population growth in the early game is very difficult.

There’s one basic strategy that most people will gravitate towards, and perhaps never leave: high income, low population early before a mid/late pivot towards population. Understanding how things work together is simple: stark colors and easy-to-read icons (something I’ve become much more appreciative of in the past couple of years, either because I’m getting old or because I’ve played too many games with impossible to distinguish from across the table icons.) Valuation is complex, with the market and all of the possible interactions. Resources are simple: you’ve got money and you’ve got population (VP) growth. Or maybe it simply knows where to be simple and where to be complex. Suburbia is effortlessly cool, making the complex simple and the simple complex. This clean visual language extends to the way tiles are colored and how icons are managed. Everything with a circle affects income a square, population growth. Somehow, after a couple of turns, this process becomes ingrained and intuitive in no small part because of the excellent graphic design. Every tile placement is followed by a 7-step resolution process, where you check the cost, immediate effects, conditional effects, conditional effects on neighboring tiles, etc. Tile placement has to be one of the most information-dense game mechanisms, and Suburbia uses it to its fullest potential. Price, timing, your burgeoning tableau, the other player’s–all of it shifts and morphs the valuation of any given tile. The longer a particular tile is on offer the cheaper it gets, a sort of topsy-turvy variation on the Puerto Rico/Twilight Imperium mechanism where unselected actions gain monetary incentives.Įven with a set selection of tiles (that quickly expands when you bring expansions into the picture), no two games of Suburbia ever feel quite the same. On top of the inherent price of the piece there’s a market price that shrinks over time. Each tile interacts with the others in unique ways, sometimes across the entire spectrum of players, and each tile is dynamically priced. It better be the right one, because every choice here is important. Each turn you’re given a platter of tiles to purchase, but this isn’t all-you-can-eat. Tradeoffs are the name of the game, in city planning and in Suburbia, and nothing makes tradeoffs both evident and accessible like drafting. Even the most noble among us can’t handle such a task.

#Suburbia game expansion how to#

That’s not to say that the idea of suburban communities is inherently flawed (I’ve lived in the suburbs almost my entire life), only that people who claim to have figured out how to organize society fail to understand the complexity of life. In the United States the history of the suburbs is rife with racism and hubristic contempt. This isn’t a delusion on the part of the game, but a nod of the head to the myth. It’s bright and cheery with its primary colors and clean lines suburbs as they’re advertised, not as they are. Certainly some games set up the bumper pads to soften the pain of tactical mistakes, but others simply offer the illusion of safety. After all, good decisions advance you towards victory and bad decisions away from it, no matter what feelings those decisions evoke. The line between agonizing decisions and a friendly buffet of options in board gaming is thinner than you’d think. Like an ice cream parlor displaying its sweet treats in glass-shielded rows, both parts–drafting and placement–offer up a suite of tasty options. Ted Alspach’s Suburbia combines two simple pleasures, drafting and tile-placement, as well as any game ever made.