Skip to Content
 

Sim City Style Boardgame

5 replies [Last post]
Beriner
Offline
Joined: 04/23/2012

Hey all!

What do you guys think about this? Sorry, it's long.

Tile placing, city building game.

Game:
There are 3 tile decks to chose from, well 4 sort of. Basic buildings, advanced buildings, and civic buildings. There are power plant tiles, visible by players, must be bought. I'm trying to figure out some better way of doing the tiles. There are 4 building types, residential, commercial, industrial, and civic. Everybody takes 1 action each turn. Draw, place, or rearrange. You can draw up to 2 tiles on your turn, or can place 1, or can move one.

Pieces:
Building tiles
Brown wooden blocks (Workers)
Blue wooden block (Security)
Monopoly money =P

Goal:
Be the most profitable city. Whoever has the most money at the end of the game wins. Bonuses for having the most crime free cities, most clean cities, and having any utopian cities (free of crime and pollution.)

Basic Rules: (Nothing concrete, or even in depth)
-Residential and industrial cannot be placed next to each other.
-Commercial can be placed next to all, this helps in separating residential from industrial.

Phases:
Upkeep
-Take taxes

Action (only 1)
-Draw
-Build
-Rearrange/Replace/Upgrade

Assign
-Place workers on buildings.

Gameplay:
Each type of building has a common stat:
Power requirement, every building will require power. Your power plants can only support so much. The only thing in this game that costs money that you earn, are power plants. Since your goal is to have the most money by the end of the game, it is worthwhile spending money to buy a new power plant to either start a new city, or replace the one in your current city. Maybe add it to current city, haven't decided yet.

Each residential is worth a certain number of workers. Example, single family home has 2 workers. Each commercial and industrial building can have a certain number of employees. Usually 2 to 6. Workers are assigned here, getting you a certain amount of money per person. Commercial buildings introduce crime to your cities, and industrial introduces pollution. A commercial building may have 3 worker slots available on it, say it has 1 crime and it makes $50/worker. You can fill those with 2 types of employees, workers and security. For each security employed at the building, it removes 1 crime, and does not generate money. Some of the civic buildings, like police stations, will also be able to reduce crime, based on where it is placed, thus freeing up employee openings for more workers. You do not need to reduce the crime rate in your cities, however there are penalties for having crime. For now, it's just crime x $25 is how much you deduct from the money you get during upkeep phase.

Industrial buildings produce pollution. Placing parks anywhere will help reduce pollution, but to reduce it more, it's best to invest in advanced buildings. Advanced buildings can be stuff like, Clean Industry, an industrial building that CAN be placed next to residential and produces no or little pollution. Advanced buildings require better power plants, or just more power. You can get advanced commercial buildings that come with automated security, so they don't increase crime in the city.

I could write more, but I don't want to make this post any longer.

Winning condition:
This is where I'm struggling. I've come up with a couple ideas but not one of them I'm happy with.
1. I was thinking of making it so that once someone comes up with a utopian city, the game ends and people add up their money. This could work since people will have to get rid of crime AND pollution completely in their city to end the game. Everyone starts with a basic city setup, so they start with crime and pollution. Most options to reduce crime/pollution, hurts income in the beginning of the game. So it could work from stopping people from just focusing on ridding their city of pollution and crime as fast as possible, since they wouldn't have very good money to win. This kind of gives players the choice of when they think they can end the game to win.
2. I forgot my other ones haha.

Issues I have with the game so far:
-Keeping track of money you earn, versus what you lose from crime feels like it will be a pain.

-Why build both commercial and industry? They both have bad things to them, so why give yourself both crime and pollution. The only thing for now that keeps people building only commercial or only industrial is that industrial gives more money than commercial and commercial is basically required to build residential, since residential can't be built next to industrial. This forces people to build both. And I may limit how far tiles can be placed from power plants, making people be more selective of their placements. Instead of having 1 commercial building separating all their industrial and residential.

Thank you for reading!

cdk
Offline
Joined: 06/11/2012
Hi- How about in addition to

Hi-
How about in addition to accumulating the most money, each player needs to obtain an efficiency rating for each building. For example, each player needs to obtain an individual rating for cleanest industrial building, most profitable commercial building, and safest residential building, and the game ends when a player holds all 3 ratings simultaneously. This way, if a player wants to keep playing to accumulate more money, he or she can hold off on obtaining the last rating and keep building until they have accumulated enough money to win the game. Also, have you considered adding an element of sabotage to your game, like allowing a player to rezone an opponent’s property ?

Beriner
Offline
Joined: 04/23/2012
Hello

I like your suggestions but I'm not sure that the ratings thing would work, and I already somewhat have that idea already mentioned in there with the utopian bonus. Where a city has 0 crime and 0 pollution, which comes down to making all commercial buildings crime free and all industrial buildings pollution free. I don't really have anything negative about residential, which is something I'm thinking about. It would be easier to see my vision of the game with the paper playing pieces I've drawn up, I'll have to post them at some point.

I have been thinking about some way to sabotage other players. At first I wanted people to be able to play disasters on each other, but I couldn't think of a good way to implement it. If you have any ideas in that area please let me know. =)

kos
Offline
Joined: 01/17/2011
City Building

I myself am attracted to empire-building and city-building games, but the transition from computer to board game is quite difficult. In particular, a board game must be much, much simpler than a computer game in order to be playable. Some of your concepts above seem to me to be tending on the too-complicated side, in that every turn there would be a lot of counting and record-keeping. The solution is either to make the record keeping simpler or to have a low number of turns (so it happens less often).

For ending conditions you could use a Victory Point system, like Settlers.
- 1 point per $X in your hand.
- 2 points if you have zero crime.
- 2 points if you have zero pollution.
- 2 points if you have an arcology.
- 2 points if you have an airport.

If you do go with a victory point system like this, beware of positive feedback loops. E.g. if reducing crime also increases your income you have a positive feedback loop -- and the potential for the runaway leader problem. In contrast, if reducing crime to zero costs more financially than the financial benefit it gives then you have a negative feedback loop -- which in the game is possibly a good thing.

I think that as a multiplayer game it needs some player interaction, otherwise it is just 4 people playing solitaire while sitting at the same table.
- Playing disasters on other players is an easy "take that" mechanic and a natural catch-up (because the leader will get more disasters than the others), but there may be better methods of interaction.
- There could be limited shared resources, whether it be in terms of physical space, natural resources, population, etc. E.g. if population is the shared resource, then each year there could be a certain number of new people who will be attracted to settle in the nicest (cleanest, safest, lowest-taxing) cities. There could even be a "flavor of the month" roll/card-draw to determine where the new people settle each year.
- If using the victory point system above, then each of the special buildings (Arcology, Airport, etc) could be unique. That is, there is only one Airport tile, so the first player to place it keeps it. But there would be requirements (e.g. you must have Population X and Commercial Y before you can buy the Airport, while you must have Industry Z to buy the Seaport) so that there is a race to see who can get the special buildings first.
- Following on from the idea above, a better way to deter small cities from buying all the special buildings is to use upkeep costs (rather than having pre-requisites). E.g. the Seaport costs $10,000 per year and generates $1000 income per Industry tile. So naturally the Seaport will only break even once you have 10 Industry, but an entrepreneurial city mayor might buy it early in the hope that it pays off in the long run -- provided that it doesn't drive the city broke first. This gives players valid strategic choices to make about maximising their income vs buying up the unique buildings.

Regards,
kos

Beriner
Offline
Joined: 04/23/2012
Great Ideas

Hey Kos,

Great ideas! I have actually been wanting to get away from the money completely as it requires too much effort to keep track of, especially with how crime affects it. I wanted to actually move to city points (victory points) or something and figure out a different way of acquiring power plants, which could simply be have 2xcommercial and 2xindustrial buildings in your city and you can either upgrade current city with new power plant, or start new city on your play area with a new power plant.

If I don't completely move away from money, I do like your idea of having victory points for every crime free, pollution free, etc. city. Instead of the upkeep phase being income minus crime rate. It can just be income, which keeps it simpler. Then victory points at the end are based off every $500 you have, how many 0 crime cities, 0 pollution cities, etc.. You're right, that way it does remove some of the record keeping.

I've been trying to come up with a way for people to go whichever way they want, more commercial than industry or vice versa, or a balance between the two. This could then play really well into your idea of special building requirements, which I liked. Could have special buildings, similar to Puerto Rico, where there are a few expensive but only 1, buildings.

Something I just came up with for disasters is something similar to Catan Cities & Knights. There will be a deck of disaster cards. A small board that shows the time remaining (rounds) until next disaster, which is just a draw of the disaster deck, which I'm thinking should be face up, so people can plan for it. This way people can see when a disaster is coming, and how they can prepare for it. I haven't come up with a good way for the disasters to affect people.
Some thoughts on that are:
-Random person gets affected.
-Random person gets affected, and everyone else playing gets affected to a lesser degree.
-Having people use their money towards a prevention effort, making it so that they do not get affected by the disaster. Person who contributes the least, gets hit by the disaster the worse.

Beriner

layen1
Offline
Joined: 08/02/2012
just wanted to reply to your

just wanted to reply to your post to let you know that MayFair Games put out the Sim City (licensed) Board/Card Game back about 15 years ago. you lay cards which have city blocks and gain points due to placement. I have a copy :P

Syndicate content


forum | by Dr. Radut