Brainstorm Session: City-building Game

SimCity is more like a toy, than a game. You just play with it, and play, and play. If you are open to new ideas, I say try making it a solo game. As it already has like a million elements on it, I wouldn't advice adding anything. Just dump the APs and stay with tax income. Plus, SimCity fans are used to things appearing as fast as they order them built.

Keep thinking!

I'm kinda new here, but I really like the idea you have going there. My initial thoughts on what you so far is that starting with only 1 AP might be too low. Assuming that each neighborhood built adds an additional 1 AP per turn, then it seems that the obvious move for all players would be to construct a neighborhood or two. This would double / triple the AP they have per turn relative to the starting amount. I personally dislike when a game seems to have an "obvious" opening move or two. If the other choices to build offered comparable benefits then I suppose this wouldn't be so bad.

My other ideas.... I'm picturing a large board in the center. Maybe something like small world, where the board size (available "emptyl" real estate squares) varies with the number of players. Toss in some rules on industrial areas not being able to be placed adjacent to residential. Competition for ideal locations would be very fierce, as well as allowing for the strategic placement of certain buildings. I build a smoke belching factory in the middle of your happy go lucky neighborhood. Maybe the "VP" value during the final tally of your neighborhood is now reduced by some amount. This would make player interaction a definitive part of the game.

Variance could be easily be added in the form of a deck of "chance" cards. Perhaps there would be a condition, or maybe simply the end of each round triggers a card to be drawn. Cards could be trigger crime waves, earthquakes, fires and other disasters as mentioned... as well as "political" events. The EPA raises the bar on pollution standards. Each player must pay 10 for each industrial zone. Mixing in some positive events would make things interesting as well. Non-socialist president is inaugurated, commerce explodes as taxes are reduced. Gain x per commercial tile constructed.

Another interesting idea that came to me is to limit the supply of certain types of tiles. Maybe there is only a 2 clean energy power plants in a 4 player game. The other power plants might run be coal/ high pollution. Or maybe nuclear. This would force players to run somewhat different strategies.

I like this idea and think it has much potential. Goodluck to you. Usually when I have a "rough sketch" of an idea for a game in my head it lingers there for sometime until I have some sort of epiphany on the game's direction and core mechanics.

I think this game would be great with tiles.. You can never totally discount the impact of the tactile feel of a game.

More importantly, I like the proposed idea of a starting board as each square/space could contain bonuses to certain tiles. For instance, a rocky part of the map could hinder the yield from farmland tiles. Or a hydro-electric plant could require a tile have a water drop icon on it showing that there's a water flow there. This would entice players to fight over prime spots on the map even before things start to get crowded.

I like the idea that everyone is building in the same city too, especially if I'm not only able to lower your score by placing something like a dump next to one of your housing projects but if I'm also able to reap points off your housing project by building a park next to it. So players could not only hurt each other but benefit off each other too.

And you could consider adding a fun element of "that's the one I wanted!" by having a number of exposed tiles that players can draw from each turn. Something like the 5 face up cards in Ticket To Ride.

As you mentioned separate cities or district it made me think of a possible overall goal for the game. Gaining population. It occurred to me when you mentioned how the cities could be neighboring. What if one of the major things players are competing over is population and there's a finite amount of population in the game. Players would then not only try to attract more citizens to the area but try to entice other players' population to move to their city/district.

For what it's worth, I tend to be a fan of more streamlined games so I liked the idea of consolidating the build points and money into a single super resource.

Perhaps, instead of a resource that must be tracked, players could each have a building queue. Like a track that can accommodate, like, 5 tiles or so. Each turn, players move all the tiles 'up' on the track and can place whichever tile pops out of the top that turn. More ambitious building projects would force the player to start the tile lower on the building queue causing it to take more turns before placing on the board. If the queues are public this could greatly affect how other players play as everyone tries to 'head off' other players' strategies.

In fact, I remember a post Rene made on BGDF a LOOONG time ago, I believe it was a "Game Journal" (the equivalent of "Blogs" on the current site) which was basically a list of all the games he had in mind in various stages, their descriptions, and maybe how far along they were in development. I was very inspired by that list (which was also full of great sounding games!), and have made similar lists for myself on my Game Design Blog and found it useful.

It's good to see you posting, Rene ;)

I liked the idea that I think the original poster made about sliding tracks to monitor several stats, and each time you add a tile to your city (or your part of the main city), you adjust the tracks accordingly.

Maybe each player controls a barrio, and as the barrios grow they will merge together to form a city, and at the end of the game there will be an election for Mayor of that city - the people in YOUR barrio will vote for you, so in effect you want to have more people than everyone else. In that regard, population could be VP, and the game could be about getting people and keeping them happy so that they don't leave (or support another candidate/player).

Just some thoughts that hopefully may help.
One possibility is to use tiles or chits to represent various buildings. One player would pay for the building, but all players could use its benefits, but would have to pay for its use to the owner. For example, Bob builds a hydroelectric dam to generate electricity. Pete could use the electricity, but would pay Bob for it. The dam would provide power for a certain radius, which means if another player (or Bob) wanted to build a supermarket and use the dam for power, he'd have to place it within that radius or acquire power elsewhere. This structure also helps to influence the way a city develops.
Certain tiles have other benefits or drawbacks. For example, the city dump may be necessary to expand beyond 10 residential neighborhoods, however, if a neighborhood is adjacent to the dump, it loses value in some fashion. Again, the player building the dump pays the initial cost and other players would have to pay him somehow for its use.

I really like the attracting population idea. I do tend to like games where each player has their own gameboard, and there is some limited interaction between players, usually competing for some resource or other. It gives you the feeling of just trying to do your best, but also has the interaction. Perhaps each waiting person will enter the first built home that has some minimal number of crime, pollution, and distance to certain services. If two houses open up at the same time, they will move into a better one. I do worry about how all this will be tracked.

Maybe to keep it simple, it can just be based on a few global properties of the city. Cities can be scored by certain criteria. Number of factories increases pollution, number of houses in each residential zone over a threshold is the crime level, and the number of houses within range of each hospital, school etc (measurable with colored translucent mats you position on each service and then just count the houses) is the service rating of the city. Every time the "moving" phase rolls around, maybe every couple of turns, free people will move into empty houses in order of the city ratings.

I've been playing a lot of through the ages, so some kind of scoring and income tracks might be useful to keep track of the city rating and other values, so that they don't have to be added up all the time.

I also think that it wouldn't work if the cities got to big. 10x10 tiles or even less is probably the limit of what needs to be tracked, although it's hard to tell without actually playing with it.

Need factories and power plants to build buildings, but those add pollution; a residential area is maybe a 3x3 block; if it has 4 houses it is crime free, if it has 9 it is overcrowded (crime); a police station next to a residential zone will eliminate 2 tiles worth of crime (so you can effectively have 6 houses); hospitals service every house up to 3 tiles away.

Action cards can be based on different layouts. For instance, you can put a lot of police around a residential zone in order to fill it, but you might have an action card where people move out if there are too many police. Having residential zones too close together may be bad, because disasters such as floods or hurricanes will be more likely to take many of them out. Balancing things so that there isn't one "proper" way to build the city will make or break the game.

I think you would have to zone, which would be flat sheets you put on your town board first, maybe paying for the zone. The zones would determine what kinds of tiles may later be built there.

Hopefully I'm not taking things in the wrong direction, if I am feel free to throw all of these ideas out :) It's just what was on the top of my head.