Not Another City-Building Game

Great reply from Jeff, I'd just like to add that a lot of city building games seem to be set in the modern age. One area I'm particularly interested in is historical/geographic themed games, hence, would look to design city building games based upon a real life city in a previous century. (Incidentally, a game I designed for our group last year was based on building up a C17th French town and walking through its streets for bonus VPs :) )

History/geography rich games serve as excellent educational themes that would hopefully make these subjects more interesting for schoolkids, e.g. PR, Princes of Florence, Princes of the Rennaissance, Ahum-Re.

Best of luck,
Dave W

I know it's hard not to think about "how is my game different than the standard fare out there," but really, the best way to design games that are actually fun is to sit down and design a game that you find fun. If you're looking at other games, don't view them as competition but rather as inspiration.

One of the ways you can get over writers' block is to look at a bunch of pictures, pick out the one that looks the most interesting to you, and force yourself to write a story about it. Not to worry about the quality of the story or anything else... just write about the picture. Looking at other games is the same thing for game designers. Look at these other city building games and try to analyze how they work. Think about the mechanics of them and which ones seem the most fun. Then think about how they could be better, and how your list of "fun" mechanics could interact with each other. Look for aspects of games that mix well together to keep your players making interesting decisions. Mostly, look toward other games as a sort of brainstorming session.

But the most important thing to do is sit down and just design your game; the game that sounds crazy fun to you. When you have a completed game, playtested with all your friends and among people you don't even know, and you've worked out all the problems and made the rules clear and the artwork contributes to a solid theme and every aspect of the game is the most fun to the best of your ability and you're finally ready to pitch your game, then look at the other games out there that are like yours and come up with a quick bullet list of how your game capitalizes upon convention but offers something new to the buying masses. Of course, by that point, you should realize that while making a game that the world will play and that will make you rich is nice, it's much better to have a fun game that you can play with your friends.

After all, when you go to your local game shop and pick up the latest game, aren't you only buying to have a good game to play with your friends?

edit:... wow. That came off really preachy. Sorry about that.

Indeed 'Big City' is very nice looking and you'll see that the remake of 'Acquire' also uses 3D plastic buildings to good effect :)

Now, what kind of mechanic(s) are you hoping to use as the central aspect of the game: Auctions, Action Points, Drafting, Psychological-choices (e.g. Basari, Citadels), etc.?

And yes I think it would be a good idea for you to research a relevant subject matter to enrich the theme of the game (urban/city development/planning policies, commercialism, socialology, historical growth of real life cities, etc.)

Best regards,
Dave W.

(For cheap prototype components, use lego bricks) ;-)