Realistic city planning game - how to provide replay value?

What about doing something like Catan's board? You have a default board layout,
but you also have the option to play on a randomized board, and there are little counters or tiles which you can use to cover/replace some symbols/values/tiles on the board for customized start conditions. Although if the goal cards are randomly assigned from a sufficiently large deck to make repetition infrequent, it shouldn't really be necessary - like in Risk. And if the start condition doesn't vary too much between games, players will be more inclined to analyze starting strategies a bit like studying chess openings (assuming you make the game deep and compelling enough), which would probably please the advocacy group if they are aiming to make people think about the topic.

One good way to provide replay value is at the start of the game, set aside some portion of a deck that is integral to the game. The players will not know what cards were set aside so that way they don't rely on memorizing the deck.

Another way is to have a deck that you only see a few cards out of a large amount so that you will have a different experience each game.

For example ... Deck A has 50 cards, Deck B has 25 cards. In deck A there are 5 cards that draw a card from deck B. Set aside 5 cards from deck A and now you have 45 cards that the game is based on and a possibility of 0-5 additional cards from deck B. How you weight the importance of each deck would also matter in that deck A could be normal effects and deck B could be bigger shifts in things such as economy etc.

M

If you want HIGH replayability, I would suggest TILES, HEXES or MATS. These three (3) options allow you to create a *dynamic* board that could be different each time you play.

Tiles and Hexes are the most flexible but will add to your game's setup phase and eat up valuable time getting the game together and ready to play. The third option (Mats) could allow interconnection and make your game FAST to setup... You just choose four (4) out of twelve (12) mats and then you put them together as required...

I think the MATS idea would be the coolest - since I don't think you want players wasting too much time setting up the board. Also it adds great depth to the game - especially in future expansions. Let's say you want to create an expansion, you could bundle four (4) NEW mats to the game as an EXTRA that your expansion offers!

Anyhow these are just some of my ideas that I thought I'd share!

Best of luck with your game.