Neighborhood Rules Draft

As I understand it from skimming the rules: it's a pattern-making game, where players must have certain types of resources before adding certain pieces. The arrangement of the pieces can increase the resources you collect throughout the game. That all seems to make sense to me.

The things that unfortunately don't add up for me are:
- the time limit. What's the justification for it? Why not skip the tracker and just end the game as soon as the grid is completely full of buildings, and/or a certain resource - like cash - is completely depleted?
- the theme. I don't see a clear connection between the name "Neighborhood" and what the player is doing, and how the game is "won." At its closest, it's more like "City Planning," because when I think of the word neighborhood I think of residents cooperating to solve problems. But this doesn't seem like a neighborhood to me. It's more like City Hall or an urban planning consultation firm.

WOOD BLOCK POTENTIAL
Did you use a wood-burning kit or something to build and decorate your city grid? I ask this because I think the game would be more interesting if you were able to use the surfaces of the blocks themselves to communicate information. It's a shame to have such cool pieces that aren't used for much else in the game other than cosmetic differences.

For example, cost to construct a building could be listed on the bottom side of a block, instead of using cards. Players could have blocks in front of them, and on their turn they could construct only those buildings (like the building cards in the player's hand as explained in your rules). You could have players specialize in certain types of buildings - residential, commercial, government, etc. - so adjacency benefits are realized only on their turn. You could have upscale/advanced buildings available only after basic-level buildings are constructed, and advanced-level buildings have to be swapped-out in the locations their basic-level counterparts were initially placed.

STARTING PROBLEMS
It may be more exciting and urgent for players to cooperate if you had problems arise at the beginning of the game, as opposed to cropping up only later. It may also be a way to guide players in the beginning of the game, instead of them just blindly or randomly placing buildings they can afford somewhere in the grid.

TO SUM UP
If you have the blocks, then use them more. That's my suggestion. They look really fun! :)

Best of success to you on this project.

I read through your rules and I was left with a few questions. You don't even have to reply to them just give them some thought.  Does each player have a neighborhood or is there only one for the game? If each player has a neighborhood is it a private tableau or is it adjacent to other neighborhoods and have interactions with them? Can the game be played as a single player? How is the game set up and played for a different numbers of players. What is the definition of a round in your game? Will that your definition of a round work well for all player counts?

I agree that power may not be the best word/building for the game.  Here are some possible alternatives: City hall; depart of zoning; legislature; building permits. Also the game Elasund has a similar concept to this maybe you can use borrow some vocabulary from it.

The wood pieces do look nice. Remember there are other shapes that can fit tightly into a square well. Circle, triangle, hexagon and octogons and plus sign immediately come to mind. The wood working on these shapes is more difficult. Also if your going to do wood burning some 1/16 inch bass wood boards may be your help you. I don't know if they are thick enough to wood burn but I do know that they are thin enough to cut against the grain on a paper guillotine and it will provide a flat surface for the wood burning. You can cut them burn them and then glue them on top.

Other random thoughts. You could possibly wood burn some info on the neighborhood board. (Some what like suburbia). Maybe you could specialize your buildings by putting different roofs on top of  them.