The teasing balance between income and reputation and the way they intertwine with the tile placement system. The reason Suburbia grips my heart so ferociously is down to the puzzle at its very core. Suburbia is one of my favourite board games ever. When I was younger I knew that suburbs were the no man’s land between city and countryside, the worst of both with none of the good stuff. Since the winner is the player with the greatest population at the end of the game, the ‘score’ track doesn’t just sit off to the side like in most games but is fundamental to the whole experience, punishing success if you aren’t sufficiently prepared for it. Cross one of these lines and both your income and reputation immediately drop a level, representing the increased bills and reduction to your small-town charm that come from a larger population. The final twist is the population track, a long and winding road littered with thick red lines. Factories may bring in the hard cash but nobody wants to live next door to one. My oh-so-addictive yellow industrial tiles, for instance, generally provide cash or income rewards but often tarnish a suburb’s reputation, particularly if positioned next to residential tiles. What you receive when you place a tile depends on its attributes, its placement in relation to its surrounding tiles and its interaction with other tiles in both your own and your opponents’ boroughs. Money can be spent on new properties (tiles) for your suburb which provide you with boosts to your income or reputation, or just immediate injections of money or people. In Suburbia players compete to have the most populous suburb, walking a tightrope between income and reputation (the amount of money and the number of people who move to your suburb at the end of each of your turns). And then I just shrug and buy another heavy factory. Sometimes I wonder if Suburbia is a Rorschach test, revealing my base desires for the material over the social. And then give me a lake to put next to it to contaminate for profit. Give me a landfill site over affordable housing any day of the week. I just want everything to be hexagonal yellow, spewing out money and repulsing people like there’s no tomorrow. Suburban StartĬhrist, but I love industry. These are scattered snippets of Suburbia. At one point it mentions a urinating sot. It’s also an article about failure, corruption and Christmas spirit. This is an article about the board game Suburbia, its expansions, app and sequels. “Sooner or later, all games become serious.” J.G.
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