Unrelated to Suburbia – the death yesterday of School of Seven Bells founder Ben Curtis at age 35 (of lymphoma) spurred me to look back at my rankings of the top songs of 2012 and create a fresh Spotify playlist with a few extra tracks. Their haunting song “The Night” is on the list.
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The boardgame Suburbia ranks in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek, with a combination of city-building mechanics and economic planning where what you do early in the game impacts how many points you can rack up late in the game. It’s reminiscent of more complex games like Agricola and Caylus in that respect, but with simpler gameplay and less direct interaction because players have more ways to change their plans on the fly. I’ve been playing the Suburbia iPad app for the last two weeks, and I enjoy the game itself but have found the app’s AI options way too weak to make the app replayable.
In Suburbia, between two and four players compete to build the most populated suburb around a central city by placing building tiles that are available for purchase in a common market. Each hex tile has specific costs and benefits. The benefits can include increases in income, population, or reputation; one-time cash infusions; or long-term effects that depend on what other tiles are adjacent to the hex, or in the same suburb, or in all suburbs combined. The costs include money but can also include a loss of income, population, or reputation, which may depend on what else is around. Place an industrial tile next to a residential one and you’ll lose reputation points because of pollution. Place tiles around a lake (free to add) and you’ll get extra cash.
The tile interactions are one of two keys to racking up large populations. You can’t do everything in your suburb, so it pays to concentrate early on one or two specific areas or tile types and try to build your income or population more quickly through synergies between tiles. You can add a farm or two, and then if you add restaurant tiles later they will be even more valuable. There are also tiles that include penalties for laying other tile types – if you add a high-end restaurant, adding a fast food restaurant afterwards will cost you an income point. The game’s tutorial suggests concentrating on income early and population later, as there are income and reputation hits built into the system when your population crosses certain thresholds.
The other scoring key lies in the various goals set out each game, 10 to 20 point bonuses for reaching specific milestones such as having the fewest office buildings or earning the highest income per turn. Four of these goals are visible and available to all players. Each player also receives one goal specific to him/her, not visible to other players, but that still requires beating all other players in that category to win it. Some goals even work against the main objective of maximizing your population, such as having the fewest residential tiles of any suburb. Without these goals, the game would be kind of boring because it would be so simple and too reliant on the central tile market, which uses the common mechanic of making two tiles available for free and all others in the queue more expensive, shifting them to the right as tiles are removed.
The app itself looks slick, with bright, clear graphics that allow you to read the costs and effects of each card easily. I only had one issue with stability, which occurred when I tried to use the game’s save feature – I couldn’t resume the game and had to kill the app process entirely to start a fresh one, which I guess is a pretty significant bug but wasn’t my main issue with the app. The AI players are terrible: you have your choice of five, and can use up to three of them (but can’t reuse any), and they’re all a little dim. They don’t plan well, which I imagine is a difficult issue for coding AI players, but they also miss obvious short-term moves or take actions that clearly reduce their chances to gain points. If I go first, I can beat the AI players just about every time. Going fourth of four reduces my chances a little, but I’m also a novice player and should get more of a challenge than this. I’m hoping that the expansion, Suburbia Inc.
I’m due for an update to my top iOS boardgame apps rankings, but will review the Dominant Species app later in the week before I do the final list.