City Simulation Game

How would you feel if you were the mayor of a huge city? Would you be able to manage all the tasks so your inhabitants don’t need to complain? With the computer, you may be used to try this out, but now it’s time to try it with this analogue city simulation game!

Watch the video to see a possible simulation!

In the beginning, you create your terrain. Grey cubes will be used for the city itself, green ones for fields and forests and blue ones for the sea and rivers. Choose wisely, as your city may get unnecessarily complex when you build too many rivers or parks!

Afterwards, the game itself begins. You roll the dice and see which element you need to build in the current lap. Then, you place the micro models. There are different types of them: streets, houses, fields and forests. The houses exist in three types: residences, offices and shops. They have different cost and income values, which may be important when you have only little capital or want to earn more money.

You can place the streets on any grey cube. On the adjacent grey cubes, the houses can be built. Fields and forests will stand on the green cubes. In the first lap, it’s mandatory to build at least one house of each type and thus also one street. Apart from that, you have complete freedom of designing your city. It’s even possible to build two separate cities on the terrain. Maybe this gives you an advantage.

Each model costs a certain amount of money. You can only build new ones as long as your capital is higher than zero (so you are not allowed to make debt). Then, the calculation phase begins. Of course, you can also stop the building phase earlier if this seems to make sense to you, or if there’s nothing more you could buy.

Each lap ends with the calculation. For the houses, you get taxes by the inhabitants, for the (yellowed) fields a certain amount of harvest and for the forests of recreation. This sum is being added to your capital. Then, you need to pay for food and non-food items for each house (this can be seen as if you needed to fill the supermarkets again with new stuff your inhabitants need).

Afterwards, you replace any model by a higher building stage, e.g. a semi-detached house becomes a skyscraper after some laps. This extension takes place as long as there are enough higher-stage equivalents (so you can’t extend if you’ve already done so very often). Streets and forests don’t have any higher stage. Fields, however, have two stages: First, they are built in green state, then the grain ripens and becomes yellow. Only in this stage the fields bring harvest, afterwards they are re-sown and become green again.

Now, the lap has ended and the next one begins in the building phase.

You can play until there’s no space left or the stock is empty. Now, what is your capital? Have you simulated a better city than your friends?

To challenge you even more, there are two extensions included: trains and ships! The train extension allows you to build a railway track on any grey cube and (starting from an arbitrary end), the train can drive the whole way on it within one single lap (after the building process has finished). Having reached the station, the train unloads and gives you some money! The ship extension works similarly: you build a harbour beside any blue cube and then the ship comes and unloads there. But attention: only one of the two containers can be unloaded by one harbour, so you need two of them if you want to use the ships completely! You can use the extensions in any lap, always up to two trains and two ships.

The game is completely modular, allowing you endless fun trying out the best solutions. You can even build other extensions with your own bricks which will make the game even more interesting (feel free to propose some in the comment section) Of course, also multiple boards can be combined forming a huge layout which will be simulated! Maybe in this way, you’ll get enough skills to be a real mayor one day! Hope you’ll enjoy playing and planning!

I’ve built the game with 2167 parts. All parts are existing in the used colours (except for the custom decorated tiles for the dice). The model measures 32 x 32 x 5 studs (in assembled state) and weighs 1225 g.

If you are interested in the amount of stages of the models and their prices, you can look in this table. The values are the results of some tinkering by me, but you can surely change them to challenge you more or less.

                    Amount

Stone          128

Grass          64

Water          64

                        Amount        Amount        Amount         Amount       Costs for

                        Stage 1         Stage 2        Stage 3        Stage 4        building /

                                                                                                           extending

Street              48                  0                   0                   0                  100

Residence      16                 16                  8                   8                  300

Office              8                    8                   0                   0                  400

Shop               8                    8                   4                   0                  400

Forest             32                  0                   0                   0                  100

Field               16                 16                   0                   0                  100

Rail                 32                  0                    0                   0                  200

Train               8                    8                    8                   0                  100

Station            2                   0                    0                   0                  1000

Harbour          4                   0                    0                   0                   2000

Ship                2                   2                    2                   2                   200

                                  Costs         Factor          Factor         Factor

                                                    Residence   Office          Shop

Food                         100             1                    0                  0

Non-Food Items       100             1                    1                  1

Building Material      200             0                     0                  1

                                              Income

Taxes                                    800 x house stage

Harvest Field                        300

Forest Recreation Value       100