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Suburbia
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3686 Victory Points
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Description
Plan, build, and develop a small suburbia into a major metropolis. Use hex-shaped building tiles to add residential, commercial, civic, and industrial areas, as well as special points of interest that provide benefits and take advantage of the resources of nearby towns. Your goal is to have your borough thrive and end up with a greater population than any of your opponents. Suburbia is a tile-laying game in which each player tries to build up an economic engine and infrastructure that will be initially self-sufficient, and eventually become both profitable and encourage population growth. As your town grows, you'll modify both your income and your reputation. As your income increases, you'll have more cash on hand to purchase better and more valuable buildings, such as an international airport or a high rise office building. As your reputation increases, you'll gain more and more population (and the winner at the end of the game is the player with the largest population). During each game, players compete for several unique goals that offer an additional population boost – and the buildings available in each game vary, so you'll never play the same game twice!
Suburbia is a game for up to four players (or five players, using the 5* expansion), designed by Ted Alspach and published by Bezier Games in 2012. In the game, players control and develop their own individual city boroughs, competing to see whose borough will boast the largest population by the end of the game.
Overview
Much of Suburbia’s gameplay revolves around the accumulation of two things: money and population. At the end of each turn, players gain money according to their level of Income, and population according to their level of Reputation.
During their turns, players can spend money to extend their city boroughs by purchasing and laying down new tiles in front of them. These hexagonal tiles are colour-coded to indicate their types: green for residential, yellow for industrial, grey for civic, and blue for commercial. Each player starts with an identical set of three tiles, laid out in a line:
Suburbs (a residential tile giving +2 Population)
Community Park (a civic tile yielding -1 Income but offering +1 Reputation for each adjacent industrial, residential or commercial tile)
Heavy Factory (an industrial tile yielding +1 Income but giving -1 Reputation for each adjacent civic or residential tile).
Even at this early point in the game, you can already see the elegance with which Suburbia’s city-building theme is mirrored in its mechanisms. Your Suburbs provide a place for citizens to live (so you get +2 Population). However, the presence of heavy industry right next to a civic area is not an appealing juxtaposition (-1 Reputation). Even so, the Community Park offers your citizens a pleasant buffer between the bordering industrial and residential zones, giving the aesthetic appeal of each of these regions a compensatory boost (+2 Reputation).
However, the provision of such an attractive community facility lands you with a financial burden (-1 Income). But this is balanced against the money-making capacity of your Heavy Factory (+1 Income).
The point I really want to get across is that Suburbia is not one of those games where the theme feels pasted onto a bunch of abstract numbers and mechanisms which could have easily been imagined to represent something else entirely (or nothing at all). Every single tile in Suburbia has an effect that feels undeniably “right” in terms of what that tile is supposed to represent and how it should relate to its surroundings.
Playing Suburbia
During the game, players purchase new properties from a row of seven tiles known as the ‘Real Estate Market’ (REM). Whenever a tile is taken from the REM, the resulting gap is filled by sliding the remaining tiles to the right and adding a new tile at the extreme left. Each tile has its own base cost, but additional costs are incurred according to the position of each tile in the REM. This additional cost increases from right to left, meaning that tiles more recently added to the REM, on the left, are more expensive and become gradually cheaper as they slide along the line to the right.
By placing new tiles into their boroughs, players can either gain extra money and population directly, or manipulate their levels of Income and Reputation to affect how much of these resources they gather at the end of each turn. As we’ve already seen in the case of the Community Park and Heavy Factory, the effects of some tiles depend on what lies adjacent to them.
Other effects depend on how many tiles of a certain type you have in your own borough (eg, the Postal Service, which rewards you with +1 Income for each of your commercial tiles). And some depend on all the tiles in the game – including those in your opponents’ boroughs (eg, the Farm, which gives you +1 Income for every single Restaurant in play).
A couple of other significant actions are possible during the game: placing Investment Markers and turning tiles from the REM into Lakes.
Each player starts with three Investment Markers. At any point in the game, instead of purchasing and placing a tile in the normal way, you can choose to place an Investment Marker on one of your borough’s existing tiles (paying the tile’s base cost again) in order to trigger its placement effects a second time. This can be a powerful move, especially later in the game when there are lots of tile types in play and a large number of established adjacencies that can boost a tile’s effects.
Another action that can be taken during your turn is to take a tile from the REM, flip it over, and place it into your borough as a Lake. (Every tile in the game has a Lake printed on its reverse side).
Lakes are cheap (with a $0 base cost – so you pay only the additional price determined by its position in the REM) and give you an immediate $2 for every single adjacent tile (excluding only other Lakes). Placing a Lake is therefore a useful way to gain a quick injection of cash. It’s also a highly effective way of removing tiles from the REM which you don’t want (or can’t afford) to purchase yourself, but which you don’t want to leave available for your opponents.
Money & Population
Gaining money is always a good thing in Suburbia. During the game, you’ll want to maximise your purchasing power to ensure you can get your hands on the tiles you want or need the most. At the end of the game, any remaining money is converted into population (at the rate of $5 for 1 population).
Population is a different matter entirely. In one sense, it’s the most important resource in the entire game, since the player who ends up with the highest population will, ultimately, win. However, during the game, increasing your population brings negative consequences in its wake.
As a town developer, what else would you expect? As your borough develops and gets increasingly crowded with citizens, it becomes both more expensive to run and, inevitably, a slightly less desirable place to live. In order to model this real-world dynamic, the board on which players track their populations is interspersed with red lines. Whenever a population increase pushes your marker over one of those red lines, you are forced to drop both your Income and your Reputation by 1.
The further up the population track you go, the more frequent the red lines become. (This is another great example of how Suburbia deploys mechanisms that are essentially quite simple, yet succeed in capturing the city-building theme of the game in what feels like a rich and satisfying way).
As a consequence, players must be extremely careful about how quickly they attempt to boost their reputations in the early game. It’s vital to establish a reasonable economy first, as your rate of income will continually drop the more your population grows.
In the mid-to-late game, it’s all about judging whether your financial position is strong enough to stop concentrating mainly on effects that yield money / income and switch your focus over to effects that boost population / reputation. Timing when and how to make this switch is one of the most interesting and subtle challenges in the whole of Suburbia, and one of the reasons I enjoy the game so much.
If you run your population up too quickly, you might ruin your finances and grind to a halt. If you wait too long, you risk failing to establish a large enough population to win outright.
Goals
I’ve already tried to emphasize how masterfully Suburbia’s city-building theme is embodied by its mechanisms. I have to admit, though, that there is one aspect of the game where mechanisms and theme don’t really gel. It’s the Goal tiles, which reward bonus population at the end of the game for players who satisfy certain criteria – such as having the most lakes, or the highest income, or the fewest industrial tiles, etc.
It doesn’t make much sense, thematically, why (for instance) the borough with the least money would get +10 population. This is a shame, since every other element of the game has such a strong thematic justification.
Even so, the goal tiles do add interest to the gameplay itself. A certain number of goals are randomly dealt to the table as open information, and players also choose (from two they are randomly dealt) to keep one as a secret personal goal. The introduction of this hidden information adds a lot more beefiness to mid-game considerations about whether, and how, you should aim to manipulate the options available to your opponents.
Given that the goals offer up a significant number of bonus points (usually enough to have a definite impact on final scores), their potential to swing the game one way or another must constantly be factored into the decision-making of each player.
Components
Overall, the quality of Suburbia’s components is fine. The graphic design on the tiles – with the simple colour-coding and the use of white circles to denote income and black squares to denote reputation – is clear and intuitive.
The only issue I have found is that the three triangular boards (used for placing stacks of tiles / money and setting out the REM) have a tendency to get their pointy corners dented when the game is boxed and moved around, and this can cause the cardboard to start peeling into layers. (Although I’m guessing the use of triangles allowed the game to fit a smaller box).
Final Thoughts
I can’t say enough about how well the city-building theme of Suburbia coheres with the mechanisms of its gameplay. The game also does a fantastic job of combining an economic-engine building challenge with a spatial tile-laying puzzle.
Had it been designed slightly differently, Suburbia could very easily have ended up as a ‘multiplayer solitaire’ game in which each player simply gets on with doing their own thing with very little scope to affect or be affected by the actions of opponents. However, the way in which the REM works (including the possibility of taking tiles as Lakes) does provide at least some scope for directly manipulating or restricting the choices of your opponents, while the presence of the hidden Goals forces players to keep a close eye on one another and form appropriately reactive strategies.
Overall, Suburbia is a game designed with a deceptively simple elegance and which offers more than enough depth of strategy through its tile-laying / engine-building mechanics to make me want to keep coming back to it again and again.
In Suburbia players take on the role of planners in charge of their own boroughs as they plan, build, and develop it into a sprawling metropolis. Expanding their boroughs one area at a time to increase their income and reputation allowing them to construct more impressive structures and increase their population to become the most successful and popular borough in the area.
Basic Gameplay Overview
Suburbia is played over a series of rounds where players take turns expanding their boroughs or reinvesting in existing areas till the ‘one more round’ tile is pulled from the final stack of tiles. The goal of Suburbia is to have the highest population at the very end of the game. But growing your population is a balancing act with keeping your income and reputation.
Each player starts with their own board but with matching starting tiles in the same layout. Then on their turn, each player has one of four actions they can take. The first option is to buy a tile from the market. The market consists of a row of 7 tiles where 5 of the slots have an added cost on top of the cost on the tile, meaning if you want the tiles that have more recently been revealed from the stack you have to pay a premium or risk another player snatching it up before you can.
The player chooses the tile they want by paying the combined price and then placing it into the borough, following any symbols on the tile itself, surrounding tiles, and other tiles in your borough to see how it affects your income, reputation and population. On other player’s turns, you may benefit from or be hindered by the tiles they place based on tiles in your borough.
The second option is to buy one of the three basic starting tiles. These are the same as the tiles you started the game with and come at a lower value than most market tiles. To take one you pay the cost on the tile, and then choose a market tile to pay the cost for that slot if any and discard it. Then place in your borough the same way you would place a market tile.
The third is to buy a lake. Each tile in the market has a reverse side that shows a lake that will give you $2 for each adjacent Industrial, Civic, Residential, or Commercial tile to the lake. It is a good way to quickly gain a bit of money but won’t raise your overall income.
The fourth option is to use one of your three investment markers. Instead of adding a new tile to your borough, you place one of your investment markers on the tile of your choice, including lakes. You then activate the effects of the tile again. For example, a tile that scores +1 income for every residential tile will score that again, however, it will do the same for any negative effects on the tile so choose wisely.
Once the player has taken their main action, they collect money based on their current income this can be money owed if your income has dipped into the negative. Then they adjust their population on the shared track based on their current reputation.
The final stage of a player’s turn is to add a new tile to the market. No matter the action the player took the market should have a gap. Shift all tiles to the right, towards the cheaper slots on the market, then take the top tile off the current tile stack and place it into the leftmost slot in the market.
At some point when drawing a tile from the C stack you will reveal the ‘one more round tile’. This tile signals that you are nearly at the end of the game. When you draw this tile discard it into the box and fill the market with the next tile. You will finish this round of the game till it gets to the start player then every player gets one last turn, allowing for all players to get the same number of turns per game.
Once that round ends, you move on to final scoring, where you will add to your population based on your goals and leftover money. Public goals go to whoever best meets the goal, if there is a tie then no one scores the tile. Private goals only score if you are the one who achieved them, other people cannot score your private objectives. Leftover money will score you one population for every $5 you have.
Once you have finished totalling populations, whoever has the highest population wins. If there is a draw the player with the highest reputation wins, if there’s still a tie then the player with the highest income wins. Still tied the player with the most remaining money wins. And if by some miracle you are still tied the rules say the tied players have to play another game of suburbia to determine the winner.
How It Plays
Suburbia plays as a midweight difficulty game. Not to say the actual gameplay is hard to learn, especially as it’s an easy one to pick up on as you play, it becomes a little more difficult when you factor in having to keep track of what every tile in your borough does and what types of tiles affect and trigger them.
What I found when introducing Suburbia to my group it was an early game for them in their board gaming experience and I could see them wavering a bit during the rules, mainly because the rules try to make it as clear as possible what options players have on their turns and how it exactly works, even me summarising them above was a struggle without diving too much into the details. But once we got a few rounds in they were happy and playing, as it is an easy game to watch a player take a turn to get a grip on how a turn works.
Suburbia is very much a city-building game so that should be factored in when considering if this might be for you, there are no secret other mechanisms this game is very clear with what the goal and gameplay will be, and there is no real building tech it’s just about expanding your borough to grow your population and what type or mix of buildings you do this with is up to you and what tiles come out of the stacks.
But it’s fun to watch your little borough grow into the area you want it to become or have chosen for it to become to stand the best chance of winning those public and private objectives. For example, the borough in one game I played that was about a third to half just different airports, I didn’t realise what she was building to till it was too late to stop her.
So how does two-player compare to four-player? Personally, I preferred Suburbia at four-player for two main reasons, the market refresh and the amount of interaction. The market in the game is key to you achieving your goals and just growing in general, so when it is full of buildings that won’t help you or will actively disadvantage you having those tiles linger gets annoying quickly.
In a four-player game by the time of your next turn at least three of the tiles that were left at the end of your last turn have changed due to other players taking their turn. But in two-player, it’s only one tile, they just don’t refresh quickly enough.
A way we think this could be solved is by house ruling the market, in one of the two included solo mode rules called Dale the Bot you use more tiles in the stacks, fewer spaces on the market, and at the end of every round, the whole market gets cleared and reset. Maybe doing something similar but making sure to use both $0 slots could allow for the market to get less stale.
The other reason I prefer four-player is you get more uses of certain tiles and it’s more of a risk to take other tiles. The tiles that trigger based on all boroughs or other people’s boroughs activate more when there’s more tiles coming out. Getting a slaughterhouse early can net you big when people are constantly building restaurants.
But the same goes for any tile that gets a negative effect for each of a certain type of tile that’s built after that one, they usually have high immediate rewards but when there are so many people playing there is a risk at building them.
I will admit though these tiles that are affected or triggered by other boroughs can be a bit much in a four-player game if you aren’t focusing or remembering what tiles do what, checking each player’s turn to see what they are doing can be a bit much if you aren’t in the right mood. So I imagine a three-player game would be best for this.
Overall both player counts are good but the standard gameplay leans more to a three to four-player game than a two-player game.
Components
The copy of Suburbia I owe and the current retail version is the 2nd edition of the game. From what I have seen of the original copy they have taken on board a lot of improvements to make the second edition a level up from the first.
Most notable is the game improved all the artwork to bring more life into the tiles, the old artwork kinda looked like an architectural model with white and grey buildings whereas the new tile’s art is more detailed and better shows visually what each tile is, bringing more life into the game and usually quicker tile recognition.
The box inserts included with Suburbia are two custom trays with lids which neatly store all pieces in the game making it fairly easy to transport without worry of the pieces going everywhere, it also has the capacity to hold the expansion pieces if you want it.
The tiles, goals, player boards, player reference aids, market board, and population tracker are all sturdy card and designed in a way that all information is fairly clear to read and understand.
Speaking of player aids, this game is sensible and gives each player their own aid rather than making people share or even including far too few to really be of any use.
Overall component quality is good and the art is clear and compliments the iconography in the game to make for a game that is pleasant to look at while also being semi-easy to identify everything quickly.
Final Thoughts
As someone who is a fan of city-building games in both board games and video games, this was right up my alley. It is a game where you need to be into the theme to a point to enjoy it and it can be annoying when nothing is working in your favour for tiles but your borough will always grow and no one I’ve played with has come out of the game unhappy with how their borough turned out.
If you are looking for a city-building game to player with three or four players this is the game you are looking for. If you want something for two-player maybe look elsewhere for something cheaper but it is playable with two people it just needs tweaking to make it as fun as four-player.
Overall a satisfying city-building game.
Zatu Score
You might like
- Almost perfect marriage of theme and mechanisms, achieved with simplicity and elegance.
- Challenging and enjoyable combination of economic engine-building with spatial tile-laying aspects.
Might not like
- Pointy corners of triangular boards seem prone to splitting.
- The Goal tiles are the one aspect of the game where theme and mechanisms come apart.