Five good games to teach about modern urban development

More and more often, board games are used in learning processes, and almost always the result is very detailed, rich and practically teachable knowledge. In this article, we highlight 5 board games about city planning, construction and management in the last 100 years, which can be used to teach urban development and motivate the creation of an urban space in which a sustainable, smart, legal and responsible city can also win.

Board games - an alternative form of education

Currently, board games have become so detailed, informative and accurate, their mechanisms are so diverse and their visual options are so wide that many of them can be perfectly used in the teaching work of primary and secondary schools, interactively teaching history, biology, politics, literature, exact sciences, etc. . Similarly, many games, even if not related to any imaginative science, today consist of various innovative mechanisms that teach us both logic, mathematics and programming.

For example, history is one of the most widely used subjects (especially wars and ancient cultures). Topics range from scrupulous, information-rich approaches to the Cold War ( Twilight Struggle ) and action scenarios about WWII conspirators in Nazi Germany ( Black Orchestra ) to complex civilization-building ( Through the Ages ), excellent political/diplomatic simulations in the Middle East in the middle of the 19th century ( "Pax Pamir" ) or in the German Bundestag ( "Die Macher" ).

Natural sciences are equally successfully represented in the games - both young and old can learn how plant selection takes place ( "Genotype" ) or how plant cells ( "Cytosis" ) work through attractive visualizations . One of the most popular and beautiful games in the world at the moment, "Wingspan" (published in Latvian as "Sparnotie") provides a wide and heavenly view of the world of birds, while others teach scrupulous exact sciences in the field of space exploration development (" Leaving Earth" ) or simulate carbon emissions in detail consequences ( “CO2: Second Chance” ). It can continue almost indefinitely, and one can only guess how much the importance of board games in future education will only increase.

Wingspan game. Source: Brain Games publicity photo.

If we talk about the topic of urban development, it has also reached a wide audience and almost 2000 freely available games have been reviewed ^[1] . This means that they are enjoyed by various users of the city, including developers, managers in their own home conditions, although for most the "city" is just an excuse to talk about a completely different topic in the game.

However, in order to assess whether the games teach critically about the development of the urban environment and motivate to create an urban space where it is also possible for a sustainable, smart, legal and responsible city to win, or whether the victory comes with heavy industrialization, gentrification, corruption and autocentrism, one must start with the GAME SELECTION criteria. There are at least five of them:

• games have been released in the last 30 years (during this time, the hobby of board games has turned from a niche into a hobby of mass consumption, countless mechanisms were born during this time, and the number of players grew from tens of thousands to tens of millions),
• the events of the game take place during the last 100 years (the last century is associated with the biggest changes in the development of cities - the rapidly growing population and the size of cities, while they can be said to be defined by automobiles, high population density, huge micro-districts and high-rise buildings, the rapid development and consolidation of electricity, infrastructures of gas, heating, telecommunications, sewerage, etc. It would only be logical to look at the games about the city we live in and its processes, how we use them or register in them today).
• the organization of the game takes place from the perspective of comprehensive city building, not only from the perspective of its elements (for example, games about planning and management of private attractions or theme parks, cultivating the most beautiful garden, zoos, real estate auctions, decorating facades, etc. are not considered),
• the game is based on more than logistics (public, delivery transport or intercity, ship or aircraft traffic) or energy systems,
• the game has an average score of at least 6 on boardgamegeek.com (for general quality control),
• the game mechanics are based on real examples of urban development, good or bad, and do not use the urban environment as mere stylization.

In this way, more than 30 games were selected, and valuable insights were observed in five , sorted by the year of publication (read LSM.lv for a more extensive article on the use of board games in urban learning).

Big City (1999) - The godfather of modern urban planning board games

Perhaps the first city development game of our time, and also one of the first with notable 3D miniatures, was the game“Big City” . In the Twentieth Anniversary Edition, these miniatures of mid-20th century modernist urban elements (residential, commercial, public, industrial, streetcar and greenspace) are further enhanced, but the gameplay remains unchanged, where players must build a single city, adding new neighborhoods to it all buildings finished or built. The mechanics of the game already more than 20 years ago used several elements of urban development that refer to both strong and weak urban planning:

• if the miniatures of the first "Big City" edition reflected the famous "City Beautiful" or expressive historicist architecture movement in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century, then the ensemble of miniatures of the anniversary batch mostly copies the modernist architecture created during the fifties and sixties (the Tapiola neighborhood in Espoo, Finland comes to mind first) . Several buildings also cite the traditions of original brutalism (one office building miniature looks like the Latvian Occupation Museum, and the city council miniature is a copy of the administrative building built in 1961 in Toronto). Each miniature can be found with a real counterpart in the architectural past, which makes them not only beautiful, but also functional in learning the history of modernist cities;
• Big City is one of the few urban development games that uses the public transport system as an important element. It is possible to build a tram line on the streets, which is advantageous because it provides double points for all buildings. Unfortunately, in the new edition it is no longer possible to branch the tram lines as it was in the first shot; it is a loss, learning the importance of a connected city and a flexible public transport system;
• on the other hand, the 1999 version did not have a card distribution mechanism between players, introduced with the aim of bringing equality closer (cards give the opportunity to buy plots of land on which buildings are built). In the new edition, the mechanism addresses the problem of disproportionately cheap and convenient acquisition of opportunities, which in reality, as we know, results in uneven investment and how monopoly degrades the real estate market along with the city, for example, in London, Berlin, or New York (billionaire, ex-U.S. President Donald Trump's developer mega-projects in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s did not take into account the population or the existing living space and construction);
• A valuable mechanism seems to be the addition of new neighborhoods - they must be located next to at least two previous ones. Thus, the city has the potential to expand homogeneously, connected, and there are no unnecessary problems with not identifying with the core of the city (in Riga, for example, residents of Dārziņi tend not to consider themselves part of the capital for this distant reason; also residents in Vecākis still say that they "go to Riga" in spite of that already lives in it);
• one of the debatable elements is residential buildings, which give an extra point if built next to a park or water bodies (good), but it seems wrong that an extra point is also due if residential areas are built on the periphery, leaving the center not for mixed development, but only for public and commercial buildings. Therefore, it follows that a successful city in the game consists of zones set in stone - 1) business and administrative center, 2) green belt and 3) residential area. Such a city repeats the failed post-war strategy of creating a suburb alienated from reality, which cannot sustain itself , and also contributes to negative congestion of traffic, services and investments in the city center, which dies after the end of working hours. New York experienced the consequences of this mistake since the 1980s, when the office capital of Lower Manhattan in the center was obsolete, more than 20% of the premises were empty, but almost none of it was suitable for living (therefore, not only the real estate, but also the streets and public institutions). In 1995, a tax rebate program encouraged the neighborhood to regain mixed use, as a result, within 10 years, the population nearly tripled, the amount of public space increased by 78%, and life continues 24/7. ^[2] In short - the city in the game without such a suburban bonus would only gain;
• it's a little confusing that the residential and commercial zone gets extra points from the green zone, but it can only be built after time, not at the beginning (also it's not good for the players, because the park doesn't give points for setting up). If we consider "Big City" as a city that grows from scratch, then it would be healthy if it started together with a green area (in the game it is parks, but in reality it could just as well be any natural areas that are already located in places where historically cities). Such a rule of the game degrades the importance of the green zone in terms of the emergence of cities and again intuitively forces to plan parks only between the periphery (residential) and the commercial zone (center), excluding the green zone from the center, because it is a redundant move that does not add anything to it;
• one technical downside - "Big City" is prohibitively expensive. The 2019 edition costs just over 100 EUR even in the cheapest case. If the absolutely excellent PVC miniatures were even half as thin, the game would be much more accessible to hobbyists without losing anything.

"Suburbia" (2012) - a complex and good-looking simulator of urban processes

Perhaps one of the first popular complex secular urban planning, building and management games is Suburbia . Its main task is to buy and arrange hexagonal squares (residential, public, commercial, industrial zones and waterfront) to ensure that the city functions as a single organism, since most of the urban elements depicted on the squares interact with each other. The Value/Challenges of a Directly Connected City trumps “Suburbia” in simulating urban development:

• you can immediately start with the fact that the synergy is between all the players built, not only within each city. This well illustrates the fact that each urbanist can dream up his urban environment according to his possibilities and liking, but each of them, as in reality, his "Suburbia" is in a single agglomeration - it is only logical if social or economic growth in Mārupe changes the processes in Riga as well or vice versa ;
• interestingly, everyone can use the investment activity a couple of times in the game, investing double funds in already built elements and thus doubling their effect as well. A good real-life example of this is the National Art Museum of Latvia, which before the renovation had less than 100,000 visitors, but a year after the investment and reopening, the number of visitors had increased by at least 330%. ^[3] Such investment also provides more income which encourages more activities followed by educational program etc.;
• almost all of the elements' blanks are properly prepared to indicate their true nature in reality - for example, an airport or an industrial zone provides economic benefits, but they carry reputational disadvantages, which again affect population growth. Or the waterfront, which, like in reality, costs nothing globally, but provides additional income from each adjacent urban element, similar to how the presence of water has ensured a successful interest in settling, working, investing, planning or relaxing in an urban environment since Mesopotamia;
• parks should be singled out, because in "Suburbia" they increase the number of people for all adjacent sectors (except for manufacturing and, unfortunately, also for other public buildings). Such a function is most appropriate for good urban planning. Already 60 years ago, urban critic Jane Jacobs (Jane Jacobs) ^[4] observed that parks become more populated and also safer if they are surrounded by mixed-type buildings - this ensures their use not only in the mornings or evenings, but also during the days when the green employees of commercial premises or offices rest in the zone, not only parents with children pass through them, but also customers, buyers, various types of audience events take place in them, etc. etc. Unfortunately, "Suburbia" cities are almost always completed with only one park of this type for about 20 other urban elements, which is unacceptable in good modern practice (the game also clearly lacks other independent natural elements - everything stops at a rare park or lake ) ;
• Suburbia's biggest downside in the context of this article might be that it's a decidedly "Eurogame". This means that the mechanics of the game are very dry, the theme is not important in it, the game is basically not about the city, but about the economic processes that happen to be in the city - synergies and anti-synergies are only pluses and minuses in budget, reputation and number of people, not the best, in a more sustainable, greener urban space. In that sense, Suburbia doesn't teach the player much about the urban planning industry;
• another weak side of the game, precisely in terms of mechanics, is that the synchronization of different structures with others tends to be too complex, that sometimes you almost have to look for an accountant. It is often forgotten that there are squares that react with others not only in their own, but also in other cities, or their learning is done incompletely. At least when playing Suburbia in the mobile application, everything is calculated for us, which makes the process easier;
• in the final, unfortunately, it is not clear whether in "Suburbia" each player can build the best city and be more sensitive to urban processes from it. What is clear is that the game is probably the best for trying out the most varied and most suitable city-building formulas for everyone's desire and occasion, and could be the most engaging for advanced gamers. Unfortunately, it does not consider advanced urban development.

"Quadropolis" (2016) - Principles of a good city for adventurous families

"Quadropolis" is a nice city-building game, the mechanism of which involves placing six different building blocks in your 4x4 square, obtaining them from common reserves in the center of the table (port, industry, commercial premises, parks, residential area, public services; in expansions also business centers and art objects ). At the end of each round, this process becomes more and more limited, which is reinforced by the movement of the "urbanist" through the empty reserves. Although the game is quite mechanical and may not seem very exciting to many, "Quadropolis" is a good family game format, which is able to reveal many interesting and mostly positive regularities about city life in detail and even surprisingly well:

• although significantly more points can be obtained with multi-storey buildings, it is also possible to leave single-storey buildings in the city, which do not interfere. The most positive aspect - "Quadropolis" does not have skyscrapers or high-rises like modern housing estates, here the maximum number of floors is five (mostly four, and increasing the floors becomes more and more difficult with time). Referring to the observations of the famous urbanist Jan Geel in the book "A City for People", this is the maximum to maintain a human-scaled and pleasant city;
• one notable way to earn points is to build at least one public building in each of the four city districts. This fits well with two important components of the city: 1) today's growing interest in the "15-Minute city" concept in urban planning - when every resident is equally able to reach the functions they need from any place without having to go to the other end of the city, and 2) in each district has its own management center, which is able to respond to what is happening in them much more promptly and efficiently. Several neighborhood information centers have existed in Riga for almost a year, which work more focused with the community, help to cooperate, lead projects in their districts;
• parks (the expansion allows to change some of them to playgrounds) give more points if there are more residential buildings next to them. It seems to sound good, but it should be remembered that this is a rather erroneous opinion that has survived in urban planning to this day (it was discussed during the game "Suburbia"). Therefore, from the perspective of balanced planning, "Quadropolis" is very lacking in any setting that provides additional points for the presence of at least one commercial building or business center (in extension);
• the "urbanist" function can also be positively mentioned, which prevents players from taking any space from the reserves. Its analogue in the real world would be the city architect's office with real power to influence the course of urban development, as it had before the collapse of the USSR, and this function tries to regulate all available building plots to be of similar value. As a result, a more homogeneous city is formed for each player;
• however, one of the most excellent indicators of urban processes is resource management. First, each building gives one of two resources (residents or units produced, say electricity, goods or services), but each building must be activated with them in order to give points at the end of the game. Consequently, empty buildings or buildings not equipped with communications are essentially slums, which do not contribute anything to the city either in "Quadropolis" or in reality. Second, human resources are not "tied" to buildings, they can change jobs or shop elsewhere. Thirdly, leftover resources give minus points - so the game punishes the player for being unemployed/homeless or having excess production that would likely turn into either environmental or air pollution in real life. One controversial point of criticism is that each park can absorb one unit of production, which is good but also bad. Good because it shows how much green space is necessary for a cleaner city, but bad because it indirectly illustrates what often happens in the more remote green areas in cities - they really become places where the excess is already thrown away as garbage;
• the only thing missing in the game is the interactivity between cities - either your opponent can build a hotel and get extra points from the surrounding buildings, or if you lose points, your opponent can leave a construction site in your city that takes up unnecessary space and needs to be dealt with. Although not positive, this is unfortunately a very common process in all modern urban centers - many, either visitors or residents, consume the city's resources by paying taxes elsewhere, or foreign investors or developers wander into cities, often able to freeze several neighborhoods, not to mention strategically important construction sites. Finally, no city is ever ready, and construction sites or expropriated, dilapidated buildings are a reality that everyone has to deal with. Here is a rhetorical question - would "Quadropolis" lose its family nature from the mentioned mechanism?

Sprawlopolis (2018) - A small game about big themes.

Despite its microgame (pocket-sized) format, Sprawlopolis provides surprisingly good insight into key urban planning processes. Along with the arrangement mechanism of four simple basic blocks in one urban fabric (residential, natural, commercial, industrial; watersides are also available in the expansion), the elegant design of the solo game mechanism balances out which actions would pay off in real life and which would not:

• although a lot of points can be accumulated by building roads in the special objectives, in the basic rules of the game for them, on the contrary, points are deducted at the end. Also, the construction of highways in the city is not promoted in the special goals, more points can be obtained if the streets pass through different blocks, and in some goals, points are also deducted for roads that lead out of the city and do not remain for "internal use", because "all roads do not lead to Mārupi ";
• for several special purposes, points accumulate better if the spread or size of industrial zones is limited, especially adjacent to residential zones;
• it seems interesting that the city can take the most diverse form, it does not have square, round, radial, etc. defined in the rules/components. etc. matrices, thus more closely resembling how cities develop today - not according to a stencil. Also, the city blocks spread out in a healthy way during the game - the game mechanic even mostly does not allow you to plan huge areas of one use that overwhelm others. It's nice that mixed and balanced builds are often even encouraged in the game;
• nice to see that more points can be gained if residential blocks are built next to commercial ones. Looking back at the planning of Soviet micro-districts, it was one of the biggest mistakes - to build sleeping areas far or not connected to cultural, commercial, social, service centers. As a result, the neighborhoods were virtually devoid of street-level domesticity and places to stop and hang out. All roads led to the city core or old towns, congesting both these service centers and public transport. At the same time, the game also regulates the excessive concentration of commercial blocks in the city core, there are special objectives that give extra points for balancing them to the periphery;
• unfortunately, the game doesn't show residents and the community's influence on the city space (and vice versa), but in an 18-card microgame, that would be too much to ask, not even needed, and not in the way.

Carbon City Zero (2020) - An educational course on sustainable cities.

Although poorly promoted and mechanically unremarkable, Carbon City Zero is one of the few games where the drive towards a cleaner, more sustainable and greener urban environment is at the core of everything. The cities are "abstract", they are built in the format of a house of cards, and the main task of the game is to ensure that the amount of emissions decreases with the development and modernization of the city and reaches zero before the end of the round:

• although climate prosperity is achieved fairly and fraternally in the cooperative regime, it is slow and painful. The gameplay is much more enjoyable and exciting when Carbon City Zero plays like a race. Paradoxically , climate neutrality is thus achieved even faster (both individually and collectively)! Also in reality, despite lofty, common goals, it is often an even better method to arrive at the zero-emission destination more promptly and efficiently. For example, in 2013, when Copenhagen announced its goal to become the first city in the world to achieve climate neutrality by 2025, it was reported in almost every major media outlet in the world, and countless cities, at least in Europe, immediately started their journey to the green course to keep up. . As a result, I have no doubt that everyone has benefited and progress has been faster. Unfortunately, such rivalry (as in life, so in the game) means not only more targeted synergies and optimization, but also the selfishness of its parts;
• the game has quite a lot of "hangovers" or negative cards that each player rotates almost endlessly in a city or between cities. They perfectly depict both the most popular troubles facing the green course (local skepticism, the fossil resource lobby, "greenwashing" or "green deception" or budget cuts). Meanwhile, the corruption card is one of those that, until it appears in the game, it is impossible to get rid of it at all - just like in life;
• the game illustrates well that success, even with a lofty goal, can be in waves, but with optimization and focus, the fluctuations can be mitigated;
• factories produce a lot of resources needed at the beginning of the game, but you need to be able to regulate, streamline or even eliminate them at the right time, otherwise reducing carbon dioxide levels takes significantly more time to win. As early as 1988, the US Senate spoke for the first time on a global level about global warming at that time and that urban areas were to blame for it. Of course, today much of this has changed (more emissions are produced by both, for example, fishing and agriculture) and global warming has been replaced by climate change. But it took 25 years for the world, led by Copenhagen itself, to finally make the climate course a priority, and part of the blame must go to intensive manufacturing and its lobby, as well as those of us who have contributed to it with our purchases;
• In short , while there are more exciting and original deck building games out there, you shouldn't buy Carbon City Zero for the mechanics. The theme discussed in the game, the wide range of sustainable solutions depicted on the cards, as well as the range of various challenges perfectly reflect the path of all modern urban areas towards climate neutrality and greener cities. Although "Carbon City Zero" is unlikely to appeal to people with gaming experience, it is simply perfect for schools (the game is intended for ages eight and up) to teach about the positive/negative impact of cities on emissions and at the same time introduce the popular the game mechanics of the construction of piles.

The author would like to thank Andris Barduchi, Nikitas Cunskis, Emīls Endel, Mārtiņš Hirš, Kārlis Jēriņas, Reinis Pūpolas, Dace Rostock, Valters Rostock, Aneta Vabule, Amelia Trapencier, Uldi Trapencier and Aldi Upmal for providing and/or testing the games to be evaluated.

The author of the article is Mārtiņš Enľelis

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgamecategory/1029/city-building

[2] https://downtownny.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/annual-report_2015_final_web2.pdf

[3] http://lnmm.lv/lv/presei/jaunumi/1030-latvijas-nacionalais-makslas-muzejs-gadu-pec-atklasanas

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities