Suburbia Digital Board Game

[Smakx]

The Suburbia digital app is a conversion of Ted Alspach's Suburbia board game by Bezier Games that is available for iOS ($2.99), Android via GooglePlay ($3.99) and Kindle/Android through the Amazon App Store ($3.99). The game supports 2-4 players in local pass and play or online turn-based asynchronous multiplayer. There is an interactive tutorial and an extensive single player campaign that challenges players to complete an objective while teaching some basic mechanics and game play strategies.

Suburbia is a hexagonal tile placing game with a city building theme, and is often compared to the SimCity series of video games. Each turn players will purchase a tile representing a building or location and add it to their part of the city. The buildings are purchased from shared market of 7 tiles, each time a player buys one a new one is randomly drawn from the stack. There are more tiles than can be used in a single game, so each game the available selection will vary. The tiles themselves list different interactions they cause or receive when placed next to other tiles. Each player is building a section of the same city, so some tiles will trigger effects from what other players build. The deck builder-like shared market of tiles also leads to strategies of buying tiles according to what opponents are playing, to block or get bonuses from their plays. The goal is to optimize tile placement to gather the resources in the game; money, income, population and reputation. At the beginning of the game each player has two random secret goals and one shared goal to score bonus points at the end of the game on top of other scoring criteria (primarily population) to determine who wins the game. The game ends after a "one more turn" tile comes into play from the third stack of building tiles.

The digital version of the game is a model of what makes digital board game conversions great. All of the mechanics and play elements that make it an excellent board game are translated perfectly to the digital domain minus the setup/tear-down hassles and book keeping chores, leaving the players free to concentrate on strategy. The presentation is well produced and elegantly executed. The interactive tutorial is helpful and the aforementioned single player campaign does good job of introducing players players to the game through gradual challenges designed to teach basic tactics.

Webpage: http://www.suburbiagame.com/
iOS Appstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/suburbia/id681966300?mt=8
GooglePlay: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.suburbiagame.suburbia
Amazon App Store: http://www.amazon.com/Jeremiah-Maher-Suburbia-Kindle-Fire/dp/B00LBFYGI0

Tom Vasel of The Dice Tower reviewing the original board game:



YouTube user rahdo posted a video demonstrating game play using the board game:



TheForbiddenLimb (Brian Henk) posted a strategy primer for the game:



Drive Thru Review posted a play through video using the iOS version: