Sim City: The Card Game
Published by Mayfair Games
Designed by Darwin Bromley, Louis Rexing and Tom Wham
Starter Set: $15.00; Booster Packs: $2.50
Sim City: The Card Game certainly took its sweet time coming out, but it turns out to have been worth the wait.
This is a "kinder, gentler" card game, in which the object is not to remove all the life
points from the other wizard, drain all the blood points from the other vampires or even
to conquer the world. No, all you do in Sim City is build a city.
Not just any old
haphazardly tossed together city (like the ones you and I live in), mind you, but an
economically efficient, perfectly-functioning city. A thing of beauty. And to further
highlight the non-cutthroat aspect of this game, everybody plays from the same deck and is
building the same city. Each card played is worth a payment, and the winner is the player
who gets to $250 first.
Open land and small improvements (like bridges) are usually just
worth $1 or so, and residences and small businesses are usually worth in the $3 to $5
range. Larger industries and institutions - hospitals, stadiums, concert halls - are worth
quite a bit more, up to around $15.
But there's a whole lot more to it than just slapping
down high-paying cards. Businesses require people ("sims") to make them work, and sims
come from those low-paying residential cards. And you can't just put stuff anywhere - all
cards must be played adjacent to existing cards, and you have to trace a route by road or
rail from where the sims live to the business, or you can't play the card. And there are
bonuses to be earned by careful orchestration of the cards. An Office Center might be
worth $6 normally, but it gets a bonus of $2 if it's placed within two blocks of a Post
Office. Some cards give bonuses to other cards - a Golf Course gives a $3 bonus to all
Residential cards played next to it. Cards can also be grouped into "complexes" for
additional bonuses, and it can really add up fast.
Just like in the computer game, you
start small. In Phase I - Settlement, only certain basic cards are played. Then comes
Phase II - Village, where the first residences and businesses come in. (The cards are
color-coded so you know which ones are legal to play during which phase.) In Phase III -
City, the big guns come into play. Power Plants (in addition to road and rail lines on the
cards, power lines also appear - and yes, they have to hook up once Phase III has begun)
and the rest of the really good cards come into play, as well as politics.
Yes, politics.
This is where the card game radically diverges from the computer game, and it's a very
nice addition. Once Phase III has begun, somebody (the player who placed the final card
during Phase II that kicked the game over into Phase III) becomes Mayor. There are also
City Councilman cards that can be played that are not part of the grid, but still earn you
money and count as votes in the City Council. What's there to vote on? Rezoning! There are
eight zoning categories (determined by the color behind the title of the card), from
Undeveloped through Residential, Commercial, Industrial, etc. Zoning is determined at
first by the initial layout of the cards, but later in the game, cards can be replaced.
This can be done automatically if the zoning is unchanged and the value of the block is
increased (and rail lines, roads, etc. aren't cut) - just lay the new card over the old
one. But if the zoning is different, or the value is going to go down (even temporarily),
you need a majority of the votes on the Council. You may have to wheel, deal, negotiate.
Bribe, even. Whatever works. It is this free-wheeling political aspect of Sim City that
may appeal most to die-hard gamers. and is the most traditionally competitive part of the
game.
In Phase IV - Metropolis, the really good stuff comes out. Each Booster Pack of Sim
City contains one "long card," a double-wide card which can only be played in Phase IV and
must be played over two existing cards (not in an empty space). The long cards are the
most exotic in the set, and not only include land-intensive items like a Golf Course or a
Large Hospital, but also famous landmarks. The half-dozen long cards I got included the
Suez Canal and Ayers Rock. The Suez Canal card was the single biggest-paying card in my
deck, at $16.
There are other things to keep track of. Each card also has a Crime rating
and an Environmental rating, which comes into play when Disasters hit. The Disaster cards
range from Employment Shortages to Droughts to Earthquakes. The Mayor must pay the cost of
any disaster out of his own money total (the downside to power), so Disasters are a good
way to slow down a player who's getting too far ahead.
The cards are fairly good-looking,
and the decision to use photographs throughout was a good one. There is a version of the
game where you use your own custom deck and duke it out with other decks, each trying to
build your own private little city faster than everybody else, and there's a solitaire
version that's interesting as an exercise in deck building and strategy. But is it a
collectible trading card game? Just barely. The Starter Sets will all have the same 120
cards (in two decks), so there's no need to ever buy more than one unless you like volume.
The Booster Packs have lots of neat cards (including the long cards), but unless you're a
completionist freak, you don't really need that many of them, either. And let's face it -
the best version of this game is decidedly non-collectible, since everybody plays off the
same large deck.
But that doesn't make it a bad game, not by a long shot. Perhaps
marketing it as a trading card game in the light of what I mentioned above isn't such a
good idea, but that's not my call. One thing that will keep collectors interested is the
huge number of special promo cards that are out there. Many game companies, distributors
and retailers arranged to have Mayfair print special cards to put their businesses in the
deck, and many of these cards are going to be of very limited availability. Some retailers
will only give out their cards at their single location; Mayfair is making other cards
available only to people who run Sim City demos (maybe there's a special card for writing
a review? Huh? Please?). I even heard that one of the Bromley brothers is sending out a
card as this year's Christmas card - but only to people who send him a Christmas card
first . . .
There will also be expansions, of course, as well as 120-card special sets
based on actual cities. Mayfair's home of Chicago is first, of course, and that set should
be out before the end of the year. But the list beyond that is nearly endless - New York,
Los Angeles, Miami, London, Tokyo, Paris . . . a potential gold-mine of specialty sets! If
they need help designing the Austin set, I'm available . . .
This is a very sweet game.
There are a lot of strategy considerations, but it's not dog-eat-dog competitive, either.
One quibble is that as a city grid gets larger, it gets a lot more difficult to keep track
of all the applicable bonuses and penalties to each card as it is played - plus
continually tracing rail, road and power line networks can get to be a pain. The original
Sim City gave you the luxury of letting the computer worry about all that dreck; in this
game, you have to do it yourself. And I wish there was a more elegant way of keeping track
of the money than by keeping a running total on a note pad - maybe some Monopoly money
would work . . .
But those are minor problems, greatly outweighed by the positives. The
game starts simply and gets more complex with time, making it perfect for people who don't
usually play trading card games, or even strategy games in general. If you don't have to
win at all costs and stab everyone in the back to have a good time, you and your friends
will enjoy Sim City: The Card Game.
- Scott Haring
