Small City Deluxe Edition – Kickstarter (Preorder)

After the success of Clinic Deluxe Edition, I am happy to announce the ultimate edition of a game which I consider my magnum opus: Small City.

First released in 2015 in a small print run, Small City is the result of my efforts in designing the ultimate SimCity-like city building game. Build Residences, Commercial properties, Factories and Cultural buildings, and surround them with marvelous parks to help them evolve!

You can also visit your opponents’ cities and gain the advantages of their buildings.

And, with the Winter Expansion, you can handle Pollution and power your buildings!

Small City Deluxe is definitive edition of the popular board game inspired by SimCity!

• Completely re-envisioned and re-created art and graphic design by Kwanchai Moriya including the box, the player boards, the main board, all tiles, and the overall visual identity.
• Rewritten and edited game rules, revised for 1-4 players.
• An expansion box that contains 8 new Modules! (see below)
• 250+ Building tiles & many more deluxe features!
• 100+ wooden bits, including custom-shaped special tokens!
• a big City Council Board (A3 size – 297 x 420 mm / 11.7 x 16.5 in)

To be elected Mayor you have to attract citizens, encourage growth of residential areas in which they can live, and stimulate the expansion of both the commercial and industrial sectors. But be careful, industry causes pollution, which will also have to be dealt with! If you build suitable infrastructure, the citizens will undoubtedly vote for you, but beware of making false promises!

 

With the pandemic, it is very dangerous to add additional contents to the game without a good development plan in place. Promising too much would change the production estimates, as well the shipping cost increases due to more components. For example the costs of paper have doubled during the last year.

Launching a KS campaign is also a way to meet my audience, and thank the backers for their support over the last 10 years! I won’t add any Stretch Goals to the Base Game. It is complex enough, with more than 250 tiles and a 24 page rules book.

But I am willing to add more components and game content to the Winter Expansion.

 

Small City Deluxe introduces a set of very unique concepts:

• Build the most effective city on your player board! There are the green Residence tiles, the blue Commerce tiles and the yellow Industry tiles. All of them interact with each other and this allows them to evolve depending on their neighbors!
• Attract more citizens in your city by building suitable cultural buildings and create more jobs by building Industrial Zones.
• Send Citizens to your opponent cities to gain the advantages of their buildings (player interaction).
• Keep on eye on your pollution and control it by building more parks!
• Hire the best people to help you with the unique Circle of Actions mechanism!
• Host your citizens in the most updated Residential buildings, but also balance your monetary reserves to gain the most Vote points, the final goal of the game!

Build a Residence and make its neighborhood desirable for living with a Cultural building: That Residence will automatically evolve to a bigger one!

The gifs show how the city is evolving!

AND SO ON….

You are a deputy mayor in charge of development of one borough of Small City.

To win the game you must have the most votes (victory points) after 8 turns. Votes can be earned over the course of the game by placing citizens in the Residential zones, by erecting Cultural buildings, by keeping Commercial properties in suitable areas, and also by making good on the promises that you made to the citizens at the beginning of the game. Players also have to keep an eye on pollution at all times, because high pollution levels will have a negative effect on your score at the end of the game.

In the advanced game, there are 3 alternate victory conditions from which the players can choose. (Economical Victory, Cultural Victory, Citizens Victory!)

Designing a building game is tough when you think about the player interaction. In this city building game simulation, the building phase has no player interaction because I was inspired by the first version of SimCity (pre-internet days).

But, during the moving phase (the worker placement aspect of the game), your citizens [These citizens are called Tourists (with their suitcases)] can take advantage of the buildings of your opponents. They can visit the Commercial properties of other players, their industries, etc…

That’s the second most important aspect of the game: trying to not utilize all your own buildings while trying to produce what do you really need in the cities of your opponents (to avoid your own pollution problems…).

 

I reimagined the expansions released during the last 7 years for this game, sorted them out into 8 Big Modules.

The Small City Winter Expansion introduces several new concepts and includes:

• More Wooden Meeples (Giant Godzilla meeples, Doctors inspired by Clinic Deluxe Edition…)
• More Real Cities boards: 8 Asian Cities with unique twists!

• More New Promises Cards.
• More Action Cards: 2 New Action cards: The Physician and the Artist with special abilities.

• More New Generic Buildings: Add more variety with new building tiles like a Bank, an Airport, a Recycling Center, a Tramways Station.

• An Additional Concept: Supply Power to your City! Build Power plants to supply power to your city and avoid breakdowns before the end of the game!

• New Real Building Tiles! Build 2 new Real buildings: Big Ben and the Sydney Opera House!

• New graphics and illustrations from Kwanchai Moriya!
• Upgraded 100% of the components like they should be for this classic SimCity-like game, long out of print.
• 250+ Building tiles!
• Rewritten rulebook, taking into account feedback collected over the last 7 years. Some aspects of the game have been rebalanced.
• Brand new game content and components, soon to be revealed in the expansion stretch goals!
• Updated expansion layout and graphic design, including several player references and rules reminder material.

The Small City Deluxe Edition has special rules for solo gaming. A game typically lasts 60 minutes and has several victory conditions, with different levels of difficulties, and with different promise cards to plan for. That means hours of fun!