Tabletop Tales: ‘SimCity: The Card Game’
As a child of 1990, I had a front row seat for the crazy 90’s gaming scene. I was exposed to the convention scene quite early, and to this day my drawers are filled with old failed card games of widely varied quality thanks to it. Some, like Pokèmon and to a lesser extent Legend of the Five Rings are still somewhat popular, while others, like Hecatomb, The Crow, Animayhem, and my two big boxes of Sim City: The CCG stand as a grim reminder that not all games achieve fame.
For those unlucky enough to be born when music was on MTV and Cartoons were made to entertain rather than desensitise, the original SimCity (1989) was created by the legendary titan Will Wright, forged on Mount Brokosh from the shards of creation and the ether itself forever defined the genre concept of enjoying simply building a map with little in the way of actual goals and spawned many sequels, tributes, and stands besides Alpha Centauri in the Hall of Legendary Games. Fast forward to 1995 when Mayfair Games tried to get their hands on every Intellectual Property they could get their hands on. This resulted in the Mortal Kombat Kard Game (Which I seriously want to find and review now…) and of course: SimCity. 1995 is also when Mayfair’s most popular game, Settlers of Catan was released.
It’s pretty hard to mess up a card game based on a City Builder, and SimCity: CCG provide exactly what it needs to. Every card represents the space of a city block and is a building or terrain feature that composes the city. However, every pack of 14 cards also comes with special long card that takes up two blocks of play but can only be placed with rezoning (a rule to be explained later) In addition to the regular cards are event cards that represent either fortune… or a disaster that will cause damage to the city and force the mayor to pay for it. Obtainable by buying enough boosters or getting a Starter Deck, one player holds the Mayor card that grants him extra vote strength which gives him a slight advantage if the deck does not have the correct cards to offset it. Since many of these powerful cards are fairly rare among a very large list, it can be maddening to put together a proper deck that accurately keeps the mayor in check.
There are around 1100 cards for the game, with a good 150+ of them being extremely rare Promo cards for conventions and gaming stores. There is a ton of variety, even with the long cards that serve as famous landmarks in your city late in the game. Instead of artwork every card has a picture, usually of an existing structure, which is interesting considering the Great Wall of China, Forbidden City, and other wonders are around. Since the game suggests a deck of 50 cards that everybody draws from, and the sheer variety of cards available can make the game hard to accurately form an opinion on since like any other collectible game from the 90’s there are direct counters to strategies many other reviewers have whined about. SimCity expected you to buy a lot of cards and create a versatile deck with a particular strategy assigned to it. This is one of those games that predates DLC yet makes it even funnier by not telling you what you get until after you pay.
The game suggests using a very small deck (less than 60) and back in the day if you loved a game you bought about the equivalent of a booster box if you wanted to be competitive (like I am.) I opened an two entire boxes to see just how many rares I could pull. Like the box, the boosters have 90’s style clouds and a yellow box that immediately brings your attention to the game; the added nerd factor of muttering “is that a SimCity Card Game?” upon recognizing it makes the packaging absolutely genius. The long cards are the funniest of the bunch, with such famous places as Alcatraz Island, The Taj Majal, and more among Oil Platforms, Surf and Beach Resorts, Golf Courses, A Federal Express, as well as very tactical cards like a State Police Headquarters, Major Fire Station, or Ghost Removal Specialist’s building. Anybody who talks trash about this game, when you can build a Ghostbusters franchise in your city, I say your arguement is invalid.
The rules are amazingly simple, every player can play a card on vacant tablespace, upgrade a card without a needed vote, or rezone a card from their hand which requires a vote by all players. Later in the game as the table begins to fill up and more cards begin requiring rezoning to play, a larger game of SimCity suddenly becomes very diplomatic as the game simply expects the players to lie, deal, and blackmail each other for superiority. You see, players have vote strength according to the politicians they control (Or represent) that are accumulated during play. The most common of these politicians are council members, there are rarer corrupt and specialist council members as well as two more special seats. The election card allows players to become governor or the council chairman, The amazingly creepy chairman nullifies the mayor’s tiebreak ability if they oppose on issues. The mayor and governor have to pay damages caused by disasters, but otherwise have voting power.
Being the mayor is both a blessing and a curse. In return for being jacked out of their money by disaster cards, the mayor is the very first player to get the ability to vote and unless the other players are lucky enough to find a few council members they can’t stop the mayor from doing some renovations to damage the holdings of their fellow players. If the mayor is good at securing an ally or two they can prove very difficult to beat. To offset this powerful ability, one can put in a variety of disasters, include the election card, and use a wonderful card that immediately recalls the mayor to put him in his place. All of this implies you have collected several boosters and rares to have such useful mechanics in your game. This is one of those games that is exactly what you put into it, since the game uses only one deck it would be embarrassing to invite your friends to play SimCity and be ridiculed for not having the cool cards that make your deck bearable in multiplayer.
Play starts in the first of four stages, the Settlement Phase where only cards with white stat boxes can be played. This consists of undeveloped land such as mountain and plains, ye olde shoppes, small farms, and victorian houses. Phase 1 shouldn’t last too long as once four sims live in your Settlement it becomes a Village unlocking green cards for use. The next two stages are slightly trickier, as out of the near thousand cards I opened up I primarily received Phase 3 cards. I say tricky because to enter the third stage you need eight available job slots for sims in addition to one of the players having a power plant to officially begin the phase and take mayordom. The game suggests that players only can have one card and pass if they can’t make a play. An incorrectly proportioned or shuffled deck can lead to an annoying problem of simply being unable to find the cards needed to actually continue the game. Though this can be rectified by granting three cards to players instead; I dislike this aspect of design making it way too easy to be unable to actually play the game. While methods can be devised to thwart this bad design feature I don’t feel right having to fix a published game before I can enjoy it.
A card is scored after being placed, and the player gets points for the placed block’s value, any zoning or complex bonuses, and any special bonuses the block may get such as being connected to a power station or covered by a police department. Later in the game, a strategically placed card can be worth a large amount of points, especially if placed as a upgrade of somebody else’s building. You don’t lose points for replacing or losing structures, which goes against our urge to protect them. The game also makes no claim that you should remember who placed what card, except for special cards where this is a factor.
In addition to the zone bonus granted by placing four or more cards of the same zone together, there is also the complex bonus. Many rarer cards are denoted as being part of the University, Medical, Airport, or even Farm Complexes. If these cards are placed together the values listed by their complex identifier (Farm 4, Airport 2, etc) are added together for a large sum when a new part of the complex is built. The absolute most common are the Oil Refinery and Farm, but rarer complexes like some stated above exist as well. I heard the argument that the Zone Bonus can get out of hand when in reality it can get nowhere near as bad as the Complex bonuses, which can be used tactically to steal the lead or catch up in points.
Since the booster packs primarily give cards that are for the last portion of the game you end up with a lot of cards you simply cannot put into your deck as doing so would make getting to the second and third stages amazingly hard, especially if you try to pull a Munchkin; shuffle your massive deck and try to play it that way then you will have a rough time due to the mix of cards offered. You will end up with way too many cards that you have to hold for a prolonged period of time, even more so if you keep the proportions of cards that are given by boosters (predominantly late game cards) SimCity is a hard game to tolerate at times for all of its customizability, and it’s a game you need to specialize in to really enjoy.
To properly enjoy SimCity: CCG you need to heavily augment the given rules, and make up your own. A good multiplayer deck needs a lot of news cards, and plenty of the cards that promote backstabbing. Some buildings detract from the value of the neighborhood, making it good for damaging the scoring of other players. Some cards even exist specifically for use in the “Duelling Cities” ruleset provided in the manual, that let you directly build in your enemies town. This leads me to the impression that while people can review and look over this game until the end of time but not really able to find anything you can accuse the game of not doing well that can’t be fixed by arranging the cards a certain way. It’s based on a city builder and was designed to be very political in a large group, which it does exactly what it needs to in that regard. Any other problems relay directly to what cards you have and what cards you use in your deck.
For instance, the argument of the mayor being unbeatable can easily be curtailed by providing a variety of cards that both damage and replace the mayor. The problem with cards being increasingly harder to count can be prevented by simply limiting the amount of cards with strange point gains. Those that hate having to figure crime or fire coverage can just use the long cards that affect the entire city. With over a thousand cards available it’s not exactly hard to build a varied deck or way of playing that handles whatever arguments you may have against the game. SimCity is rather easy to play and has a gentle learning curve, or alternatively you can throw in the confusing cards; its up to you. If the way cards are limited by what phase you can start playing them bother you, just don’t use that rule. The game can’t decide what the “right” way to play is, so why should you?
I love this game. The rarer cards give you the satisfaction of being funny, the city built by the cards is varied and while some cards are meant to specifically exist in the same deck, these cards tend to be rare as well. What you’re left with is a city that’s as unique or bland as you want it to be, and a game just as fun as you want it to be (and make it).
-Necroscourge 2/21/13
