P3: War of Zones
Team members: Jessica Chen, Allison Huynh, Nathan Kong, Amy Nguyen, Alwyn Tan, Matthew Ventures
Artist’s statement
The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. –David Harvey “Social Justice and the City”
In War of Zones, players get a chance to develop properties and influence the growth and culture of the city from a private developer and public planner perspective. One of the most prolific urban developers is Robert Moses, who helped to grow New York City with the gentrification of NYC, Central Park and NYC boroughs. For example, he turned Central Park into the centerpiece of urban recreation that we know today, effectively re-zoning the adjacent areas into wealthy hotspots. He also pushed specifications to lower many highways around many of the burrough’s parks, thus not allowing public bus access and limiting racial minorities and low-income groups to certain zones of the city by using highways and byways as key demarcation lines (Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” 1996.)
You get to play the role of someone like Robert Moses, will you build properties and zone the city for the rich and privilege or will you help to build housing for the homeless and help your fellow citizens by supporting parks and cultural historical sites?
Ecosystem
The city is your canvas. Radically transform a plain vanilla city to a vibrant center for commerce, industry and the arts or “redline” the city landscape to a place of “haves” and “have nots.” There are other developers and bureaucrats, some with pure economic incentives and others with more civic minded duties. Like in any city, the government must balance the needs of all its citizens and make the city beautiful, prosperous, an attractive place for businesses and tourists yet make the housing affordable for the locals.
Tangibly, we model the economics of the city with formulas for rent and cost for different properties. We also added event cards that were either random natural disasters or pivotal socioeconomic/cultural issues a major urban areas that would face. The learning outcome is to model the complexity of the different factors in creating a healthy and vibrant community — balancing economic interests with that of community welfare.
Learning goals
City zoning, buildings, parks, highways and the artifacts of a city have politics. There are natural, cultural, economic, civic and sometimes racial motivations behind the growth, development and zoning of a city. The policies of the cities, socioeconomic of the key actors, as well as natural disasters help to co-produce the urban landscape of any city. The developers are individually looking to get rich and collect rent but must consider larger community related issues such as economic crisis, homelessness and natural disasters such as fire and water. When players work together to build and collaborate, they are rewarded. Likewise, they are rewarded when they help to address key issues in the community such as homelessness.
Implementation
War of Zones demonstrates some of the factors that influence the shape of any city with our gameplay. Our event cards either show the policies of the city and we draw real life inspiration from around the world. Our cards refer to policies or events in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Africa and other cities that have to deal and manage diverse constraints with different roles and personalities.
Concept map
Process
Initial decisions
The goal of the game was to identify strategies to maximize profit while learning civic values from an urban development simulator. From the start, we knew wanted to create a fast-paced, complicated game with mental math on a grid layout. Initially, we modeled a more complex system which took in 2–4 calculations with 8 adjacent squares, with various zone types assigned to each square (residential, industrial, commercial, water).
Each player would start off with $10M, and try to be the first to reach $20M. To earn money, players must earn rent from properties, which can be purchased & placed on a zone. The cost & rent of a property all depend on the zone type & the adjacent zones. To keep the calculations quick, players place dice that indicate the current rent amount next to their properties.
Each player takes their turn building up to one building, then everyone collects rent after a round. To keep things interesting, an event card that can affect the board (modeled after housing events/issues in other cities) is drawn at the start of each round.
Iteration #1
To test our idea, we created a rough prototype based on our initial decisions to test with just ourselves in class. We used colored squares to indicate our zone tiles, and created a reference sheet of the rent/costs of each zone.
Notes
- ✅ Flooding event card was very fun and involved changing the board & engaged players on every turn vs the whole round ➡️ Add more cards that can modify the board or happen for every player
- 📝 Hard to go back and forth from reference sheet to tiles ➡️ Add rent/cost equations directly onto the tiles
- 📝 Rent & cost calculations didn’t feel balanced ➡️ Economic analysis
Iteration #2
To address the feedback that the rent/cost equations didn’t feel balanced, we conducted an economic analysis on the rent yields for each zone.
In addition, we fleshed out the design of the zone tiles, considering contrast & readability. We also introduced a new tile, the municipal zone, to better reflect the role governments can often play when building a city. Players aren’t allowed to build on it, but can benefit from it through industrial zones or various event cards.
For the event cards, we also wanted to test how players received different alignments & colors, so we made variations on the card layout & style to use for the playtest.
Then with these changes in place, we playtested in class, using colored slips of paper as player tokens.
Notes
- ✅ Players liked the core loop/arc structure
- 📝 Grid made it overwhelming to count the rent/cost ➡️ Try hex tiles
- 📝 Water tile was too complicated to understand ➡️ Just keep municipal zones as the only non-building zones
- 📝 Tiles are too small & colorful, and people tried to tie the colors on the events to the colors on the tiles ➡️ Make larger tiles & turn the event cards monochrome to keep it simple & understandable. Also, make color usage more sparse/meaningful.
Iteration #3
This time, our biggest change was redesigning our game board to reduce complexity. We changed the tiles to hexes to reduce the number of adjacent tiles to count, and added a white background for better readability.
In order to avoid overloading the players with colors, we also experimented with using coins as player tokens instead of colored totems or paper.
Notes
- ✅ Fun sounds!
- 📝 Event cards sometimes felt useless if they happened only at the start of the round ➡️ Explore drawing event cards every time a player goes
- 📝 Race condition on event cards that require each player to flip a coin — no player wants to go first ➡️ Remove coin flip mechanic
- 📝 Pacing felt off — board was pretty stagnant, and event cards sometimes didn’t last the whole round ➡️ Introduce more exciting board & event mechanics
Iteration #4
There were 2 main issues with event cards from the previous playtest — they sometimes felt useless if their effect was done in an instant, and players didn't enjoy the feeling of not being able to do an event just because they didn’t flip a heads. To increase player agency and improve the pacing, we decided to add drawing an event card to start of every player’s turn in the building phase. In addition, we removed the random elements from most event cards so that actions just happen and player who draws gets to choose what tile or player to apply it to.
In addition to allowing for a dynamic board & giving players the option to develop interesting strategies, we decided to allow players to add a new zone to the board for $3M during their turn. Now on a player’s turn, they can:
- Draw an event card
- Buy up to 1 property
- Buy up to 1 new zone
We also added to the event cards to introduce a new special token type that could be added to the board to affect rent/cost calculations or where players could build.
Some players also provided feedback that having public scores could make a player feel discouraged to play as they observe their opponents become more powerful. We experimented by leading one playtest where the players’ funds are calculated secretly, and one where there was a public scoreboard. In addition, we experimented with game rounds of 3 vs 5 instead of ending the game when a player reached a certain amount.
In class, we were able to do 2 quick playtests, which lead to useful feedback:
Notes
- ✅ Players enjoyed drawing events more often since it gives more action. Removing some of the randomness of event cards made players feel like they had more control & agency, and less like it was all chance
- ✅ Adding zones made the board more dynamic & interesting
- ✅ Players enjoyed the city notes &liked learning about challenges going on with different countries/cities
- ✅/📝 Players wanted to play longer than 3 rounds ➡️ Set default as 5
- 📝 Adding a new zone was too expensive ➡️ Decrease to $2M
- 📝 Players secretly calculated other players’ funds by observing their costs and incomes ➡️ Stick with the public scoreboard since this extra work is too burdensome. Additionally, it promotes competitive play that’s more meaningful than the surprise of learning everyone’s funds at the end.
Final iteration
For our final game board, we created a grid for the tiles so players had something to follow, but include room to grow to accommodate new tiles. In addition, we added a score track so players could track funds clearly.
To simplify the board, we also decided to remove the use of player tokens, instead relying on the colored dice to indicate rent in addition to the player affiliation.
On top of everything, we put the final touches on the event cards, and finalized the physical elements used in our game, including changing the starting numbers of tiles to be more balanced.
We also created a quick start card that players can easily reference throughout the game.
