Unpub Preview: dCity

Let's look deeper at dCity, which is scheduled to appear at several upcoming events including the Collector's Con ProtoZone on Saturday May 11, 2013 from 10am to 7pm in Baltimore, MD.

dCity, by Nick Ferris,  uses dice as workers. You'll be playing as the mayor of a city and you'll use your dice to zone your land, construct buildings and transportation, fight disasters, and more. You goal? Become the best  city in the world.

Let's take a trip to dCity  with Nick and see what this game has to offer.

What was your inspiration for dCity?  Growing up, I was a huge fan of the Sim City series of PC games from MAXIS. The idea of designing your own city and struggling with things like budgets, complaining citizens, and random disasters was so awesomely exciting. As my interest in boardgaming continued to mature, I lamented the fact that there seemed to be few city-building board games available. And while a number of games advertised to have city-building “themes” have appeared in the past couple years, none of them has been able to capture the essence of what made designing your own city in Sim City so fun. Enter dCity, a game which seeks to emulate the feel of the classic PC game while combining innovative mechanics of modern boardgaming.

What is your favorite part of dCity? While designing and continuing to improve dCity, I have been quite pleased with how readily a number of themes and mechanics from Sim City have been translated into board game form. As the mayor of your own city in dCity, your city’s population will grow and start to strain your limited resources, and you must carefully monitor and control your city’s residential, commercial, and industrial development to ensure a proper balance across a number of metrics including population, revenue, pollution, technological development, and more. You can employ a number of experts to help make your job easier, and you can take measures to protect your city from earthquakes, fires, UFO abductions, and other disasters.

To your knowledge, what do other people find most interesting about dCity? Most players comment positively on the wide variety of strategic approaches that can be taken while playing dCity. For instance, some cities may prefer to focus on technological advances, while others cater their development to more affluent citizens. The game also supports more tactical play, allowing players to adjust their strategies frequently to the ever-changing conditions of the development environment as well as those of their neighboring cities.

What has been the most challenging part of designing dCity?  dCity continues to undergo rigorous balance analysis intended to ensure that no particular strategy is generally stronger than another. Each new playtest provides data that is used to improve components for the next iteration of the game. Additionally, a major overhaul of the game’s prototype art and several major mechanics has led to a game that is more straightforward to learn while still providing the player with the true feel of a city-building simulation.

What advice would you give to players attempting dCity for the first time? As dCity is a dice-as-worker placement game, some first-time players are unsure how to begin turning a roll of, say, 3-4-6 into a thriving metropolis. Some of the keys in the early game are to develop some early population centers while also generating revenue which can be crucial to later play. Building a preliminary town with a variety of developments can also help a player later in the game when it comes time to specialize in areas which will result in more satisfied citizens while maintaining a more well-rounded city.

What has surprised you most in play-tests of dCity? Early versions of dCity took a kitchen-sink approach to development—everything that ever would be in dCity was likely to appear in that first version. From there, it was a matter of removing the parts that didn’t work and tweaking those that did. I have been pleasantly surprised that nearly everything I was hoping would survive that first big cut—the parts of the game that I felt were most important to the city-building experience—complemented the gameplay experience well and still remains after many revisions. While development still has a long way to go, the core elements are in place, and lower-level balancing continues to improve gameplay with each new playtest.

People who like___________ will like dCity. Why?  City Tycoon: While I would not categorize City Tycoon as a true city-building game, I particularly enjoy its pseudo-cooperative play as players are working together to lay out a single city. The player interaction in Tycoon is strong, and I hope to grow the interactivity of dCity to similar levels.

Suburbia: I was hopeful that Suburbia was the Sim City board game I’d been hoping for all along, but I feel it is little more than an unbalanced mishmash of tile-laying and unpredictable secret goals. Along the way somewhere, Suburbia seems to have sacrificed the thrill of city-building for the tedium of point-earning. While those who like Suburbia may also enjoy dCity, those who dislike it may find refuge in dCity.

The Castles of Burgundy: While Castles uses dice not for worker placement but for action selection, it has lent some influence to dCity’s primary play mechanics. Being able to predict the other players’ actions and balancing moves that are best for you while keeping ahead of your neighbors is critical to building the best city in both Castles and dCity, and dCity builds on this mechanic by tightening the competition for limited resources and developments while speeding along the resolution of a player’s chosen actions.

What do you hope to accomplish at the Collector's Con ProtoZone on Saturday May 11, 2013 from 10am to 7pm?  dCity version 0.51 is ready for playtesting! Version 0.5 introduced a major overhaul of the game’s tile laying mechanic, replacing the previous (and somewhat tedious) zoning requirements placement method with a simpler, more visually appealing transportation infrastructure. The main board is much cleaner now and less than half its previous size, and the available actions are more streamlined and cohesive. Players now have far more control over determining the game’s win conditions, but they must still carefully consider a number of aspects when developing their city later in the game. Finally, the disaster system has been completely revamped, so there will be more fire-burning, tornado-evading, riot-in-the-streets-preventing fun for all!

Tell us anything else you want to say about dCity that I haven't asked or you haven't said already. dCity: 2-4 players. 30 minutes per player. Ages 12 and up. Build your world-class city today!

So, come out to the Collector's Con ProtoZone on Saturday May 11, 2013 from 10am to 7pm in Baltimore, MD and play dCity!

Most images in this post were supplied by designer Nick Ferris. The Unpub South Jersey image was taken by Brian Elligson.