They Call This The City

What a wonderful, strange, nerdy, genius bureaucrats fighting over powerpoint simulator game! I knew before I'd even opened it, just from this page, that it would suit down to the ground the group of wonderful-strange-nerdy teen geniuses I run games for – and it did! Although thank god I could scrape together some graphing ability from those foggy memories of maths classes, or else I would have been absolutely lost once they got on a roll with those boxplots...

We played this last year as part of a sort of campaign lead-in while we debated what our main game would be, and while it didn't tie into Wanderhome QUITE as neatly as I may have hoped (really more on my failings in imagination as to how a horsemeat scandal would translate than any fault in either game), it certainly did a lot for how this group relates to games!

[Documentation of the "scandal" in question. Note the break in the timeline also, fully intentional on the part of the graphers 💀]

We ended the game with enough tampered paperwork & belligerence to start a small civil war (to determine the true name of the city, of course), but I like to think the rules themselves dovetailed into this quite neatly. By the time we got to the point in the game where you're called to return to a previous graph & disprove its findings with outliers or decide that it was misleading from the beginning, every player was just simmering with frustration just waiting to explode. This was mainly because of how each round operates: you set up the perfect graph to show how your idea of the city is the One True & Correct Path Forward, and then those horrible other players will start with their additions, absolutely WRECKING your clearly scientific conclusions!! This was very very fun, and only moreso after you 'unlocked' the ability to go back & tamper with past graphs, which as the above example shows we proceeded to do shamelessly.

The tone of this game is established immediately & really well, from the excellent cover right through to the slideshow layout and the spiralling madness of the example graphics. I think the chaos of those examples really helps spur you on to see if your table can match it! That balances really neatly against the interjections that start appearing deeper into the rules, to remind you that your City should be recognisable – or rather, that it already is & forever will be, because your foundational context of real life is inescapable. So you should probably introduce injustice intentionally, with this handy piechart that can literally carve up your City between the highest bidders! Or do anything else you can dream up with a piechart, but it's nice to bring the social realism in :)

Things this game reminds me of:

• I Am In Eskew & Discworld & Man-made Object by Lemon Demon & all that kind of absurdist art about cities and/or buildings
• the game City Planning Department, another rpg that brings out the petty bureaucrat I didn't know was hiding inside me
• The Thick Of It, purely because of how many policies were decided off-the-cuff and then justified backwards through various focus groups & inquiries & studies & etc, which these graphs could be pulled right out of
• The Pepsi Breathtaking Design Strategy, which seemed to share similar design principles

Anyway, suffice to say that this game really got me thinking about what exactly it is that we want world-building games to do, so thank you very much for that! I should note also that despite all dice probability & min-max statistics & mental arithmetic role-playing games are associated with, this is the only game so far that had me using a ruler, a compass, and a protractor again – and to be honest I was half wondering if I might need a graphing calculator. If that sounds like a fun night to YOU, trust me: it was!

Love this. I think.