Everybody, I’ve done it. I have discovered the
weirdest version of SimCity, one that you didn’t even knew existed.
What ever one you think it is, you’re wrong. Which says a lot, because it turns
out there are a LOT of ports of SimCity.
I grew up playing a lot of SimCity in my youth.
While SimCity 2000 is probably the best one, and the less said about the 2013 installment the
better, it was the SNES original that captivated me the most. Even at only six years old
or whatever age I was, I got enthralled by residential zone, managing housing costs,
reducing crime and dealing with traffic jams. More than anything, I thought getting the R-Top
and C-Top megabuildings was the coolest thing you could do. Before activating every single
disaster at the same time at least.
The Super Nintendo game actually ended up being
the most popular version of the original SimCity, having sold over two million copies compared to
the few hundred thousand of its computer brethren. In my limited worldview as a kid, my ignorance
led me to believe that the SNES game that I oh so adored was the original, and it turns out it’s not
even close. While that version came out in 1991, it was first released in the 80s.
The Amiga was home to a port of SimCity, and is quite similar to the Super Nintendo
version most of us are familiar with. The only major differences here is that
Residential Zones are green instead of red. It also goes without saying that the lack
of music is jarring, and the sound effects aren’t exactly up to par with the console. But
this isn’t the weirdest version of SimCity.
The ZX Spectrum also got SimCity. Slightly less
color pallettes available makes your city built all over blindingly yellow landscape. All the
same features are here, and still works quite well despite the slower game speed. Much
like the Amiga version, there’s no music, and the sound effects rarely make an appearance.
Most interesting I’ve found is that this doesn’t have the Monster Attack disaster, instead allowing
for manually triggering a Nuclear Meltdown, something that is saved for scenarios or extremely
rare occurrences in other versions. But this isn’t the weirdest version of SimCity.
The most surprising one I found was that the Macintosh got its own SimCity around the
same time as the Amiga and ZX Spectrum, around 1989 and a couple of years before the Super
Nintendo. Obviously, it’s all black and white, so not exactly the most visually appealing. At
least the building graphics kind of match what I’m used to. It also lacks sound effects or music. It
also does that weird Mac OS thing where checking things like graphs or maps makes an all new window
appear alongside the game window. But it still has everything included, right down
to Monster attacks. But this isn’t the weirdest version of SimCity.
The most surprising of all ports was that the original 8 bit Nintendo Entertainment
System was to get its own SimCity. It was shown at trade shows in 1991, but quietly
cancelled in favor of its 16 bit brother. An unreleased prototype was discovered, and its
ROM made available online. I can’t believe this thing exists. This is such a cool discovery and
keeps the history of video game conservation alive. While absolutely surprising, no, this
is not the weirdest version of SimCity.
The original, the very first SimCity,
was developed for the Commodore 64. While it was made and finished in 1984, it was
not released until 1989. The limitations here a pretty obvious -- graphics, sound, the fact that
you can’t even see what your population is at. One thing that this has that none of others do
is pipelines, and making sure water is provided to all of your buildings. And even though this
is the original, it all its primitive glory, this is not the weirdest version of SimCity.
SimCity has been ported to well over a dozen different platforms, operating systems,
and who knows what. But one form I never expected it to be put into was this.
SimCity The Trading Card game was published by Mayfair Games and released in 1994. It seeks to
emulate the excitement of the video game in a deck of cards, starting with a small town and expanding
into a full metropolis. A starter deck comes with 60 random cards and an instruction manual.
There is so much to unpack here on these cards. First of all, there is no artwork -- instead it’s
all very real photos of very real locations from around Illinois. And you can clearly see that
they had to stretch the imagination to make some of these buildings work. Some multistory complex?
Sure, that’s a “ski manufacturer”. I have a lot of questions about “primitive hut”. This is just
a YMCA. And I wanna know in what world does THIS look like a “nightclub” to anyone?!
There are numerous ways to play this -- everyone sharing one deck building one city, everyone
having their own deck, everyone building their own city competitively, or as many players
as you want. Building is done in “phases”, denoted by the color of bar the stat block is
in. You must start with small settlement cards, consisting of things such as landscape, some
farms, or that one local weirdo trying to live off the grid. After enough population is built,
you can then build village cards, then city cards, and finally metropolis cards.
Rather than spending money to build things, each zone is worth so many dollars, and the first
one to whatever dollar amount wins. Cards also show how much population they provide, require,
how much crime it has and how much pollution it contributes. The physical space of the table
also matters, because you can only play cards where there is space available and where they end
up effects the score. So it’s generally better to play on a standard kitchen table than say the
food tray on the back of an airplane seat.
With a starting hand of seven, you begin your turn
by drawing a card, playing one card on the table… and that’s it. That’s as involved as it gets.
After the first card, all additonal cards must be played next to it. Also important is that every
card has transportation along its borders - roads, railways and some of them with powerlines.
Connecting these together to form a contiguous transport line is necessary for cards that
require a certain population to reach it. This is about as complex as a decision gets
- where to place it for the road and rails to line up. Otherwise you can get a bonus for putting
similar zones next to each other, like commercial all grouped up or farms or whatever.
After reaching Phase 3, the city phase, it really gets spicy. Now you can rezone and
rebuild cards already played, but can only do so if the newly elected city council votes
in agreement. Whoever initiated the City Phase automatically receives the Mayor card. My 60
card starter deck didn’t have one of these, so as stated by the instruction manual, I
can use the one inside the manual itself, which means I am now This Guy.
When it comes to voting, the mayor gets two votes and breaks ties, everyone else can go
fuck themselves. For other players to get votes, they need to purchase city council members, a
new card type. Paying for their services may reduce their score, but at least they
get to now vote on important zoning decisions. Some a generic members, allowing for a
single vote. Some council members are specialized, giving extra votes on certain issues like this
guy is agriculture, this lady is governmental, and cell phone guy is my new hero.
There are also corrupt city council members, who are cheaper but also must vote a certain
way. You can tell this guy is corrupt by, what, his inhaler?? Play an election card and
everybody gets to vote in a new governer and city council chairman, which means the winner
gets to be this gentlemen. I am quite certain this is a developer’s uncle and they just
used a family christmas photo for it.
Once the City Phase begins, Event cards
are now also allowed to be played. This is where you can play disaster cards, making
the Mayor pay for them, make players pay taxes, discard all council members and so on.
Here’s the issue I ran into with my first deck -- its super unbalanced. Of my 60 cards, only
18 could be played in the first settlement phase. I had 26 Phase 3 cards, 11 phase 2 cards, and
only two Metropolis cards -- one of them being a Movie Set, in which they somehow got a behind
the scenes photo of John Travolta in the 1996 film “Michael”. Another problem was that in order to
go from Town to City in phase 3, someone has to play a Power Plant card. Without that… too bad.
And in all of my 60 cards, two of them were power plants -- a coal one, and a hydroelectric one
which requried to be built next to water.
Thankfully, the manual has a solution -- you can
substitute a power plant by using the back of the manual. Or, as stated on page 24, if you are
having trouble advancing phases: “acquiring a few boosters or a second starter deck should solve
the problem”. Otherwise go fuck yourself.
Really? You can make the game actually playable by just spending more money.
Sigh… (opens booster pack)
As far as I can tell, cards don’t have different
rarities - no commons or rares or mythics or legendaries or whatever. So there’s no real
excitement or hype over whatever new card I end up seeing, they’re all about the same. All of the
buildings are still about as generic as it comes, though it probably wasn’t the wisest choice to
include a “colonial servants quarters”.
You may have noticed the unusually large
size of these booster packs compared to conventional ones. That’s because
every pack also includes special Long Cards -- high value cards that can only be
built on top of two existing cards horizontally. Some are generic like office buildings or a
school, some of these are notable landmarks. Why yes, my city does have a Sequoia National Forest.
And the Panama Canal, fuck it, why not.
Because they come in boosters only and stick
out, every single one of these long cards I opened up were super bent to shit. Not
that these have any value or anything, but like, come on dude at least protect it
with some extra cardboard or something.
Since the long cards can’t be shuffled
into the main deck, for obvious reasons, a separate long card deck can be used during
play. When a player would draw from the main deck, they can instead draw a long card in hopes
of getting some big value. Another issue I ran into with these long cards is… where am
I supposed to put them!? I can’t fit them into a box with the other cards, and no deck box
exists that can comfortably fit everything. Also, there’s no guideline as to a reasonable size of
the long deck. How many should I have there for smooth play? A few? A dozen? All of them?
That goes for the rest of the deck too! How many phase 1, 2 3 or 4 cards is expected!? I’d
imagine a higher amount of phase 1 and 2, because otherwise the game can’t even get going and you
spend most turns drawing and then discarding down to handsize. How can I fit enough of all these
in, while also including a healthy amount of event cards and nerds? How many power plants is
a reasonable amount so that we can reliably get to the City phase? What amount of residential,
commercial and industrial zones do I need, along with agricultural, government, city services, and
golden “special” cards? Also, remember the Mayor card? That isn’t included the actual deck - that
must always be set aside, like a commander.
There’s also so much math involved. You’ll need
a score sheet for everyone’s money. But there’s also combo bonuses and multipliers that can
happen -- get bonus money for putting zones next to each other. And if a complex is built of
interrelated cards of constituent zones like farm, gambling, or Post Office, you cumulatively add
in a bonus of that complex. Then if you rezone, upgrade or rebuild figure it all out again.
All at the same time, keep constant track of the population. This is easier said than done when
you play cards that say things like “add 1 sim to every residential zone within 3 blocks”
or whatever. Any time you play another card that requires so many sims connected to it
by transport, add it all up again and ugh… it’s always just constantly changing. It’s too
much math, and this is coming from someone who regularly plays Magic The Gathering.
I can’t imagine this game was ever popular, yet it somehow managed multiple expansion sets,
all based on real cities. There are starter decks for Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington DC.
They don’t change how the game is played at all, it’s just more kind of familiar buildings.
Ultimately, the game just isn’t very fun. It feels like it would work best as a three or more
player game, but all of the multiplayer stuff like Council Votes just seems tacked on. There’s no
voting in two player mode making it very boring, and playing by yourself means there’s no threat
or challenge -- you’re just trying to get a high score or whatever. The cards all look pretty
generic, and all the score keeping gets to be quite tedious. It straddles the fence of being a
cooperative game and a competitive game to finely, making its purpose muddied and unclear on how it
should be played. Despite being a “collectible card game”, nothing about it is collectible.
It’s too clunky, cumbersome, and uninteresting to retain anyone’s attention, even if they’re a
fan of SimCity the video game, like myself.
It feels like a failed experiment. Like they
said “how can we capitalize on the success of a niche genre while also getting some of that
sweet card money?” It’s a novelty at best, but I don’t forsee myself pulling this off the shelf at
my next party for people who even *want* to play. Unless I’m trying to make them leave.
However, I know there’s one burning question that’s on everyone’s mind,
and I’ll answer that right now. (Smell booster)
(END)
