Designer Diary: Shiny Happy People in Cities: Skylines

Board Game: Cities: Skylines – The Board Game

City-building games have a long history, both in board games and computer games. One key difference between most board games and most computer games in this genre is that board games are competitive while computer games are not. Cities: Skylines – The Board Game is co-operative, but the path to get there was not straightforward.

I started out making a competitive game, and only when that was as polished as possible did it become clear that the design did not represent the feel of the computer game as well as we wanted. Restarting the development of this game with a completely different core is likely the most difficult thing I have done in my fifteen years in the board game industry. I have posted a lot in the game forums about the details of the early work (linked at the end of this post), but here I focus on some areas of the finished game and my thoughts about them.

Win? What?

In the computer game you cannot "win" in the normal sense. You can play for hundreds of hours and set goals for yourself, yet the game does not end and tell you that you have won. Board games need to end — so how to define an end condition, and how to decide whether the players won?

I have explored individual difficulty settings (Nations) and global difficulty settings (Warhammer: Age of Sigmar – The Rise & Fall of Anvalor), but co-operative games are different. Player group skill varies, both in absolute terms and over time as groups become better at the game, and I wanted players to be challenged in all situations. This caused the game end condition to be split into two parts, both integrated with the game in different ways.

Rich or Happy

The first end condition is money, and it is very clear. Money is shared among the players, you spend the money of the city, and if you ever have negative money, you have lost. Money is spent and gained in many ways, varying over the whole game and also within each milestone. Sometimes you feel very rich, at other times you are close to bankrupt. Losing the game is a real possibility that you need to consider. This is the primary source of pressure for players.

The second end condition is happiness. It comes into focus at the end of each milestone and is the scoring system of the game. The happier your city is at the end of the final milestone, the better you did. It is possible to lose by making your citizens very unhappy, but it is rare. Finishing the game with a low score is not that hard, but challenging yourselves and striving for more than just surviving is where the game comes to life, and also how all groups are able to play it. When you compare to your last score and try to get better, you will feel the challenge that is central to co-operative games.

To help make the happiness a focus of player effort, we developed a score track that stands up and that all players see clearly. It is not just a track on the board with a small token moving along, mixed in with other systems. Finding this way to handle happiness took a large number of iterative steps between me and Wolfgang Lüdtke, the editor.

New and Shiny

Many new board games are played only once. For the EXIT series and similar one-time experiences, I think this is fine, and the rules and components are light. But for bigger games it can give a very limited impression of a game. I design games with the intent that they should shine best after being played many, many times — but to be played many times a game needs to show at least a glimmer of its shine in the first game, perhaps even in the very first couple of actions.

I agree with Geoff Engelstein on Ludology 206.5 — "It is almost like you are designing two or three different games" — with the first play experience differing from the fifth play and from the twentieth.

The complete game of Cities: Skylines is hard. There is a lot of things to consider, lots of moving parts. Learning everything in one go is tough, so we split the learning experience into multiple games, a series of scenarios. The first is a short tutorial with only three boards, compared to the normal four (out of a total of six). Experienced gamers can skip this and go directly to scenario 2 or even 3, but I do not recommend anyone go direct to the full game.

Many players, especially those expecting to play the game only once, will likely play the full game immediately anyway and have a worse experience. We could have simplified the complete game, but that would have reduced the replay value for those who will play it many times.

In some ways it is easier to make extreme games as a super-light game is played the same way by all and super-heavy games are played only by those who want to play super-heavy games. Promoting a game to the right audience, through theme, box art, information released about it, etc., is a key task for the publisher. A filler that looks heavy will disappoint many players.

Player Independence

I try to create solo variants for my games as I know that many want to be able to play solo and also many learn the game solo to be able to teach a game better. I try to keep the solo game as close to the multiplayer experience as possible, without a lot of upkeep and special stuff. Co-operative games are often easier to switch from multiplayer to solo, and that was the case in this game as well. The number of cards you hold per player changes depending on the number of players; there is no other change.

So, how about alpha-player problems? Players have roles with special powers, take turns, and decide for themselves what to do as their action. What you can do, I cannot. The board state varies depending on whose turn it is. One example of overzealous alpha-player mitigation I tried was to have player cards secret, and while being effective, it also made the game really hard and hindered the best part of it, the collaboration. With testing, it turned out that for almost all groups, it is not worth it to enforce any additional type of alpha-player blocking through rules as that makes the game less enjoyable. The core gameplay systems are enough to hinder alpha-player behavior.

A Sprinkle of Spice

Unique buildings are, as the name implies, unique. They have an important role in the game. They provide variation, with special rules that you try to use for maximum advantage. In the computer game, they are expensive and have specific requirements so that was how they started out here, too. However, playtesters saw them as a burden, a must, something that you had to do. Their high cost became almost the only thing about them that mattered, regardless of how powerful and interesting the effects were or other changes I tried. They became a negative experience and had to be changed — and changed they were, oh, so many times.

The final solution involved integrating them fully in the core gameplay, to use their extra-large size as their cost, but not paying any money for them. Now when you draw a unique building, it is always something that you would like to play, but you might lack the space on the board, or other pressing concerns might make you decide to get rid of the card and not play it at all. Now unique buildings provide interesting choices and a positive experience.

All the price tweaking and previous testing now feels redundant; why did I not do it like this immediately? This is often the feeling I get when I finally find a great solution to a problematic part of a design, and one of the reasons I keep looking so hard to fully explore the design space. Having luck and finding the best solution immediately can happen, but most of the time you need to put in the work to iterate and explore.

Released...Almost!

The game is printed, and a copy is on its way to me as I am writing this. Holding the finished physical game for the first time is always a bit surreal to me. It becomes a confirmation that all the work, all the branches and possibilities, have finally been decided on and fixed. It is an important milestone, a point of clarity. At first there is stress, I quickly unpack and go through everything in detail, checking for errors of any kind. I have been assured that everything is correct, that there are no errors, but I will go through these motions anyway. After playing it, I will be able to feel calm, then happiness as the game reaches players that enjoy it, which is the whole reason I manage to keep designing games at all.

Here it is...