Origins:  Unplugging Games, cont.

By Justin Hall

SimCity was an amibitious attempt to make a collectible card game that wasn't combat based. It took the spirit of a single player computer game that balanced many variables and added peaceably cooperative competition. With your opponents, you build a city. The roads, rails and power lines are printed on the cards themselves - you lay down natural resources like forests and coastline, and then layer houses and business on top of them to develop a full fledged city grid. Players compete for money, generated by the card layers and relations between adjacent cards. When you play with groups of people, it's possible, for example, to build a house near someone else's group of houses, which increases the revenue you get from your house. In this game you can get ahead without totally screwing over your opponent.

All that works within a framework of cooperation - it was developed to be the type of collectible card game that you could play with family (not having to worry about improperly "Challenging Mom to the death!"). You lay out your resources to maximize your own point earnings, and possibly minimize the success of your opponents; you never directly attack your opponent.

If it all sounds very friendly combat, it was. Darwin Bromley, SimCity game designer and President of Mayfair games at the time, took a few moments away from his train boardgaming at Origins to revisit the SimCity experiment. He spoke lovingly of helping fans build decks that would allow them create their own city. Unlike Tomb Raider, which features art almost entirely from the game system and the computer renderings of Lara Croft, SimCity was made at a time when such computer renderings cost more than the resources of Mayfair games afforded. Darwin and company took photos of buildings in major American cities themselves - you'll see the cards in SimCity are photorealistic. The back of the SimCity card game rule book invites players to submit pictures of their own homes to appear as cards.

SimCity emerged to a hungry public in 1994, and the initial edition sold out. Future editions were printed heavily and they didn't sell strong. This was shortly after Magic: The Gathering had changed the face of hobby gaming with the trading card game, and at the time there was a explosion in new collectible card games. Six other collectible card games were released the same week as SimCity. After selling out the first run, SimCity got lost in the shuffle. Today you can find a grande set of game cards for sale cheap through Mayfair games.

Still, others hurl themselves into the breach, offering new card games based on gameplay models from card games.