The fascination and increased enthusiasm towards playing board games have been seen for a very long time. Board games are indoor and multi-learning fun-filled games that still attract audiences from any age group. The availability of playing multi-strategy-based games on a tabletop and providing a multi-player option is also considered more reasons to engage and attract users.
Engineered building-based games that give users a chance to build their colony, kingdom, or city are considered one of the most user engaging content and theme of games. Games such as Quadropolis and suburbia are the finest examples that prove how people are crazy about owning their supermarket, a society having all of the high-class amenities, and even a city rather it be virtually. The evolution of games like Quadropolis, Suburbia, etc., has gone through many developmental phases to meet the levels of user satisfaction. Although most of these specific building and amenity-owning games may always not have their digital versions, especially these tabletop games, they are available to play on mobile and pc platforms, staying to the game’s main structure.
What is Quadroplis?
Quadropolis, designed by François Gandon, is an engineered building game involving planning and strategy to collect amenities and allow players to own their buildings, areas, shops, etc., virtually. In Quadropolis, the player takes on the role of the Mayor of an in-game fictional modern city. The player then needs to plan a global strategy to evolve their town according to the requirements and demands of the city’s Inhabitants’. The primary motive of the game is to outmatch their rivals by sending their architects to have them incorporate in building various structures erected across their city. The more buildings a player makes, the more victory points they score. The game also offers different scoring patterns for multiple facilities, and sometimes they combine to provide a better scoring result.
The game goes basically with four rounds in which they try to build buildings across their city with their one to four engineers in each turn. The player completes facilities and erects them across the city, thus laying out their city plan themselves. They mainly compete with other players for shops, parking lots, restaurants, and other amenities by collecting them with each victory point collected.
Suburbia: One more building fantasy game
Suburbia also being one the most attractive building fantasy game played by many board game geeks across the audience. Suburbia is similar to Quadropolis in motive and gameplay, but it is considered a tile-laying game according to tabletop players and its playing method.
Suburbia is also called a tile-laying game designed by Ted Alspach and distributed in 2012 by Bézier Games. The game allows each player to build up an economic drive and complex infrastructure that aims to be initially self-adequate and eventually lead the player to become profitable and thus, in turn, promote population growth. As the player develops their town, they also can modify their income and enhance their reputation. Therefore when the player’s income increases, they acquire more cash which will help them purchase better and more valuable buildings. They can even own an international airport or a skyscape office building. Thus, the reputation increase also leads to more population growth. Finally, the player achieving the most significant population at the end of the game is considered the winner.
Quadropolis and Suburbia: the contrasts
Quadropolis and Suburbia are considered one of the most audience-engaging and thrilling building games. They offer players a family weight strategy-based gameplay and allow users to organize city planning and engineer architecture in interactive and entertaining ways. Tabletop games, although considered to be among the best offline strategy and planning games easily playable by most of the age groups and variants, sometimes make these games challenging to choose and understand their aspects. Just as in this case of considering between Quadropolis and Suburbia, various aspects make these games differ from each other.
Design
Quadropolis reflects on being very modern and represents a mobile-phone-app aesthetic. It resembles and even shows quite similarities to SimCity in a board game. It’s spotless and, most importantly, very family-friendly. But comparing it to the more cosmopolitan Suburbia portrays a charming look. It may not be the most unique-looking game, but Suburbia’s attention-specific details and platforms are very promising. Also, the laying platforms and reward qualities are pretty different; Quadropolis offers their players more organized gameplay than in its app gaming version or board game version.
Strategy
The most rightful competitor of Quadropolis would be considered as Suburbia. Not to mention that both of these games come under the same category and exhibit the same tile-based gameplay, but the games differ very much on strategy and planning-based mechanisms. Suburbia is bulkier and has more in-game items, leading the player to organize and manage more in-game elements.
Talking about Quadropolis, the experience, and game collection, although less, still requires the player to carefully plan and think about every strategy in a pretty systematic manner. Instead, the Expert mode, present in Quadropolis, lets the player spend quite a thinking time on game strategy and management.
Experience and play satisfaction
Both the games offer high-intensity play and require extensive planning and creative organization on behalf of the players to complete each step and go through the path of winning. These games offer pretty good play satisfaction and game management to the user. Although the experience may sometimes differ on a medium game level, Quadropolis provides a medium-level game experience, and the other is impressive.
Indeed one element that brings both of these games on the same page is its strategy involvement. Hence, both games’ contrast may allow them to co-exist simultaneously with trend and audience satisfaction. Some other aspects also need to be acknowledged that make them slightly different, like Suburbia follows a far more economy-defined motive. In contrast, Quadropolis relies more on tile selection and correct placement for collecting victory points and owning amenities. Quadropolis keeps the player constantly informed that they are competing with other players, rather than Suburbia, which mainly focuses on reputation and population growth and may be considered a little bit less competitive.
Conclusion
Games like Quadropolis and Suburbia require extensive thinking and effective planning to organize game elements. Although they may differ on some aspects, the intensity these games offer the user is impeccable and equals the tactical strategy planning of Combat-based games. The player faces an adrenaline rush, and their urge to achieve amenities through their own decisions and planning is quite noticeable in these games.
Through their craze, board games have always been a topic of fun, learning, enjoyment, and skill enhancement. Tabletop games like these provide the players with good management skills and enhance their thinking capabilities in both board and digital platforms. Thus the vital qualities of these games make them mostly irreplaceable and very user demanding throughout the evolution of modern gaming.