Suburbia

Let me guess, you found the idea of TheoTown interesting but after a while felt like you'd want something with more meat on the bone. I have just the fix you need. It's called Suburbia, and it's a delightful tile laying game of hexagonal proportions.

In Suburbia you will be trying to attract as much population as possible to your fledgling burrow. The game is played in turns. Each turn, you will chose a district tile from the real estate market, pay its cost and place it adjacent to your other tiles.

Most tiles increase either income or reputation (sometimes both, sometimes neither). Your income determines how much money you will get at the end of your turn. Reputation on the other hand, determines how much population will arrive in your burrow. Population is eventually converted into victory points at the end of the game so that's enough incentive to get a lot of it since it doesn't help at all during the game. There's a catch though. The population track features a series of red lines which when crossed, decrease both your income and reputation. This is a warning not to grow your population too quickly. A crowded city is unpleasant. It will take a toll on finances and scare away potential immigrants (not a bad idea, actually).

The fun part of Suburbia are the tiles themselves. Each tile has some special bonuses attached to it. These can make permanent changes to your city stats or give one time bonuses depending on what the city composition is like. Most of these bonuses are activated by adjacency, tiles in your city or tiles in all players' cities. Not only that, but they also work retroactively.

For example, a farm will increase your income for every restaurant in your burrow. This happens when you place it, but will also happen when you place restaurants later on. There are variations on this mechanism. The casino will increase your income every time you pass the red line, which literally means you will not lose the income, and having two casinos will actually increase it. A fancy restaurant may bring you +3 income but it will lose you 1 each time another restaurant is built, and so on.

Buying from the market each turn might get difficult, especially when you haven't got a cash engine yet. In that case, you can always build a lake, which will give extra cash at no cost, or buy one of the cheaper standard tiles which are generally much cheaper and give decent benefits.

Finally, the tension in Suburbia comes from the objectives. During a game, you will receive a secret objective, but have also a number of public objectives that you might want to pursue. These objectives give a big influx of population at the end of the game, when it's clearly welcome.

Regarding opponents, the app has a series of AI's that focus on different aspects of city building. Dakota, the charismatic computer gives me headaches usually. Alternatively, you can try at specific challenges in which you will be playing solo to complete a custom set of objectives.

Conclusion

Suburbia is great at mixing tactics with long term developments plans. The way in which the real estate market is set-up each game determines what opportunities and challenges appear throughout the game. The juggling of reputation and income is always fun. Finally, the interface is highly functional. Except for some issues with pinch-zooming (double tapping will fix it), Suburbia is a pleasure to play.