Suburbia | Only the Goals Matter | Game Breakers Strategy

Suburbia by Bezier Games quickly became one of our favorite board games, and here we make our way through the massive collector's edition to take a look at a part of the game that we don't think gets enough attention.
#Gamebreakers
#Boardgamestrategy
#Suburbia

[@tychay]

I disagree goals are the game. Goals are VERY important in Suburbia but often the goals work against each other (in your case you had a private civic goal that works against the public one) and there is a $5 for 1 pop transfer at the end of the game which is huge if someone is runaway (this is a big deal because end-of-game scoring like that is not penalized so $50 is like winning 1 goal). A lot of goals (not this game) are like highest income or richest player so it works in line with the victory point approach. Even goals that are anti-population can sometimes be strangely won. For instance, if a goal is miscreant (have the lowest reputation), you can work things so that when you enter the C tiles you rush a lot of stuff to put your population up and reputation and income be damned (e.g. green tiles like condos and stuff that give you straight up pop). You end up with a huge population AND the red lines work to your advantage to cement your win with the miscreant goal you net at the same time. :D Lowest income can be still achieved while being strong by going for tiles like Waterfront Realty that give you money instead of income (in your game, with the Nightlife tiles, one player getting a helicoptor pad would allow them to vampire off your crazy run of airports (you did remember to 2x some of those larger airports in the game right?)). In this game, you two let her get 3 goals + her private and neither of you got a single private goal and split the other goal. That is unusal (as in I have seen this in games against bots, almost never over the board). Often the goals are split (not split down the middle) but split enough to mitigate goals somewhat (maybe an extra 10-15 pop for one player). The example of this game is rare/unlikely and not representative of most games of Suburbia (my experiences). Even if I feel very runaway strong, I always keep one public goal in mind to win (usually I set that in the beginning, though early on I might switch a couple times before settling on it). If I'm in the middle of the pack, I'm looking out for that one player who is trying to sweep up the goals. Just one person like me would completely change the table meta of "goals are the game." Suburbia has a pretty good dynamic between goals and the game. It is often enough that which to go for can change from game to game which adds to the overall replayability and randomness, and it is that dynamic that powers the Bonuses and Challenges in the Inc. expansion. You WANT a game that has multiple paths to victory (that's why point salads are possible) and goals offer this. But compare this to PARKS where the equivalent (year cards) are so crippled as to be, not just useless, but detrimental to game play. They are so bad that the expansion is being Kickstarted to change their behavior entirely and fix its poor design.