It’s easy to see how this setup could easily slip into a fawning, blind appreciation for huge property interests demolishing cities’ cultural centers to fuel gentrification. From there, its people, millions of them, that collectively build the city.” To get the right occupiers, you can only shape the environment. “You zone in SimCity, but you do not get to choose what emerges in those zones. “City government and local institutions might lay the roads, the pipelines and electric cabling, but it is private interests that actually develop them,” he says in the design document. He felt that Magnate could differentiate itself by giving economic forces more influence in its design. He looked to older titles and modern classics alike, such as popular city builder Suburbia, and noticed that many focused too hard on recreating the single-player feeling of the SimCity computer game series, so often an inspiration for this genre. Naylor explains that his vision has always been to create a realistic property board game that didn’t sacrifice interactivity in the quest for balanced competitiveness. The wealthiest player walks away the winner, but it's all too easy to be caught up in a vicious burst bubble and lose everything. Magnate: The First City ends with a market crash and encourages players to time their exit from the rampant real estate racket as close to that as possible to maximise profits. Opponents also benefit from whatever high-value tenant is persuaded to move in, raising the overall property value of surrounding establishments and creating vibrant sectors. Each offers specific benefits in the short term but can quickly change the landscape of the surrounding city and limit avenues for expansion.
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They will first need to leverage their resources to bid on plots then decide whether to zone them for offices, retail, residential buildings or industry. Magnate is Naylor’s first title through the London-based Naylor Games and pits players against each other in a bid to become the top property developer by outmanoeuvring opponents to buy land in the city and build amenities that will rake in earnings. Designer James Naylor celebrated the event by publishing his thoughts on seeing the project from conception to the table, along with the guiding ethos behind his decisions. Two years after launching its Kickstarter campaign, competitive neighborhood-building board game Magnate: The First City recently brought its equal parts Monopoly and SimCity-inspired design to backers, with a public release planned for November.