Cross Bronx Expressway: A Solo Urban Planning Sandbox

One of the most wonderful things about working with GMT is that GMT One exists, recognizing the value of solo play for historical gamers. There was always going to be a solo system developed for Cross Bronx Expressway, but early in the design I had no idea what shape it would take. Because of its COIN pedigree the default was a version of the Jacquard system, which has produced wonderful solo experiences for so many volumes of the series. Yet there was a problem. All of those games are multiplayer competitive, which means the bots created for them are dialed in to provide players with a true competitive opponent. Cross Bronx Expressway, being semi-cooperative, required a slightly different framing to give players an experience that paralleled that of the multiplayer game.

Around when I was able to start giving serious consideration to the solo system, within my design circle there was a lot of conversation about the personalization of adversaries in bot systems. Particularly in the competitive setting, giving bots names helps to anchor players in the theme, where they have to beat a character rather than just a system. In the historical space, these personas can take on added meaning as stand ins for historical figures. In that context the modeling of those bot personas becomes as much about their historical significance as their play function.

A recent example of this is the Crown system designed by Ricky Royal for John Company Second Edition. With it solo players face off against the royal crown itself as they try to steer the British East India Company in ways that will fill their coffers. What makes this characterization of the bot that much more compelling is that over the course of the game the Crown’s “climate” and thus its behavior changes. More than just a flow chart of predetermined choices, the system really gives character to the bots that enhances the narrative that emerges through play.

The Crown system had a heavy influence on my initial approach to the Cross Bronx Expressway solo system. An important one was its framing where the crown is not an individual but understood as the power wielded by the royal institution. This aligns with the player positions in John Company where each player represents not an individual but a whole family. Similarly, in Cross Bronx Expressway players take on the role of municipal sectors not individuals. Personifying the bots to represent these broad institutions would conflict with the game’s scale. Nevertheless over the course of the time period represented in the game, the ideas of those sectors and where they put their focus changed frequently.

This was what led me to the idea of Position cards, giving each faction a deck of 8 cards which aligned with the historical positions their sector took over the course of the history. These cards provided selection priority, a goal which aligned to one of the faction’s scoring objectives, and how that position would evaluate the board state to determine its course of action turn to turn. Over the course of a single decade of play each faction might go through anywhere from 1 to 3 different positions, which the player faction would have to navigate and negotiate around to achieve their own objectives.

I prototyped up this initial system and started testing and everything went perfectly. Well, not quite. Everything worked because I was the designer of the multiplayer game and filling in the gaps for rules that were either unclear or not even fully written. So in theory it all worked, thematically I loved it, but practically it needed a lot of work.

Enter Developer, Stage Left

by Joe Dewhurst

The words I most dread hearing a designer utter: “Oh, I’ve already designed a solo system, here you go”. While of course I appreciate the effort they’ve put in, there are often major gaps that need to be filled, and now we’ve committed to publishing the game with a solitaire or non-player system included! This can often lead to serious delays in publishing the game, as the GMT One team, consisting of myself, Jason Carr, and a handful of others working on specific projects, are stretched very thin and can typically each only work on one solitaire project at a time.

It would not be an understatement to say that designing a solitaire or non-player system often takes almost as much time and effort as designing the original game itself. It is, effectively, an entirely separate game system, one that players expect will make all decisions for the non-player faction(s), while also somehow being streamlined enough that it doesn’t get in the way of them actually playing the game. In my experience the biggest mistake designers make here is to assume that certain decisions are obvious, such that they don’t need to give an explicit procedure for how the non-player faction will make them. For a designer who knows their own game better than anyone this might be true, but for a player encountering the game for the first time it certainly isn’t, and even experienced players expect not to have to make any decisions for their non-player opponents – not even the most trivial or seemingly obvious ones.

This was the situation I was faced with when NB handed over his initial Cross Bronx Expressway non-player system to me. The Position cards provided a clear set of priorities for each non-player faction, with a clever and responsive system for adjusting these priorities during play, but they did not tell the player exactly how to resolve each action (or event) once they had determined what the non-player wanted to do with its turn.  The solution I eventually settled on, cribbed from the excellent Jacquard system originally designed by Bruce Mansfield for Gandhi, was a single “General Priorities” table that listed every kind of action a non-player faction might want to take. This, combined with a simple and intuitive set of General Principles, provided everything we needed to make decisions for the non-player factions.

One thing you might notice at the bottom of this table is an unusual tie-breaker priority, “player selection from remaining spaces”. For most non-player systems this final tie-breaker would usually be “random selection from remaining spaces”, but, as NB mentioned above, Cross Bronx Expressway is a semi-cooperative game, so we decided to give the player (or players) the final call here. A non-player faction will still prioritize its own interests, as indicated on the other rows of the table and on the Position card priorities, but there is some room for players to “advise” it when making otherwise equal-priority decisions. Players also have the ability to “negotiate” with non-player factions by taking advantage of their current Position priorities to encourage certain decisions – while this might feel like you are manipulating the non-player or gaming the system, we think it actually provides a good analogue to how you might encourage a player to make certain decisions by agreeing to a certain course of action yourself. So, for example, if you know that the NP Volunteer Position is going to prioritize placing Organizations in Districts with two or more unhoused Vulnerabilities, you might deliberately place your own Organization in such a District in order to encourage it to form a Coalition with you.

The end result is, we hope, exactly what players want: a simple and easy to operate non-player system that gives you a set of characterful and challenging partners (and opponents) to play with (and against). Once you become familiar with this system it should fade into the background, allowing you to focus on your own gameplay and enjoy the unfolding narrative or urban decay and regeneration in the South Bronx. Good luck! 

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