As soon as an event deck was introduced to the design of Cross Bronx Expressway, it was clear that it needed to be split into periods. Covering 60 years of history, for the game to have an event from the 1940s played in the 1990s only works if you abstract away all of the historical meaning of the event itself. A deck of generic events from such a broad timespan would leave players without the context to understand the decisions the game has them make. An event deck like this would make the Bronx just a background setting without any real significance. My aim was to give players the agency to play through the history, and to accomplish this the event deck is split into six periods, each featuring a set of events from the corresponding decade to serve as historical guideposts. 

In reading a recent Dan Thurot series on Foucault and Cole Wherle’s Root, one thing that stood out was Thurot’s assertion that the suited cards are their own faction in the game which players interact with. It made me look at the cards in Cross Bronx Expressway a bit differently. They do not function in the same way as the cards in Root do, but the ways they manipulate and are manipulated by players gives history an agency in the game which behaves like its own non-player faction. The character of this faction is shaped by the deck composition and changes as the game moves from decade to decade.

Choosing the events for the cards was difficult. I started with over 150 events spread out across the decades. Trying to capture all of the details that went into each decade caused each of them to explode with possibilities. With too many events, however, either all of the event effects would need to be relatively weak or the level of randomness could cause the swinginess of each period to get way out of hand. So as much as I wanted to call out events like the Pope’s 1965 visit to Yankee stadium, or the release of Paul Newman’s Fort Apache in 1981, sacrifices had to be made.

Deck construction math limited me to 15 events per decade. A balanced decade would provide each faction with five cards where they were first eligible, giving each faction equal odds of being favored in any decade. By shifting these odds slightly towards one or two factions, the decks could be weighted towards the historical influence factions had during each decade. A random shuffle might balance that back out or even favor a different faction, but the odds would still lean towards history.

In addition to the faction agency given by eligibility order, the event actions will always be performed, giving history a direct impact on the game through their cumulative effects. One decade may lean heavily into building infrastructure, while another is exhausting them. The variability of deck construction combined with player choices will make every play of a decade different, yet by the events within them, the overall character of the decade is maintained.

Events are used in all of these ways to hold the narrative within each decade together. Where this pays off the most, however, is with the narrative arcs that span across the decades. These arcs take the events themselves from being discreet actions, to a narrative thread which connects the long tail of history. In a single play, there’s no guarantee that any of these arcs will show up, but over the course of multiple plays, they begin to reveal themselves.

Robert Moses

It’s easy to paint Robert Moses as the villain in the history of the South Bronx, but that is not the primary focus of the game. Moses shows up only twice in the game, once in the 40s at the beginning of this history, and again in the 70s after all of the roadway projects were completed. However, there are also cards for these roadway projects in each of the intervening decades. Each time one of these events shows up, one of the players will be exhausting infrastructure. The choices presented to players through these events make the impacts tangible. These connected effects, across the first four decades of the game, build to reveal the long-term impacts that emerge from Moses’ decisions.

War

At the very start of the game The United States enters World War II, and by the end the US military is going into Iraq. War cards show up throughout the game, often removing population from the board. In the original set there were cards that brought that population back, but as the deck was refined many of those were lost. The relationship the area had with the military is very subtle, particularly with the role that it played as time went on. The same institution that took Colin Powell from the Bronx to the White House, in the same period returned Vietnam vets who found their greatest opportunities in street gangs.

Politicians

Elected officials at the local, city, state and federal level are represented in events throughout the game. At each of these scales the decisions made by politicians affected both the factions and the population on the board. These range from Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. allowing city workers to unionize, to Governor Nelson Rockefeller creating drug laws to appear tough on crime ahead of a presidential run, to California Governor Ronald Reagan coming to Charlotte Street in the South Bronx to retrace the steps of President Jimmy Carter three years prior. 

Shifting Populations

Over the course of the game the demographics of the borough change. The repeated narrative that we hear about this is that minority populations came and the borough changed. While there’s some truth to this, the real story is a little more complex. Even before the start of the game the population of the borough was diverse. European immigrants, Jews, African Americans, and Puerto Ricans all lived on the same streets in the 30s. However by the 40s the European immigrants, many of whom served in the war, came back to financial opportunities not afforded their minority neighbors. With the economic depression caused by the roadway projects deflating property values in the area, they would leave the Bronx for places those minorities could not. You can see this in the cards as suburbanization events remove population while (im)migration events add population.

Community Organizing

The ways in which the community organizes itself also changes throughout the game. The events that come up early show activism from the community for rights and protection under the law. During the middle decades this transforms into the survival and protection afforded by street gangs. Later as more representation is seen in local politics, there’s a shift towards advocacy and investment. Each of these are reflective of how the community historically reacted within the broader socio-economic context.

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These and the other arcs that emerge throughout the game serve to give historical context to the movement of pieces and changes in board state. The events that build these decade spanning arcs become just as much an actor as the three player factions, fueling negotiations, supporting objectives, devastating plans and continuously changing the board state to great effect. In the next article we will look into that board state and the pieces which go into shaping it.

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Previous Articles:

Cross Bronx Expressway: Modeling History Through City-Building

Cross Bronx Expressway: Positioning Players in the Bronx