A challenge (and sometimes a critique) of historical games that cover modern topics is that the story does not always end when the game does. Current events have a way of framing these games in a new light, as the circumstances continue to change and new information about them is revealed. Cross Bronx Expressway is one of these games, as was proven at the beginning of this year, when a fire which resulted from substandard housing conditions killed 17 members of an immigrant population in the Bronx.

News of the fire ripped me to the core. It came a week after an interview where when asked the question, why does the game end in 2000, I replied, because the same cycles keep repeating themselves. It’s not a novel thought, as David Gonzalez’s New York Times piece “How Fire Defined the Bronx, and Us” shows. It is frustrating to see these communities are still vulnerable to the same conditions that saw buildings go up in flames 50 years ago.

I had begun work on this piece prior to the fire, but have since revised what follows because as much as I want Cross Bronx Expressway to be a fun competitive game (which playtesting continues to show it shaping up to be), I do not want the weight of what is being modeled through it to be lost. It is a game that asks you to consider the effects of your actions within a broader socio-economic context that still makes victims of the residents of the Bronx in 2022.

One of my favorite things about COIN as a game system, and perhaps the place where Cross Bronx Expressway most clearly shows its lineage, is in the weight of the pieces, both literally and figuratively. As the pieces are moved around the board they are felt. The sharp corners of the cubes, that moment when you hold those last one or two cylinders, fiddling them a bit as you ponder which region they should be placed in. Then you step back, your turn finished, looking at the board as a potentiality expressed in color. Something is brewing in the northeast, while the southwest is secretly an opportunity. There’s only one or two more turns before you’ll have to do something about the situation in the center of the map.

That weight is delivered by an understanding of what the pieces represent. Event cards provide context around which a narrative is passed between the players, history unfolding by their actions. The players hold that weight, and the deeper they get into the history the more the implications of their own actions are revealed. What I wanted to be sure to bring to the design of Cross Bronx Expressway is the way that this weight allows a few types of pieces to express so much.

There are only four types of pieces in Cross Bronx Expressway – Population (cube), Vulnerable (cube), Infrastructure (disc) and Organizations (cylinder). Placed on the map these four pieces express the social and economic state of the districts of the South Bronx, allowing players to reconstruct and deconstruct the weight of the history as they play from decade to decade.

Population

The Population cubes tell the core story of the game. They come in two sizes, where a small cube represents roughly 15,000 people and a large cube roughly 75,000 people. These cubes build up on the map to quite a sizable population. By the 1970 census almost 1 million people lived in the area. Over the course of the game the demographic composition of the population changes, as waves of immigrants bring new residents to the area while suburban opportunities lead others to leave.

Players will add, move, and remove these cubes through their own actions, or as dictated by historical cards from the event deck. They will count and calculate as they think about how to help the population and achieve their own goals as well, sometimes at the same time, sometimes. They have sharp corners you can feel poke your fingers holding them, as you think about where they can be most useful to you.

Vulnerable

Often at the center of those thoughts will be the pink cubes on the board, called “Vulnerable” in the game to represent population vulnerabilities. Counting the population cubes in a district will tell you how many people reside there. Counting the pink cubes will tell you what portion of that population are living in vulnerable conditions. As the vulnerable cubes pile up it doesn’t mean there are more population, but that a greater percentage of that population is at risk. As such, when you remove one of those vulnerable cubes you are relieving some of the stresses that exist on that population.

The vulnerabilities faced by the residents of the Bronx over the course of this history are innumerable. One might be unemployment, while another is a lack of heat. Food deserts, overcrowded schools, hospital closures, aggressive policing, drug epidemics, inadequate prenatal care, building code violations, gang violence and more. When one of those pink cubes is placed in a district, whether by choice or as dictated by the rules, it is giving that population yet another obstacle to overcome. The corners of the vulnerable cubes are also sharp, as added pressure can hurt. You will put them down now hoping you’ll have time to deal with them on the next turn.

Infrastructure

There are Infrastructure discs in each faction color, the largest components on the board. More than just the buildings one might find in a standard city-builder, infrastructure provides the basic needs of food, clothes, and shelter for the population they can support. Also unlike buildings in standard city-builders, infrastructure probably won’t make any faction rich, and in fact is one of the leading causes of debt in the game.

The area is in an economic decline from the opening decade of the game, as the roadway projects which will cut through the borough claim property. By the 1950s this decline is institutionalized with redlining policies preventing economic investment in the area. Nobody wants to invest in the infrastructure because it is not profitable. Yet the social stability of the area is dependent upon there being infrastructure to house the population. Factions will do whatever they can to get those population cubes housed in their infrastructure just to break even.

Infrastructure, while central, is also far more passive in game play. There won’t be as many actions taken with them, yet every one that is taken has the potential to have a profound impact. If a player’s infrastructure looks to be a debt trap, they may seize an opportunity to flip it over to its exhausted side and avoid paying the high upkeep costs and taxes.  The discs are like chonky coins in hand, a reminder of the pennies on the dollar you are likely to see in returns.

Organizations

Also distributed amongst the players are organization cylinders in faction colors. Each cylinder placed on the map represents subtly different things to each faction. A community cylinder may be a mix of local small businesses, community initiatives, cultural organizations and more. A private cylinder can include a factory, warehouse, national chain stores, banks, and other institutions whose base of operations is not local to the area. A public cylinder might contain hospitals, police, schools, shelters, and other publicly funded groups that serve the local population.

Where infrastructure discs are more passive in play, organizations are quite active. Placing them in a district changes the socio-economic balance, and location is everything on both of those axes. On the one hand organizations are the primary way players can mitigate vulnerabilities. Activating an organization can remove one of those pink cubes from a district. By forming coalitions with another faction, multiple of those cubes can be removed in the same turn. The Public and Private factions might designate a Business Improvement District (BID) through the building of a coalition between their organizations. They may then activate those organizations as a job training program which the Private player uses to hire the unemployed vulnerable, removing two pink cubes from the district.  In this way they are able to reduce the stresses on the population.

If the population in that district is sizable, the other benefit of those organizations kicks in – for everyone except the Public, organizations can make money. So long as the social conditions have not deteriorated to a state of unrest, organizations earn profits off of the population, the larger the population the more profits. So as you roll those cylinders between fingers, the question of where it can be most effective in the moment and in the long term, will weigh heavy.

In Play

These four piece-types come together on the board to paint a picture of urban socioeconomics. It is a very different view from when one looks at the board of a traditional city-builder. It deceptively looks like an area control game, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Through what it is abstracting, it is also vastly different from looking at COIN games, which share many of the same pieces. Being able to read the implications of the various combinations of pieces in a district is a part of the learning process. From a game perspective this can be done without a reference to what all of the pieces are abstractions of, but playing or understanding the game from just that perspective would be missing the point. Hopefully this has helped to convey some of the meaning of those pieces, so that when we read them on the board in the next installment of this series it will all start coming together.

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Previous Articles:

Cross Bronx Expressway: Modeling History Through City-Building

Cross Bronx Expressway: Positioning Players in the Bronx

Cross Bronx Expressway: Building Historical Narrative Arcs