Shortly after finishing the third installment of this series about the tactility of the pieces, I took some time to capture a multihand playthrough of my physical prototype. Let me tell you a secret. I lost. In fact I lost in the first decade, three times in a row. Granted, this was the “Bronx is Burning” scenario which is hands down the hardest one in the game, but the fact of the matter is it took me four tries to get out of the first Decade, which is what you’ll see in this playthrough.
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.
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.
Asymmetric game design often lives and dies on the way players relate to their positions, frequently expressed through factions. In historical simulations, the faction design provides a framework through which players can execute their strategies. When done well the strategic choices presented to them create a decision space which mirrors the history, or at least the history as presented in the game. This is an important distinction, because any historical game is still the biased presentation of that history from the perspective of the designer. So before getting into the ways in which I have positioned players in Cross Bronx Expressway, it’s probably worth noting what my position is as the designer.
The map for Cross Bronx Expressway shows eight out of twelve community board districts in the southern section of the Bronx. A few communities in the city of New York, in the state of New York, in the country of the United States, on this planet we call Earth. The game zooms into this small corner of urban life, in an effort to simulate the historic changes that happened in cities across the globe during the second half of the 20th century. Examining the effects of these changes on the South Bronx reveals many of the issues that arose during this period.
