RogerBW's Blog

Suburbia component enhancements 19 August 2016

I wanted to improve the experience of playing Surburbia, so I designed some organisational aids.

The first was a tile stack holder, to make it easier to draw tiles without knocking over the stacks:

One might trim back the base a little to save material, but I rather like having it as a full hexagon. This is tall enough to take all the tiles for a full Suburbia Inc. game, or 5★ up to four players, while still fitting comfortably in the box; if you have a 5-player game of 5★, the 66mm version will take everything.

The "standard" tiles (Suburb, Heavy Factory, Community Park) are only used in stacks of four, and it doesn't matter if lower tiles are exposed, so I haven't made a shorter version for them.

The other accessory, in a more unusual visual style, is a coin holder, to try to manage the huge pile of cardboard money. Originally I was planning to use three stacks:

but there are many more of the smaller-denomination coins than there are of the large ones. I tried an arrangement like a five-spot domino, but I didn't like the way it looked, so I ended up with a more conventional linear coin-holder design, as seen here:

I'm quite fond of those curved insets at the top. They're not quite a usual shape, and they help one drop the coin into the column.

I printed this version and used it for a couple of plays, but it's not quite tall enough to take all the 1-value coins. It's already fairly tall and narrow, though, and I think it might fall over too easily if it got much taller. On the other hand it does fit into a zip-lock bag with the coins in it, and doesn't take up much room in the box.

So I bent it into something a bit more stable:

That'll hold all the coins, which is great, but now it's too tall to fit comfortably in the box!

So I had to give up the symmetry, and this is the final version:

These use a bit more material than the smaller accessories I've been making; if you want a hardcopy of this, I'll have to charge you £4.12 for the coin holder, and £5.80/£6.17 for the 60mm/66mm tile stack holder (plus postage).

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