I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a project longer than the board game I’ve finally finished. The idea was born while I was doing chores on a farm in the New Mexico desert, and now three painstaking years and more than 100 test games later, I’m extremely proud of all the work I’ve put into it. And now, I’m ready to share it with the world.

I’m hoping that this game will delight the overlapping Venn diagram of board game / transit nerds that I know and love, and I hope that it’ll also work as an advocacy tool to help non-urbanists start to think about how their cities can work a little better for human life.

A game about sustainable transportation

At its core, CITY MOTION is a board game designed for 2-9 players, where each turn players earn points by visiting various destinations on the board. The twist? As the game progresses it gets harder to get everywhere in time by car so players must also invest their time in improving the existing urban environment around them.

The game begins with a modular board representing a city on the grid. Each player starts by adding their home to the board-oldest first because that’s how real estate works naturally. On each turn, players can spend time to move their character to different locations to earn points or spend time improving the city by advocating for initiatives. Players advocate for adding bike lanes or public transit, increasing density, removing parking and a host of other options. However, they can’t automatically pass initiatives on their own, and the odds of one passing get higher if they team up.

The ultimate objective is to collect the most points by visiting the most places, but they can’t run up their score in later rounds unless they’ve planned ahead and worked together to reshape their city.

A fitting analogy for real life change in local politics!

Leveling Up Our Cities: Games as Change-Makers

CITY MOTION isn’t just about scoring points; it’s about shifting perspectives on urban development. At every step in the design, I wanted to emphasize that players don’t just get to build the city perfectly from the top-down, but have to actively think about reforming the spaces that already exist around them. The game simulates the experience of being an engaged citizen, where time spent on improving the community may detract from the immediate rewards of getting out to visit the destinations around you.

What was interesting was that while working on this game, I test played it with more than a dozen people, many of whom tried to steer the game towards a more top-down mechanic. It was quite hard to resist the urge because I had no desire to make a game that looked like a board game version of Sim City. In the end, I think I was right and the game that I ended up with was the perfect blend of a city-building game and a “getaraound” game.

Seeds of Inspiration: How It All Started

The seeds for CITY MOTION were sown during our transformative year biking the western and southwest US in 2021-2022. We’d seen such a variety of city designs from Portland’s bike utopia to LA’s grimy car-dependent misery, and we’d met so many people who were passionate about urban planning. I think I first started to want to do something during a particularly thought-provoking stay with an urban planner focused on the health impacts of car-dependence. Earlier that year, I’d built the online game Uprising Chess as a tool to advocate for worker cooperatives as an alternative economic model, and an urban planning board game felt like the perfect idea as an advocacy tool.

It was shortly after that, while WWOOFing on a farm and having only to work 4 hours per day that I started to put together the concepts that would become the game. Claire and I began sketching out the game in the afternoons, and I designed the first prototype and biked into town to get it printed. It was a whirlwind of work and I finished in less than a week.

When we returned to visit our urban planner friend, we presented her with the first copy of the game—a heartfelt culmination of our experiences and shared visions. She was so amused, and her enthusiasm reaffirmed my belief in the power of games to inspire real change.

Join the Adventure: My First Kickstarter Journey

As we prepare to launch CITY MOTION on Kickstarter, I’m experiencing a mix of excitement and nerves. This is my first crowdfunding campaign, and it feels a bit strange to put my creation out there for others to support.

With most of the projects on this site, I would normally just give away the plans and then call it a day. But I’m hopeful that the process of putting it on Kickstarter, and promoting it around town and with online communities will actually help it to spread further than if I just put it up and moved on. And I believe it’s really important to share this game with a wider audience.

In addition, I decided to use any surplus funds that might come from sales to kickstart my other urbanism related project: the Isthmus Carshare Cooperative. Isthmus Carshare is another huge project that I’ll be writing more about soon. It’s an outgrowth of my earlier work with my team from the Climatebase Fellowship to vet a novel hyper-local system for carsharing. It’s operating on a much grander scale and is already requiring grants and Board meetings, but if we can make it happen it can really help reduce car dependency in Madison. Overall I think it’ll be a perfect beneficiary of any success this game manages to have, and I’m extremely hopeful that we’ll be able to successfully launch our operations on the success of our efforts with CITY MOTION.

Wrap-Up: Let’s Walk the Talk (or Bike or Bus)!

I really hope WITY MOTION can be more than just a fun board game; I want it to be an advocacy tool and a conversation starter for our aspirations toward healthier, more vibrant cities. And even though it’s just a game, building it has felt like some of the most important I’ve ever undertaken. The time really is upon us to fix our cities both for healthy urban living and fixing unsustainable car-dependency in a positive way.

So whether you’re a board game enthusiast, a transit advocate, or just looking to have a good time with some friends, I invite you to join us in reimagining what it means to be an engaged citizen in a walkable world. Now go contribute to that Kickstarter please :)