Overview

Welcome to Sunnyvale, California! You care deeply about the housing crisis currently afflicting the state and strongly support the construction of more affordable housing. You just happen to have some very reasonable concerns about these particular affordable housing projects, at this specific time, in your own neighborhood. Fortunately, there’s plenty of space in all those other neighborhoods where these developments can go!

In this board game, players take on the role of NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) activists, using various tactics to restrict and rezone their neighborhoods to prevent the construction of affordable housing. The goal is to maneuver around zoning laws, rally community objections, and strategically block new projects until there is nowhere left in your neighborhood to build affordable housing.

Each player controls a 6×6 grid, representing their local community, and must balance proposing projects in other neighborhoods with using Activism and Concern cards to manipulate the placement of affordable housing. Through gameplay, players will experience how local opposition can shape housing policies, creating a complex web of resistance that ultimately stalls progress.

The game captures the essence of community dynamics, strategic planning, and the often contradictory stance of NIMBY activism in a fun and challenging format.

Assessment Goals

1. Players should be able to identify how local resistance impacts housing development: By reading and using Concern and Activism cards, players will recognize the specific strategies communities use to block projects and delay housing developments, illustrating the cumulative effects of NIMBYism. We evaluated this with a pre-and-post assessment that asked players to name as many NIMBY tactics as they could. We found players consistently gained knowledge on this metric.
2. Players should reflect on the real-world consequences of limited affordable housing: The game’s “Housing Crisis Worsens” mechanic simulates broader societal impacts such as increased homelessness or displacement, encouraging players to connect in-game events to real-world housing issues. We evaluated this by asking players how important community input should be on the construction of new housing before and after play, to see if players were willing to de-prioritize it in service of increased housing supply. In tests, some players moved dramatically on this metric, but others did not move at all.
3. Players should come to understand the collective impact of housing opposition: When NIMBYs oppose housing in their neighborhoods,they often argue that the housing will be built elsewhere. Given NIMBYs are widespread, this generally isn’t true. The game systems should model this effect and demonstrate it to the players. We evaluated the opinion change here by asking players whether they thought affordable housing blocked in one location would likely be built elsewhere both before and after play. This metric saw little movement in our tests.

History of Game Versions

Version 1.

V1 Prototype of the Anti-Tetris core mechanic

Our initial prototype featured a 5×5 grid. On their turn, players could play cards that let them either:

• Immediately place single family housing on their board
• Give someone else an affordable housing project
• Or place “concerns” on their board that would block affordable housing

When a player received an affordable housing project, it would take a certain number of turns before they would have to play it on their board. If there was nowhere for it to go, the housing project was discarded. Their score would be the difference of the number of single family homes minus the number of affordable housing units.

Playtest of V1

Playtesters shared that since affordable housing could be rotated and placed in any position on the board, they were forced to strategize where to best place their concern tokens to do the best job of blocking these projects, yielding a challenge aesthetic with non-obvious strategy and engaging gameplay. They also enjoyed the mechanic of giving other players affordable housing, which added a social aspect to the game. This social aspect was reinforced by the players’ commitment to the theme, saying things like “You’re doing the community a great service” when others had to add affordable housing, or “we really need this… just not in my backyard.” Overall, players had fun with the strategic element while actively engaging with each other and fully embracing the theme.

Version 2.

V2 Improving Learning and Realism

Since the initial prototype struck a great balance in terms of being challenging and fun, for the early iterations we focused our attention on aligning the game with our learning goals and having the gameplay model the real world better. Recognizing that NIMBYs also often oppose the construction of single-family homes, and feeling that their gameplay effect of blocking affordable housing and scoring points at the same time was too powerful, we decided to remove them from the game. We also decided to remove some concern cards, such as “Racism. Just racism.” due to the role-playing that it encouraged and mismatched humorous tone and sensitive subject. Finally, we decided to expand the board to a 7×7 grid and introduce terrains (open space, suburbia, and downtown) and a transit line running through the map so concerns to block affordable housing would feel less random.

Playtest of V2

In the playtest following these changes, there was still some role playing but noticeably less than before. One player said things such as “My NIMBY’s are gonna fuckin flood your neighborhood” and “We’re all winning because we’re getting affordable housing. Unfortunately it’s in my neighborhood,” but the other two players didn’t engage in this aspect of the game. Players were more silent and focused more on strategy than what the cards had to offer.

Version 3.

V3 Fidelity Improvements

Theorizing that the reduction in fellowship-fun was due to the upgrade in fidelity, which had less character than our initial prototype, we redesigned the cards and board so they would be more immersive. Affordable housing cards would feature blueprints of real-life proposed affordable housing projects and “concern” cards would feature images of relevant NIMBY protests and signs. The player boards would feature real-life names of downtowns, suburban streets, and open spaces in or near Sunnyvale.

Playtest of V3

Unfortunately, the playtest following these changes yielded the least roleplaying or engagement with the themes so far. The players hardly interacted with each other at all, and the comments that delighted us from previous playtests were completely absent. Additionally, when players played concern cards, instead of reading the italicized concern they simply read the card type aloud, which means they weren’t being exposed to the various reasons NIMBYs give for blocking affordable housing. Finally, some playtesters expressed that the game made them more sympathetic to NIMBYs’ needs. This was broadly reflected in the assessment data we collected—some players showed changes in knowledge and housing attitudes, but others did not.

This playtest clearly demonstrated that we needed to adjust the mechanics of the game to better emphasize our learning goals. While we wanted this to be a complacency game, where players take on the role of those causing the problem and are forced to thereby learn their methods and experience the consequences of those actions, this message was lost. While players could look at the board and notice that no affordable housing was being built, there was no reflection of the consequences in their score and no element of the game that taught players what consequences there might actually be.

A different procedural issue was present throughout each playtest. A central mechanic is the time that it takes for a housing project to be built, which we implemented by putting “time tokens” on the card of the housing projects. Initially, the player would remove one token from each of the projects in front of them at the end of their turn. We discovered that players had a hard time remembering to follow through with this procedure. Theorizing that this was due to the fact that players would forget to do a procedure at the very end of their turn, we changed the order so this procedure would be the first thing players did on their turn. Unfortunately, that didn’t solve the issue, and players continued to forget to remove time tokens from their cards.

Another issue persistent in the gameplay we observed in many of the playtests was the pacing. Towards the end of the game, when players’ boards were almost completely filled with concern tokens, there was little to no worry that they would be forced to play affordable housing. This made the end of the game somewhat sluggish and boring. While this might faithfully model the real world, it meant the game got somewhat boring at the end.

Version 4.

V4 Putting the ‘Crisis’ in ‘Housing Crisis’

To solve all of these problems–the lack of emphasis on consequences of not enough affordable housing, players forgetting to remove time-tokens, and the boring end-game–we introduced a “Housing Crisis Worsens” card. Working in conjunction with this card is a meter that tracks how bad the housing crisis is at any given moment.

As soon as a player draws a housing crisis card from the deck, they turn it face up for all players to see. The aesthetics of each card directly exposes players to the consequences of reduced affordable housing. Each housing crisis card causes the housing crisis level to rise. Then the players all resolve the effects of the new housing crisis level. Instead of removing time-tokens from their projects at the end or beginning of each turn, players remove time tokens  from each project based on the housing crisis level as this card is revealed. This change ensures that time tokens will actually be removed when they’re supposed to since it’s now part of an exciting communal event rather than a boring, individual procedure. Another effect of the housing crisis card is that players must remove some number of concern tokens from their board, opening their space up so there’s a chance they’ll be forced to place affordable housing even late-game.

Playtest of V4

Our playtest of this final version surprised even us in how well it went. The crisis cards created an element of constant tension in the game that was not there before, and the removal of tokens kept the game in that satisfying middle-ground of barely being able to block housing the most of the way through. Best of all, re-emphasizing the theme of the cards in their layout got the players reading them aloud and laughing with each other the whole way through. While the game does cover some sobering topics, we believe that laughing at the silly excuses of NIMBYs adds an important satirical element that we believe will reinforce the game’s message with emotion. This hypothesis was borne out in our assessment: improvement in player knowledge of NIMBY tactics was substantially higher than the previous playtest (Though it deeply pains Seamus to imply any kind of conclusion can be drawn from a sample size of three).

There are still some things to be tweaked, but they’re largely numerical and balancing issues: players need to be able to add more concern tokens than they currently can to compensate for their constant removal, and the “lawsuit” cards are bad in multiples. To correct for this, we removed half of the lawsuit cards from the deck and increased the density of strong Concern cards. Getting the balance exactly right, though, will require further testing.

Print-at-Home PDF

Download: Sunnyvale Print and Play

Rules: Sunnyvale, CA rules document

Polish: Wooden Tokens

Our physical prototype uses wooden tokens to give concerns, permitting counters, and housing a weighty feel, and makes it easy to distinguish between the different kinds of counters.