#155: Dissing DoaM Darlings

All right, we'll get to some recent plays here.

I'm going to start us out with Cross Bronx Expressway.

Derek talked about this on a recent episode from BGGCon.

It was actually on the Tricky episode where he talked about his plays of this.

This game had caught my eye, honestly, because GMT is one of our sponsors for DomeCon, and they sent a bundle of games for the con.

And I always kind of have to decide, am I going to keep some of these for the kind of con library, or do I want to put them on the giveaway table? And when I looked at Cross Bronx Expressway, one of the games they sent, I was like, wow.

Immediately I was just intrigued by the box art, frankly, is very different than anything you would expect coming from GMT.

And just the pitch that this is like essentially a socioeconomic war game kind of vibe from their Irregular Conflict series.

Only the third game of the Irregular Conflict series.

And so I was like, I want to get this on the table.

After I heard Derek talk about it, I'm like, I got to get this on the table and figure out, like, is this going to stick around in the Dome library? Is it going to be a game I want to play? And got to play it.

So this is a three player only game.

Well, I'm sure it does some kind of solos and two player modes or whatever, but it is a three player game.

with three players controlling three different kind of entities in the South Bronx in the mid-1900s, where there is a lot of development in the area.

The epitomous Cross Bronx Expressway is being built and many other kind of areas are being developed and built and you're dealing with apartments going up, coming down, you know, clearing space, doing the things that go into kind of keeping the borough viable while trying to also expand it.

So those three entities that are playing are the public, the private, and the community.

So each player is kind of tasked with upholding their end of the bargain, working with the other two to kind of grow things in a responsible way because the game kind of spits out almost like a John Company-esque unrest scenario just naturally, right? As things are growing, as population grows, as you build new housing developments, as you deal with events that come out, then these cubes are kind of dropped onto the map just to kind of cut through all of the text and just talk about the abstract.

Your job is to get these cubes off the map because if you don't, they're going to turn into people who are incarcerated at a blight on the city, so to speak.

And that is one of the conditions of the game, actually.

You're fighting to keep these people off the streets, to responsibly house them, to responsibly take care of them, or the game can just crumble and end and nobody wins.

So this is the game versus the three of us, and we're all versus each other, but we're also responsible for keeping the game afloat.

So I'm going to keep saying John Company in my descriptions here because I get a lot of the vibes of JoCo, where the game can crash and burn and somebody can be left on top of the pile of ashes in John Company.

That's not really how Cross Bronx Expressway works.

If the game crashes, the game crashes.

There's no winner anymore.