Cities Skylines - 10 Minute Mayor

City Building

Building cities in games like Cities Skylines can be a peaceful and rewarding endeavour - once you have mastered good city design, you can chain together your road network, utilities and zoning until you have the perfect little hamlet, village, town or city to call your own. It may not be a genre for everyone, a bit of a niche that a handful of people (including myself) love as one of their favourites, and of recent time Cities Skylines has taken the crown as quite possibly the best traditional city builder around. For those outside of the fanbase, its not as simple as slapping down some roads, colouring in some squares and calling it a day, your city requires thought and planning if you don't want it to become a gridlocked nightmare, overflowing with trash and dead bodies, so with that in mind...

Two heads are better than one

The one issue with city builders is they can be a little solitary, for those of us that love them that can be part of their charm, but what if you want to make it a multiplayer affair? In comes 10 minute mayor, with a simple premise that can add a whole different spin on your favourite city builder: You play for 10 minutes, building the city as you see fit, then switch with a partner (or rotate through multiple players). The beauty of this set-up is when you colaborate with people who have different building styles or, even better, people who don't traditionally play city builders! Decisions should be made without any intervention from other players, except if those less-familiar with the game genuinely need help, otherwise, let them build free and have a laugh when districts fail to mesh together and gridlock needs to be remidied.

Extending the rules for more fun (and chaos)

So this new way to play should be easy to follow and set-up, but what if you wish to tweak things a little further? Well these addons and variants can make the game that little bit more interesting...

Addons

• Merging Towns - build seperate towns on the same map and work together to make two functional and profitable towns and eventually grow into two seperate cities, completely apart. Agree connections and public transportation and have limitations on what each town can have. Perhaps make one town a tech and office and the other an industrial hub? One a tourist town and one a university town? Its up to you to negotiate
• No Reverts - once something is built, agree a number of turns before that area can be modified again (perhaps with the exception of if gridlock occurs). Mistakes must be embraced and worked around, adding to the charm and realistic feel of building a city
• Campaign Promises and Elections - between your turn, you have to pitch what you wish to accomplish in your time. If playing with a few players you could have everyone vote for the next mayor instead of rotating, letting players pitch their promises against one another (No voting for yourself!).

Variants

• Change the time - 10 minutes feels about right for these kinds of games, but if you want to mix it up simply changing the time limit can make it feel different. Want chaos? Make it 30 seconds. Want more time to develop? 20 or 30 minutes. You could even shift the critera, let each mayor have 1 square or a fixed portion of a square to build on each turn instead
• Keep it paused - keep the game paused until you have filled your starting square, while alternating control, once filled unpause and watch the city build - hopefully you've planned it out perfectly!
• Remote mayors together - remember this game could easily be played across the internet, either by screen sharing or simply sending the save file back and forth