City Planner Co-op

Building a city is easy. Staying in office is the game.

CityPlanner is a city builder where the roads and zones are only half the job. Five political factions watch everything you do, a fifteen-seat council votes on your laws, and every three years the voters decide whether you keep your job. Play it alone, or share one city and one treasury with up to seven friends — and find out who lobbies against whose parks.

Run the city

• Lay roads and zone land for homes, shops and industry, then watch people build on it and grow from houses to towers.
• Keep the lights on. Power and water travel along your roads. Fall short and parts of the city black out in turn.
• Look after your citizens with police, fire stations, clinics, schools, parks and bus depots, each serving the area around it.
• Balance the budget: set three tax rates, fund five departments, borrow when you must.
• Read the map with views for pollution, crime, traffic, land value and service coverage.

Play the politics

• Five factions — Labor Union, Business League, Green Alliance, Homeowners' Bloc and Civic Reformers — each want different things and each speak for a share of your voters.
• Thirteen policies, from Rent Control to a Congestion Charge. Table a bill, lobby the factions, and see whether the council carries it.
• Demands with deadlines. Meet a faction's demand and it remembers. Miss it and it remembers that too.
• Elections every three years. Fall under 50% approval and you lose your policies, your influence and a tenth of the treasury.

Expect the unexpected

• 49 dilemmas. A casino wants a license. The teachers are on strike. Someone wants to plug a warehouse of crypto miners into your grid. The city pauses and everyone has 15 seconds to vote.
• 66 random events, good and bad: floods, tornadoes, sinkholes, epidemics and recessions, but also booms, bequests and the occasional film crew.
• Many leave lasting effects on crime, demand, income or your utilities for months afterwards.

Co-op for 1 to 8 mayors

• One city, one treasury. Everyone builds; everyone pays.
• Your own influence. Spend it to push your bills through — or to sink a colleague's.
• Majority rules on every dilemma.
• Peer-to-peer over the internet. No account and no game server: the host sends an invite code and friends connect directly. If the host leaves, another player can carry the city on.

Also

• A hands-on tutorial that teaches by doing.
• Autosave every game year, plus manual saves.
• Every map is generated fresh.

Controls

Mouse to build. WASD or arrow keys to move, mouse wheel to zoom, Q and E (or middle-drag) to rotate. Space pauses; 1, 2 and 3 set the speed.

Playing with friends

Everyone needs the same version of the game. The host chooses Host a co-op city and sends the invite code shown under City Hall. Friends paste it under Join a friend. If a reply code appears, send it back to the host, who pastes it under Admit a friend. Connections are direct between players, so a few very strict networks (some mobile and office connections) cannot join.