Sustainable Cities and Communities

SDG 11 lives in the board of Watts and Wealth as much as in any single card. Urban tiles are a distinct terrain category in the buildable mix, and facility decisions on those tiles shape the city’s energy and pollution profile for the rest of the game.

Primary mechanics

Buildable terrain includes plains, forest, coast, mountain, desert, tundra, river, urban, and volcanic categories. Urban tiles favour facilities with low spatial footprint (small solar, micro-hydro) and penalize high-pollution generators that would cluster smog locally.

Smog_Emergency (era 2) lets the drawer buy any facility from the most-polluting player at half cost — a market-shock event that punishes pollution leaders. Smog_Fog_Crisis (era 3) hits the drawer with -10 tokens and -5 energy if they hold more than three fossil facilities. Together they model the compound-hazard pattern AR6 attributes to Asian megacities.

Grid_Blackout_E2 and Grid_Blackout_E4 are escalating-severity variants of the same disruption — the later-era variant is more punishing because urban dependence on grid electricity has grown.

Card-level grounding

• Industrial_Revolution is the era-1 Event card that makes the drawer’s next build free — a one-shot acceleration of early-era urban expansion.
• Railway_Expansion is an era-2 Policy card that reduces all build costs by two tokens — infrastructure that connects inland tiles economically by lowering the cost of building anywhere.
• Infrastructure_Bailout is an era-2 Policy card that protects one facility from destruction or decommission, modelling state-led urban resilience funding.
• Disaster_Preparedness_Fun is an era-2 Policy card (costs 20 tokens) that cancels one natural-disaster card outright — explicit SDG 11.5 framing on disaster risk reduction.

SDG 11 sub-targets in mechanics

• 11.6 (air quality): Smog cards + facility-pollution math directly model the air-quality consequence chain.
• 11.5 (disaster resilience): Mitigate-card layer + Infrastructure_Bailout encode the resilience-investment trade-off.
• 11.b (sustainable urbanisation policy): Policy cards combined with urban facility choices teach the long-horizon coupling between policy and urban form.