Last updated on January 15th, 2026 at 08:27 am
SUBURBIA City Building Game – Board Game Review
SUBURBIA City Building Game is a Board/Strategy game from Bezier Games, Inc., first launched in 12th December 2013.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 22+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes SUBURBIA City Building Game Stand Out
"All in all, the app is pretty fantastic … a wonderful addition to anyone’s iPad." -Board Game Geek
"An accessible and interesting game, and we recommend it for budding strategists and architects alike." -Pocket Gamer
"Overall, Suburbia is pretty awesome. It plays well, looks good, has lasting replay value … There’s simply not much to complain about." -148Apps
Ted Alspach's best selling city-building board game is now on iOS! The winner of the prestigious Mensa Select Mind Games award challenges you to manage a growing metropolis. Choose your strategy carefully as you compete against your friends or multiple computer personalities. Or take on the Campaign and travel to real-life cities, each with unique goals.
Build residential, commercial, civic, and industrial areas like stores, museums, airports, and of course suburbs. The market is always changing, so spend your cash wisely. Be careful not to grow too quickly, or you'll lose both income and your reputation. Make the right moves to grow your population and you will emerge victorious!
• Two to four player local pass-and-play games
• Six unique AI (computer) personalities
• Single Player Campaign
• Interactive Tutorial
• Rule Book, Strategy Tips, Tile Reference, and Goal Reference
• Player Stats
• Over 70 different buildings
• Essen SPIEL Expansion, Game Con Bonus Tiles, and Nightlife Expansion
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, SUBURBIA City Building Game is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 15th December 2025
Recent improvements include:
Updated for modern devices.
Download & Availability
SUBURBIA City Building Game is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get SUBURBIA City Building Game on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We got this for $0.99, which really is a steal. This is a great game and an adaptation of a very good board game. The AIs are tough and theres a learning curve to figure out how scoring and modifiers work, but once you do, this is quite fun. Games take about 20 minutes, and the computer handles all the tricky math for you, but we still do recommend learning how it calculates these anyways, or youll never get far. We play on ipad. It makes zooming in easier, and this is important to remind you which tiles use what modifiers, as the text can be small. Placing a surburb tile next to a lake tile is good. Placing suburb next to landfill is bad. But, landfill is great for an economy boost. Part of the fun is learning how to combine your tiles for best effect. The goal conditions can change from game to game, so you cant just use the same layout designs again and again and expect to succeed! Some tips – early in the game, build up your economic base first, or you will stagnate. Keep reputation healthy; you get +1 population for each rep point per turn, but control your growth! If you allow population to grow too quickly, you wont have the economy to support them and you will fall behind. We play vs one AI at a time, and a game lasts about 19 turns, so if you cripple your economy, you wont have time to catch up in time. Anyway, if you like strategic economy games (check out Le Havre too), or you like simcity-like games, Surburbia is a winner.
Our app works perfectly! Maybe a recent update fixed the errors. But this game is fantastic, and the campaign mode really brings new challenges. Love it.
We originally gave it 3 stars because we found the new graphics hard to read, but we found the option to revert to old graphics and all is well.
The preview showing how the tile will affect stats are incorrect. For example, the airport which should only show -1 rep if adjacent to a suburb is showing -1 in every possible spot, despite only one space being adjacent. So disappointing since we love this game.
Tile purchases are wrong. Allows you to buy tiles even if you dont have enough money. If the printed price plus the market price equals more than your coins then you should not be able to buy the tile.
Updated graphics are super cute but we just caught our newly purchased tiles not increasing our income (yellow warehouse +2 for every touching blue business & +5 for blue new car dealership + another +2 for touching yellow warehouse. . If purchases dont increase our scores, its not so fun.
No multiplayer which is the whole reason the game is any good.
The new tiles are gorgeous, however, we own an iPad Pro and even on this large 10-inch screen we cant read the incredibly small writing on the tiles. :/ Im sure the printed tiles will be easier to read, but unfortunately, the online game is now dead to us. :(.
Might not be visually flashy as the kids seem to like in todays apps. But this really captures the table top game and adds quite a lot of aids so the player doesnt have to try to precompute their numbers.
The app works well for us. We also enjoy the game play. Our only complaint is that the AIs are not very strong opponents.
Online multiplayer has been removed.
Game runs great on our iPad using iOS 12.1.4 Excellent conversion of the board game. Convenient for playing on the go. Hours and hours of challenging fun.
The bad reviews are all from older versions of this game – the updated version is perfect, and a 5-Star port of this wonderful board game! We love the multiplayer but also the solo challenges!! No bugs, full tutorial and great UI on iOS 11. Thank you to the design team.
Suburbia is incredibly addictive and engaging.
The interface is probably a nightmare to learn if you don't know the board game well, but if you do it is excellent and provides a great Suburbia experience. It must have been a complicated game to port to iOS, and they did a great job. Engrossing and fun.
But can we get some expansions.
We were all ready to write our three-star review, then we tried the campaign. Our first exposure was Castles of Mad King Ludwig (a very similar game by the same designers). We struggled with that one until we downloaded the manual for the physical game – the Ludwig tutorial is a bit choppy and it's hard to find the concrete rules. Playing alone, we went straight to the single player campaign, and it didn't click. Before giving up, we tried multiplayer against the AI, and finally started having a good time. We still enjoy Castles, now that we've figured it out. We brought that understanding into Suburbia, which shares a lot of rules. The tutorial and manual here are much better laid out and much clearer. We had only one point that needed clarity – does a tile score only when you place it, or do the tile bonuses continue to trigger every time you play more tiles next to them (or elsewhere in the city?). Some Googling resolved that one (it's the latter, they continue to trigger), and so once we clearly understood the rules, we could play. The main problem here is the AI, and, indirectly, the size of the goal bonuses. We lost our first game, after winning the board. We got no goal bonuses and the computer trounced us in the final scoring. In the second game, we lost by 1, still figuring out the rules. In our third game we pretty much doubled the computer's score, and continue to do so. It's not that we're amazing, we think the AI is just too weak. And the fact that you can play a pretty mediocre game, but complete all the goals, and your score just explodes – it is a mundane task to build fewer lakes than the computer. We were ready to chalk up a three-star review due to insufficient AI. Then we tried the campaign, which had fallen so flat in Castles of Mad King Ludwig. But this time it is great! The campaign forces you to actually play the game and push yourself to eke the last bit of efficiency and bonus out of the city you're building – this is what the game is all about. Now the game forces you to think, evolve, and play. It saved the game. Feedback for developers? Make it abundantly clear how and when the tile bonuses trigger, even go so far as to animate where your points are coming from after each play. This is an important but unclear part of the mechanics. And introduce some harder AI opponents that stretch your players – shouldn't be too hard in a game that is pure math (or maybe it is hard to find that medium between too easy and pure calculator?) Feedback for shoppers – get this game and play the single-player campaign, if you want a math-based puzzle of a game that will both interest and challenge you.
Despite disabling sound, the app starts with sound. This is an automatic 2-star max for us, regardless of other app quality.
Please update the game for the iPhone XS Max and other new devices.
It seems that you get reputation reductions for adjacent tiles, even when they are not adjacent. The game isnt playable if it doesnt follow the rules.
Zooming feels buggy on iPhone. Sometimes you lose sight of the tiles and have to quit the game and start a new one.
We like this game a lot but the app needs some work. We're constantly getting error messages in online multiplayer…the latest being "bad argument #-1 to ?" What the heck does that mean? It's also really confusing to challenge/host our friends. We always end up player random players which is fine but we had hoped it would be simple like in the Carcassonne app. We'll continue to play because we love the game and already purchased it but we hope it will be improved soon.
The game is interesting, and the board game is probably fun. The app is poorly implemented. There is no save feature for single player games, and if you forget to go in and save your local game and the app restarts, it is gone. Campaign is only 10 scenarios and way to short to be worth the value of the game, especially considering each scenario is just a variation on the theme. All-in-all, probably about 2 hours of gameplay, and then into the used games folder to never be played again.
We were scrolling through the AppStore and accidentally clicked on the 6.99 and the purchase part came up where you need your finger print. We clicked on the cancel button then once we were done looking at the featured tab we went back to the home screen then we saw this game up on our home screen. Waste of $7 that we needed.
We are a very long time fan of this game and no it well. We just got the app and we like the app as well. However, after playing two games and being confused about how the app was adding up our income, we decided to double check it. We are very confident that it is not adding up our income correctly. It is hard to tell because you cant see how many deductions you have from the population board, but we are showing that we should have an income of 26 minus population deductions. Our population is 28. The game is showing us with an income of 15. If it isnt adding up the effects of the tiles correctly then the game is unplayable because you cannot strategically select tiles. We would really appreciate a response, refund, or help in understanding this. Maybe we are missing something, but like we said, we are a long time fan of the board game and know it well. We dont think we are mistaken.
Nothing is more frustrating than playing out an entire game only to get Runtime error bad argument #-1 to ? (String expected, got nil). This has ruined two attempts to play now so Im done.
Tried our first solo game, out of income to buy anything, but the game wont let us proceed until we place a tile, which we cant afford, and we see no way to tell it End Turn or if there, some action that we can do that will let us just pass or take money, it wasnt well-explained in the tutorial.
If you're playing a campaign you'll have to start over from scratch as you'll never be able to find your tiles again.
No decent tutorial, no explanation, the interface is plain terrible. If you played the tabletop version you probably can get around these issues, but if you haven't – don't bother.
The user interface on this should be better for a premium app. Worst part is that there's no "find our city" button anywhere: for some reason, it's too easy to tap the screen on some way to lose sight of your tiles, never to be found again (on an iPhone). We've had to quit 3 of 5 games because of this: we don't think we'll try it again.
Hi, please let us know if gamecenter 10 will be implemented.
The game design is great. Campaign and single player games are both nice options. The calculation of population from extra cash at the end of the game was a little confusing (more complete directions would help for those who haven't played the real game), but overall it's great.
Much more enjoyable than the table top version, much faster without keeping track of everyone's point changes. Love the fun one player campaign and that there are npcs that can be added to multiplayer pass n play.
We LOVE Suburbia and we do like this app, but we feel it needs a few additions to really shine. First, it needs to have a way to reset the view when you zoom in. We have had to stop multiple games when we accidentally zoomed in too far and couldn't reset the view. Next, it needs to have the Inc expansion added and the 5 Star as well. We love playing those with the real game and we miss them with the app. Third, the AI players are too easy to beat. We haven't lost a game yet. Can't wait for the next round of updates.
Having just discovered the amazing Suburbia board game, we were so excited to see that there was an app as well. Unfortunately the app has quite a few glitches that makes it verging on unplayable, especially for the multiplayer options. Hopefully they'll be able to sort these issues out so that more people can discover the fun of Suburbia.
One of the tiles said -reputation for adjacent community so we placed it by itself next to a lake. Still subtracted the rep.
Especially in the multiplayer department!! Game plays oddly when playing against people online, and it doesn't always update when it is your turn. Additionally, we had to replay our turn frequently before it updated and switched turns to other person. We'd play our turn, and an hour later, we'd have to play the same turn. Frustrating whence game progresses so slowly because of that. It would take weeks to complete a game multiplayer. Interesting single player campaign, however, so we appreciate the option of playing alone.
Zoom bug keeps you from doing anything if you accidentally misclick, and there is no way to reload saved games.
We can't figure out if it's a bug or just poorly explained but we have no idea how the cost is impacted aside from the tile price and market. We read the rules and walked through the tutorial to no avail.
No LOCAL NETWORK/bluetooth play, the game forces Game Center which is utter failure, unreliable, slow. The game does not allow you to view your city or opponent city (as you would in real boardgame session) while waiting for opponent turn. Imagine playing chess where ipad hides board while you wait for opponent? Has author ever played Suburbia boardgame with real people? Game Center loses sync and requires constant manual resyncing. Tiles are not readable on older non-retina devices. Let other developers pick up good titles like Suburbia, dont kill it with crummy releases like this one.
Riddled with bugs. Tiles disappear, people cannot join your game sometimes, doesn't tell you when it's your turn. Great board game, very poor ipad game due to bugs that have not been fixed since we bought it over a year ago.
We agree with most of the review by LetsGetTrivial. Great game. If you like city building + strategy (such as Settlers of Catan, SimCity, etc) youll likely lose time to this game. The tutorial is vastly incomplete for players. Calculating tile impact once a handful of tiles have been played will be extremely confusing to most players – Especially those who come to this game having never played the board game. The developer needs to step-by-step explain tile stats in different situations. In addition, the written instructions need a visual overhaul and miss important point in tile tabulation. Hoping for a product update so we can better enjoy this game.
We want to like this iOS version of the board game Suburbia, but it just dumps you into the game without showing you the tutorial, and since the many options and controls are unintuitive, you stumble around and are tempted to just quit. Then, if you are on the single-player campaign and need to leave the game or turn the iPad off, well, you just lost your game progress. Not a good implementation.
Suburbia is a beautifully designed and well-balanced game. Think of it as a more strategic version of Sim City. Every turn gives you meaningful options, and there are different approaches you can take to accomplish goals. This is also a very well done App adaptation of the board game. We particularly like the solo campaign. There are a series of scenarios that you play through. Its not simply a matter of random goals. Each one feels unique and well thought out. Lots of re-playability. Even playing the same scenario over and over again feels fresh, as the sequence of tiles can change the course of development quite a bit. Note to the devs: Awesome job! However, we think you are charging way too little for this. Please consider selling additional expansions or scenario packs in the future. Also please consider making an iPhone version.
We haven't even played the multiplayer options here. The single player variant alone is worth the price of admission. Will buy the board game too when it is in stock again.
A beautifully constructed and addictive game with playing options between the campaign and local play. Some suggestions would be to add and an "undo" button. For example while moving a tile if you accidentally hit the check mark you're screwed. A minor point would be to add a "play again" option which would be nice so you don't have to select the players each game. Some stats would be a nice addition also. These suggestions do not take away the enjoyment of a terrific game, excellent job.
We love suburbia the board game, it is one of our top ten games. And this app is better in many ways! While you do miss the face to face gameplay of a tabletop, it improves in the one downside of the boardgame, the fiddlyness of keeping track of everything. This ios game does that for you. Plus we love how they moved beyond and added a single player campaign. This is great and unique from the board game. We haven't tried multiplayer yet. We do look forward to hopefully the expansion suburbia inc sometime tin the near future.
This is even more fun than the board game as it requires no setup and the opponents (if you choose AI opponents) take their turns very quickly. We especially like the single player campaign mode. It's very challenging and it made us a much better player. After two weeks with this app, we now often beat all our friends when we play the board game.
Great board game to have an electronic version to track all the book keeping. Solo campaign is fun and addictive. One of the best iOS versions of a board game we've played.
Great iOS to one of our favorite board games. 5th star will be added once multiplayer is improved. 6th star with suburbia inc. :).
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.1.4
- Size: 83.59 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Bezier Games, Inc.]()
Last updated: 15th December 2025 | Genre: Board, Strategy | Developer: Bezier Games, Inc.