Emlak- A City Building Boardgame

Emlak is a city building boardgame that I designed for 2 – 4 people which can be played in 30 minutes. It has tile placing, bidding and pattern recognition mechanics.

Istanbul is an ever-expanding (spawning) city towards east and west. There are more than 12 million people living in this unique city. New districts are formed and new municipalities are established every couple of years. There are some districts that I have never been but heard.

Mortgage is a new practice in Turkey and it is speeding up the urbanization. Although the land around the Bosphorus is very crowded and the prices are ultra high, , there are many opportunities for banks, investors and estate owners in the areas away from the coast. Thus, a huge amount of native and foreign capital is channeled to real-estate market.

In a spring evening in 2005, I was making sketches of the urban skyline of Istanbul and planning a game night for the weekend. Soon the thoughts of game and the city mixed up and became a new city building game idea... It took a year and many many play tests to finalize the game. Emlak is my second completed boardgame after Tayamat.

I was impressed with the mechanics of Masons; forming the board and matching the patterns with the cards in your hand, then modifying the board again... In the game of Antike, the actions you can access is determined by the rondel, a circular device which is divided into eight wedges, representing seven types of actions. I borrowed this mechanic to determine what kind of districts players can play on the board combining with the pattern building mechanic of Masons.

In the game of Emlak –which means “Real-Estate” in Turkish- players are the real-estate speculators, investors and agencies and score points as they can match the demand cards in their hands with the board. They can also score points by investing in Mortgage stock papers.

The contents of the game are 1 main board, 1 investment board, limited number of player tokens for scoring and investment, demand cards.

There are two boards in the game: the main board and the investment (bidding) board. In the center of the main board there is the municipality building (rondel). In the municipality the officer moves only clock-wise. In their turns the players can move him one quarter or keep it where he is. The color he stands on determines the type of the district the player can build in his round.

Yellow –Industrial district
Blue – Commercial district
Red – Resident district
Green – Recreation and green district

Some district tiles have special icons which represents the additional actions the player must take – mostly beneficial to the player who plays it. Some of these actions are unique to the type of the district.

The player draws a district tile and can place the tile any where on the board as long as one side touches another tile or municipality. Then the player checks if the order of the districts matches with the order in any of the demand cards in his hand. If so, he scores the points on the card and adding one more token to the scoring track. At the end of the round the player refreshes his hand.

The demand cards with 4 points says “find me a recreation ara between a commercial and an residental district”-
Every time players score, they put one token on the scoreboard from their token pool. These tokens are also use for bidding on the investment board. Thus, players have to balance how many to invest and how many to keep for scoring.

Scoring track is an important tactical part of the game. There are some score points where only one player can occupy, if another player reaches the same point that player must place his token to the previous empty space.

Two times during the game and once at the end, players score additional points according to their investment on the Mortgage stock.

Finally when one player scores 40 or more points, all of the players calculate their final score including investment and other bonus points. The winner is the player with the highest score. Scoring itself is a little odd and will take a bit to get used to.

Overall I enjoy designing this game a lot as well as playing. It has a depth of strategy and luck factor yet it plays in half an hour.

Happy gaming,
Tunc Iper