18th Jun 2026 - Cross Bronx Expressway
by Robin. Sat 20 Jun (Updated at Sat 20 Jun)A bit of an oddity, this one, so I thought I'd better write something about it. Michel is definitely one of the club's most dependable finders of offbeat board games; and hopefully I'm a moderately dependable signer-up to play those games when he lists them.
I saw this one on the board for a few weeks before it actually got played at the club, so maybe you've all looked it up already when pondering your options for the week. But for those who don't know, it's a 3-player game from GMT Games that isn't a war game at all, though it has certain similarities with COIN games. At least, so I'm told... I've not played many war games, so COIN is a cult that I've not yet dared to approach. But if this was a taster, it was quite a promising one.
The bits that attracted me to Cross Bronx Expressway were the theme, but also the very unsymmetric factions. I was a big fan of Weimar, which has a (very vaguely) similar theme and unsymmetricness, so wondered if I might find something similar here. And this game is certainly a lot simpler than Weimar, but the general concept of part-cooperative, part-competitiveness is still there - along with the broader wargame thing where you spend most of the game trying to cancel out what the others are doing, so not actually scoring many points. And the factions are much more unsymmetrical than Weimar, which is great.
The theme of this one is (I think) the urban regeneration of the Bronx after the Great Depression. 3 factions are competing to reshape the borough according to their ideals. The player who scores the most points wins the game, but each faction scores points for completely different things. And the actions they can take to achieve those things are each different as well. So there are 3 players playing somehow 3 different games, but with the same stuff on the same board. The stuff on the board is the districts, the buildings, the community organisations... and the actual people who live there.
We nominated Michel to play the "Community" faction, because he'd played the other 2 factions previously. Community represents the small businesses and social clubs - and apparently also the gangs - in the Bronx. They want the best outcome for the community, which seems to involve less people getting put in prison, and lots of nice social organisations to keep everyone gainfully occupied.
That left me and Marko to choose from the Public and Private factions. I went for Public - representing the council and social services (and police) - because that felt slightly more conscientiously nice than Private; though by the end of the game I definitely felt like the bad guys. Basically Private's aims revolve around making money, and making good investments, which often chimes with the nice rosy positive economic outcomes that are nice for the community. Whereas Public's aims are balancing the budget and keeping people off the streets - ie. cramming them into overcrowded jails. I guess that's what the Public sector looks like in Trump-era America.
Anyway, it's always fun to be the bad guys, so I had a good time. I spent the first half of the game trying to nick points off the others by getting everyone off the streets into publicly-funded support schemes, then the second half flooding the streets with unsupported vulnerable people, to get them off my books and into places where they caused a problem for the others. Sounds like a bad day at the local DSS office? And yet somehow very absorbing.
So I did enjoy this game, and would certainly play it again. I did wonder if it might be a bit unbalanced, though. It's a low-score game, in which each faction can theoretically score a maximum of 10 points. But surely no-one every gets anywhere near 10 points, because the others are always somehow competing for the same things: although the points for each faction come from different criteria, those criteria always take points off others, either directly or indirectly. Which is great, but...
For the Public faction, 3 of the possible 10 points, and indeed 3 of the 5 points that I actually managed to get, came from keeping the Public budget in the black. And of all the point-scoring criteria, that is the one that the other players can interfere with the least - even if they stopped me raising any funds, all I had to do was not spend too much, and I'd be fine. Not spending too much limited my ability to stop the others scoring points, but still no-one else managed to get more than 4 points in total - while my Public faction was able to get 75% of that just by good admin.
That said, it certainly didn't feel easy. This was 3 hours of hard-fought scrapping over a combined total of 13 points. But I certainly felt like the bad guys: not only was I doing somewhat callous stuff to the local population, but the system was rigged in my favour as well! No wonder they don't like a big public sector in Trumpland. I'll play a different faction next time...