A city-building game in which the city would prefer you didn't

JumpCrisscross 260 points 89 comments October 10, 2026
housing.over.pizza · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (20 comments)

thrance

Line at the end of the in-game "rulebook": > Every rule, vote count and case in this game is drawn from the public record. Sources are in docs/research/ in the project folder. Neighborhood politics scores and the economics are simplified for play. Nice, I'm happy to hear that, Claude . This kind of silly game is supposed to help you understand a complex issue in a fun way. But this is missing the plot entirely. Why is this so overwhelmingly complex? Why would I spend time learning this ugly, convoluted and verbose UI? Who is this for?? EDIT: I'll link to an example of what I think this game should have been: https://research.wmz.ninja/projects/phd/index.html A game made with intent, that is easy to pick up, respects its player's time, and makes its point effectively.

hyperhello

You know, if an old city with a natural boundary doesn’t think you should build a bunch of profitable crap in it, maybe you could take the hint and stop acting like you’re bringing Jesus to them. San Francisco’s seen the conquistadors. In fact, many of the streets in the Sunset are named after them.

treebeard901

It does have the blue angels flying over the city at one point

deadbabe

I imagined something more like a sim city clone where every time you try to put down a building or zone, it’s refused with a pop up message saying why. Let me prompt that out brb

nico

Took me back to sim farm. The aesthetics are awesome

doginasuit

I'm a unclear on what high "The Neighborhood" scores mean in the right panel before approving the project, is it good or bad?

sixothree

I play games like Civilization and we get these tech trees and policy trees and such. And I can never help but wonder what it would be like to play these when the people of the territory act like Americans. You try to incentivize future technology and they push back. You try and prioritize education and they push back. There is always division and infighting. Regardless, I don't think it would actually make the game more fun.

mrhyyyyde

Whoever made this, I love you and we should be friends.

TeMPOraL

The Nuclear option is an interesting choice the game has locked up.

thekuanysh

what a throwback feel, nicely done

minimaxa

Love the idea! I started something similar as a meme game, but I'm just too busy to keep working on it: Data centre slumlord - https://binary-mirror.itch.io/data-centre-slumlord

SubiculumCode

Davis, CA. lol

peri-cl

Reminds me of that Factorio joke mod which adds bureaucracy-processing as a recipe tree. Assemblers start to shut down if you don't process paperwork fast enough. IIRC, it had biters following the player around in queues to give them complaint forms.

JumpCrisscross

My suspicion is San Francisco would love a Beijing-style hukou system. That lets it lock housing (and thus the built character of the city) and control immigration which in turn should result in stable housing prices provided units don't go out of use or residents don't have too many children.

artemonster

how do you complete a tutorial when you cant mute this fucking music

jwsteigerwalt

You win by not playing…

AlbinoDrought

The best I got: Discretionary Review (Developer): I built 4,147 homes in San Francisco, 2015 to 2031. Grade A, "Builder of Some Things". Survived all eight investor reviews. 16 hearings, 3 appeals, 4 lawsuits. The city needed 82,069.

kistaro

Popovers cannot be scrolled in mobile Safari without flipping the screen to landscape and back, and sometimes not even then. It tried to have an adaptive layout but didn’t nail it. Ask Claude to fix mobile scroll target handling?

jubilanti

Fuck your Autoplaying sound you can't mute without going through onboarding multiple screens. You're a sonic terrorist. Please stop doing this.

behringer

The only way to beat this game is to not play.

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