Game: “Suburbia”
– C1-C2 (advanced) –
Practice Your Listening Comprehension
Practice Your Reading Comprehension
One of my favourite board games, “Suburbia,” serves not only as a fantastic strategy game fit for both single and multiplayer modes, but also as an effective and immersive language learning tool.
The game is about developing and managing your own city in a region of other municipalities (AKA your opponents’ cities). This is done by expanding your city borders with new properties, businesses, and services, ranging from residential to commercial and from industrial to governmental. Management comes into play when seeking to balance one’s income and expenses with reputation, population, and development. Will you risk lowering your city’s reputation, thereby decreasing your population growth, by zoning loud or polluting industries near residential areas? Or will you increase your region’s land value with the addition of beautiful lakes, allowing further investment in the city budget for social services or privatized expansion? It is all up to you. You are the mayor. May the best mayor win.
WHAT TO LEARN
By playing “Suburbia” in English there is a large variety of vocabulary and grammatical structures that learners can practice and/or discover:
reading comprehension
listening comprehension
conversational English in a group setting
thinking in English
present simple
imperative
conditional
question structures
vocabulary related to:
American English
types of buildings
types of businesses
government services
urban planning
reputation
budget
numbers
scoring
strategy
and much more…!
What kind of town or city do you live in? What sorts of services are available there? Practice your English by letting me know in the comments below.
