Suburbia 5 Star Review – Getting Stuck Halfway Down a Waterslide

After the success of Suburbia Collector’s Edition and Suburbia (Second Edition), Bezier Games combined all existing expansions for Suburbia into a single Suburbia Expansions box. Including Suburbia Inc, Suburbia 5 Star, and Suburbia Nightlife, as well as two promotional expansions Essen and Cons.

While combining these expansions, they’ve also updated them to align with Suburbia (Second Edition) with new artwork, graphic design, and components.

So although this is an exciting release, the downside for me is that it renders my previous review of Suburbia 5 Star useless. With that in mind, in late 2023, I updated this review to match the latest version and rules of Suburbia 5 Star.

What’s new in Suburbia 5 Star?

While Suburbia 5 Star adds 50 new tiles and enough components to play Suburbia with five players, the biggest change is the introduction of stars. This new resource can be found on almost all of the new tiles and represents whether the tile is somewhere tourists want to go.

For example, the Smithsonian would be worth at least 3 stars. Meanwhile, my mouldy cheese collection wouldn’t even raise half of one.

Anyway, as you gain these stars, and your borough becomes more attractive, you’ll move up the star track. This determines player order and gives you benefits at different breakpoints. In addition, at the end of each round, the player highest on this track takes one reputation from the lowest player.

While I just brushed past it, Suburbia 5 Star does introduce a clear delineation between one round and the next. So once everyone takes a turn, you need to stop and reassign the player order before the next round. This is a big departure from the base game where you keep taking turns until the game ends.

For anyone who owns the first edition of Suburbia 5 Star, there is one gameplay change between that and this new edition. That is the change in setup. While in the previous version, you were instructed to shuffle all the tiles in with all tiles from the base game and other expansions. Now you’re asked to remove one tile from the original set for each tile added from this expansion.

To the stars!

The new setup change makes a lot of sense. In the original Suburbia 5 Star, you often didn’t see the star tiles as the pool was so diluted it was like dropping a can of Coke into the ocean. Now, almost every tile you collect has a star on it, so you’re interacting with the star mechanic a lot more in this edition.

This is a major improvement to Suburbia 5 Star. Because now you actually have to think about the stars on each tile. Whether it’s worth paying extra to secure an additional star or to just ignore the mechanism altogether and go your own way. This is a fun addition to your thinking, without overpowering the gameplay you know and love.

That said, and there’s no nice way of saying this, but the addition of a breakpoint at the end of each round sucks. It breaks the continuous flow of Suburbia that I love so much, like getting stuck halfway down a waterslide.

But I get it.

There are some incredibly powerful tiles within this expansion and allowing players to manipulate the player order makes the game feel fairer and allows for clever plays. But from my experience, this interruption is more annoying than anything and actively detracts from my enjoyment of the game.

On another topic, the new tiles are a lot more tongue-in-cheek and humourous than any of the tiles we’ve seen so far. For instance, there’s a tile called Lactose Princess which looks suspiciously like a Dairy Queen. The Mayor Ted Statue is referencing the designer Ted Alspach, and the New York Slice tile is the name of Bezier Games’ other hit board game.

So in summary, the changes made to Suburbia 5 Star in the Suburbia Expansions box improve the expansions a lot from its previous incarnation. However, as long as they keep that break between rounds, I will continue to dislike this expansion as it slows down the game too much for what little it adds.