Every single time I’ve played Suburbia since its release in 2012, the same moment comes up. You’re weighing up some tile or other, wondering where or how to expand, when your eyes fall on your opponent’s suburb.

“What on earth have you built?!” you ask, gazing at some new variety of miserabilist hellscape.

A school tucked between a slaughterhouse and a cliff edge. A “commercial district” consisting of an office building, a stationary shop and a graveyard. Or stranger still – the last game I played saw my friend developing an idyll that ran very close to “secret cult”. To maximise the profit from his rare Crystal Caverns my friend had single-mindedly surrounded them with a druidic circle of affordable housing.

Suburbia is a masterfully designed game. It’s easy to learn, impossible to master and endlessly surprising. But it’s these comedic undertones that make me love it.

Let me outline the rules: Players in Suburbia are racing to have the most people in their suburb when the game ends, but this is a delicate balancing act. The board showing everyone’s population is covered in tiny red speedbumps, and passing one of these reduces your income and your suburb’s desirability. Grow too quickly and you’ll find yourself tangled up in red tape, with dwindling funds and a pathetic trickle of new residents. Grow too slowly and you’ll be unable to catch your friends when the game ends. It’s urban planning meets the immortal game of chicken.

How you achieve any of this is equally simple. Everybody start Suburbia with just three hexagonal tiles: One suburb, one park, and one factory. Loosely, yellow industrial tiles massively increase income, but decrease your suburb’s reputation (the rate at which you gain population) when next to green residential tiles. Parks cost money, but increase your reputation every time you put a home or office next to them. That kind of thing.

But every single tile in Suburbia is different, and while an unfortunate placement of one will often make them as worthless as the cardstock they’re printed on, correct placement can bring incredible power. The Office of Bureaucracy lowers your reputation, but can be ludicrously profitable if you manage to amass all lots of other black, bleak Government tiles. A Wildlife Reserve will have people flocking to your suburb, just so long as you never build in that direction again.

Six tiles are always available for all players to buy in a “conveyor belt”-style central shop. On your turn you can buy one of the tiles and socket it onto your growing suburb, but when you buy something the rest of the tiles in the shop all slide down both physically and in price, before you finally add a new tile is the empty space at the top.

Once again you’re plotting risk vs. reward, constantly weighing up how much you’re willing to pay for a tile vs. the risk of another player buying it. About three or four times in any game of Suburbia, all players will be lost in thought, someone will silently purchase a tile they didn’t really want and another player will scream “NO!” as their plans for a utopia shatter like a china plate on the game’s endless concrete. Or perhaps they’ll elicit the more passive-aggressive “Just wondering, why did you buy that?” through clenched teeth.

Ultimately, a game of Suburbia is long enough that everyone will have their fair share of successes and disasters, and it’s this arc that makes it such a wonderful puzzle to share.

To begin with everybody assumes control of a blank slate, and it’s initially interesting to see the radically different directions (literally and metaphorically) you all grow in. Quickly, you’re all lamenting the unique problems that you’ve created, whether that’s a lack of money, space, a certain tile type and so on. In the game’s second act you’re alternately groaning at your friends’ ludicrous combos and giggling at their failings, before finally approaching the third act where everyone’s suburb starts sputtering and failing like an ancient car due to the pressure of your growing population. In the space of two hours you’ve had a dream, achieved some small part of it and burned it all down.

Vitally, every game of Suburbia is different. There are so very many tiles in the game, from drive-thrus and casinos to homeowners associations and lakes and everything in between, and with this come a great many possible ways to build. I get excited to play Suburbia after two years not just because it’s fun, or because I can watch new friends marvel at its puzzle for the first time, but because I know it’ll still be new and exciting for me.

I’d happily recommend this game to everyone. A harder choice is whether you want to invest in either of the game’s two expansions, both of which add variety and just a touch of complexity.

Suburbia, Inc. is the first of these, adding a selection of new tiles (ah, the romance of the Indoor Mall, the illicit thrill of the Redistricting Office!) and some randomised mid-game milestones to strive for (for example, pressuring players to have three Industrial tiles early to receive a bonus to their income). The main draw, though, is the selection of new “Border” tiles that can be grafted onto one of the edges of your suburb. Suddenly you’re bordering a beach, a theme park, or perhaps a border where the appeal is an immediate financial kickback – accepting the terms and conditions for a nearby Radioactive Waste Site, for example.

Purchased with a little foresight, these borders are the best tiles in the game. But the real cost isn’t their printed price, but a terrible regret for the rest of the game. They represent players hog-tying themselves, sealing off whole compass directions from further growth. In a game where you have no idea what’ll be up for purchase next, they represent an appealing gamble. Altogether, Suburbia, Inc. is a gentle upscaling of the original game’s puzzle – what to build, and where, and when?

Suburbia’s second expansion, Suburbia 5 Star, is similarly invested in adding colour and complexity, though succeeds more at the former than the latter. Its massive collection of 50 new zany tiles, from a Haunted Asylum, to a Cornfield Maze, to a Bungee Bridge, all increase your suburb’s Star rating. Each turn the player with the most boring suburb loses exactly 1 resident, who promplty moves to the suburb with the highest star rating.

Unlike borders and milestone goals of Suburbia, Inc., the star rating doesn’t augment the base game’s puzzle as much as it layers something else to think about on top of it - it’s decision-making which sometimes gets in the way of the game you were playing before. You end up thinking twice about that combo you’re putting together, because maybe it’s best to buy a star-rated tile instead. This is still entertaining decision-making, but it’s more awkward and unimpressive than I’ve come to expect from Suburbia. Though that is, perhaps, fitting for an expansion about roadside attractions.

But never mind that. Suburbia 5 Star isn’t even in shops yet. For now, the only puzzle you should be worrying about is whether to buy Suburbia or not. And if you’ve gotten this far, the solution is probably “Yes.”