When most people think about board games, they picture colorful maps, clever strategies, maybe even a little friendly competition over who builds the biggest city or gathers the most resources. But sometimes, a game chooses to tell us a story that’s heavier, more complicated—a story that asks us not just to play, but to reflect.
That’s exactly what Cross Bronx Expressway is trying to do. It isn’t just entertainment—it’s a doorway into one of New York’s most painful urban chapters: the mid-20th century construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway, a project that bulldozed through neighborhoods, displaced thousands of families, and left scars on the Bronx that are still felt today.
The design team behind the game set out to do something unusual: turn a contested history into a playable experience. Not in the sense of trivialization, but as a chance to understand the human costs of planning decisions often talked about only in technical terms.
A Different Kind of City-Building
If you’re expecting shiny skyscrapers and efficient subway lines, think again. Cross Bronx Expressway flips the typical city-building genre on its head. Instead of celebrating growth and expansion, this game zooms in on what gets lost in the name of “progress.”
Players navigate the reality of forced relocations, fractured communities, and the economic fallout that came when blocks of the Bronx were razed to make way for the highway. A big part of the design question was: How do you capture that complexity without turning it into just another set of numbers and cubes?
Mechanics That Mirror Reality
The designers developed three main tools to channel history into gameplay:
- Loss as a resource: Instead of stockpiling money or goods, you’re constantly managing the fallout of displacement, fading neighborhoods, and disrupted local economies.
- Conflicting roles: Players embody different actors—planners, politicians, business leaders, community groups—each with competing goals, often at odds with one another. The tension is the point.
- No take-backs: Once a building is gone or a decision is made, there’s no undo button. The board carries the scars of your moves.
It’s the kind of design that ensures the history isn’t just a backdrop but sits at the heart of how the game feels.
Respecting the History
The developers are keenly aware that they’re working with painful material. They say the goal was never to make players feel like they’re “playing with tragedy,” but instead to invite them into a process that reveals how damaging urban planning decisions can be.
In a board game landscape often dominated by wars, colonization, or cooperative adventures in space, centering the human impact of a highway might seem unusual. And yet, that’s what makes this project powerful: it positions games as a medium for social commentary and historical learning, not just escapism.
A Map That Tells Its Own Story
Visually, Cross Bronx Expressway avoids flash. The board presents a detailed map of the Bronx, muted in color so that the highway—and the neighborhoods it swallows—stand out with stark clarity. When a building is demolished, players literally remove it from the board, leaving behind the concrete ribbon of the expressway.
It’s a striking transformation to watch in real time. By the end of the game, the map has become its own chronicle of loss.
Can Board Games Teach Us History?
Historians often describe games as “models” of the past. By simulating decision-making and consequences, a game can force players to sit in the discomfort of complexity. Cross Bronx Expressway doesn’t pretend to give tidy answers. Instead, it encourages discussion: Should development always trump community? Who really benefits from progress—and who pays the price?
These are questions that linger long after the final piece has been placed.
More Than Just a Game
What makes this designer diary so compelling is that it’s not just about how a game was built, but why. It’s a glimpse into how board games are evolving—as tools for dialogue, empathy, and re-examining history.
Where most games might ask you to manage wood, gold, or armies, Cross Bronx Expressway asks you to manage lives, neighborhoods, and the weight of irreversible choices.
And that might be its greatest achievement: proving that cardboard and dice can carry not just strategy, but meaning.
What Do You Think?
- Can board games help us make sense of painful history, or do they risk softening its edges?
- Could more games take this approach, focusing not on victories, but on costs?
Because in the end, Cross Bronx Expressway isn’t just asking us to play—it’s asking us to sit with the discomfort of history, together, around the table.
Would you like me to also suggest a few headline alternatives to match this magazine-style tone?