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Introduction to croydon2040.com

Welcome to the croydon2040 game!

You have just been given responsibility for running Croydon! It’s your job to lead Croydon into a successful, wealthy and prestigious future. As leaders of the borough, it will be down to you to make political decisions that guide Croydon into the future and to set budgets to make sure everyone gets the money they need to keep Croydon running happily and successfully.

Playing the game

Over a ten-week period you are going to make decisions that represent some of the choices that will be faced by Croydon over the next thirty years. Each week will represent three years for Croydon and you’ll be given three new policy decisions to make. These will range from simple things like whether you stage an event in Croydon to more complex issues involving crime prevention, health and education. Your job is to balance your decisions so that you make Croydon a place of opportunity for all of its residents and make it the kind of place you’d be proud to call home.

In addition to making policy decisions you’ll be responsible for setting the budget priorities for Croydon. You’ll be given a number of wealth points each turn which represent the money Croydon has to spend on its services – but it’ll be up to you to choose which departments get more or less money. If you’re successful, make good decisions and set your budget well, Croydon will grow to become a more successful, wealthier and more prestigious borough. If you neglect the needs of your residents, or fail to manage your budget, you risk high crime, falling opportunities and unhappy residents.

You’re going to be in competition with the other teams playing the game – your Croydon will be rated in terms of Top Croydon Points, which shows how well respected, liked and popular Croydon is in the world as a whole. Whoever creates the best Croydon by the end of the game will win a prize for their school, but there will be prizes for other achievements too.

What you’ll do

At the very beginning of the game you’ll be asked to describe your vision for your Croydon, and also nominate spokespeople for the key areas that you will oversee.

Then, each week of the game there will be a number of tasks you’ll have to complete, and it’s important you get them done before the deadline.

Each Monday new information will be available on the site, telling you about events in Croydon
You’ll be able to log on to the site to review your progress, looking at the Stats that will tell you how life in Croydon is going
You will also see news stories, covering each of the decisions you made last turn and giving you an idea of how those decisions have been received
You can compare your performance to other teams by looking at who is in the lead in the different rankings and what comments other teams have published.
You can then read the briefing information on the new decisions you’ll be asked to make this week
Once you’ve made your decisions you can enter them into the site
After your decisions are made you set your budget priorities for the turn ahead
You will then have the chance to justify your decisions by entering comments on what you’ve done, which will be viewable by all the other teams in the game
The deadline for submitting your decisions and budget settings is the end of school Thursday

Declaring your vision

One of your jobs at the very beginning of the game will be to declare your vision for your Croydon. You need to create a slogan that described how you want your Croydon to develop, or how you want it to be in the future. Your vision should be a snappy phrase that the people of Croydon will remember!

Setting up your spokespeople

You will be asked to nominate a spokesperson for each of the eight budget areas (see below) which you will be concerned with. The names of the spokespeople will be entered onto the game website and you will see their names appearing in the news-stories that will be featured within the game. You can have the same person being the spokesperson in more than one area, and you can change the name of your spokespeople later in the game if you wish.

Seeing how you are doing

This web site will tell you what’s happening in the version of Croydon which you control. One of the main ways of seeing how you are doing is looking at the stats for your borough.

A stat is a measurement for something, a way of gauging how well a particular aspect of Croydon is doing. The eight stats you can use to measure your successes and failures are:

Pride – this represents how residents feel about Croydon, whether they take pride in their local area, whether they are pleased to live here and do they talk positively about it to people from outside the borough
Inequality – this gives a measurement of the degree of inequality within the borough – are some people very wealthy whilst others are very poor, do some people have access to excellent facilities whilst others struggle to get by? Low inequality leads to a fairer, happier, society
Crime – This gives you an idea of the crime figures within the borough, and then how people feel about it
Health – indication of life expectancy and overall health levels in the borough
Education / Opportunity – this shows the availability of education and training opportunities for children and adults as well as the economic opportunities open to residents of Croydon (e.g. how easy it is to get a job, to set up your own business, etc.) Good education and opportunity to lead to more successful and wealthy residents
Wealth – this indicates the overall wealth of the borough in terms of the number of successful businesses and the income of residents. Higher wealth will lead to more money for the borough to spend.
Happiness – this simply shows how happy, on average, residents of the borough are – are they enjoying their lives, do they have plenty to do, are they pleased with the world around them
Culture / Leisure – this shows how much cultural and leisure activity there is in Croydon – this includes a very broad range, from cinemas to nightlife to restaurants, theatres, concerts and sporting events.

Your Stats will have a big impact on how people think about Croydon, and you should try to make sure they all reach good levels. If your Stats get high enough people will start talking positively about how well you’re doing, and your Top Croydon Points will grow. However, if you let any of your stats fall too low people will start to criticise you and it will damage your Top Croydon Points. Check the current level of your Stats each week, and see if people are talking about them.

You can think of Top Croydon Points as your overall score in the game, as it represents the success of Croydon. Top Croydon Points is a measurement of how well respected Croydon is in the world at large, how favourably people think of it, and how much good press coverage it is getting.

You can use what your Stats tell you about your Croydon to help you make better decisions in future. Is your crime rate going up? Then increase funding for policing, or look for policy decisions that will help cut crime. Are people unhappy at the lack of Culture / Leisure in Croydon? Then look for policy decisions that help bring more creative people to Croydon, or increase spending on Leisure in your budget.

Croydon Cloud

You will also get feedback on what people are saying about your Croydon. This will be in the form of an 'cloud' of words – as your policies take effect people will start talking about Croydon in different terms and you'll see words becoming larger in your cloud. Perhaps your future Croydon will be seen as liberal, pretty and arty, or perhaps you'll create a Croydon that is wealthy, authoritarian and dull. The bigger the word in the cloud, the more people are describing Croydon in that way.

You can also view the Croydon Clouds of other teams by viewing their team pages.

News Stories

Each turn news stories will be published about the decisions you made last turn. This will give you an impression of the kind of press coverage your Croydon is getting, and will give some opinions of local people and professionals.

Viewing Other Teams

As well as seeing what's happening in your Borough via your own stats you'll be able to compare your performance with the other teams in the game – you'll be able to see the stats of the top ten best performers in each stat in the game and see how you’re performing compared to them.

You’ll also be able to read press releases written by other teams commenting on their policy decisions. How are they thinking about their decisions and budget? Have they had any ideas which may be useful for your team? There are always many opinions about how to do things in politics and it’s worth listening to other people’s opinions.

If you want more details about a team’s activities you can click through to their teams page and see more details about who they are, as well as their Croydon Clouds, news stories and recent decisions. This way you can keep a close eye on the actions of your closest rivals in the game.

Decisions

One of your most important tasks whilst running Croydon will be making the three policy decisions that are put in front of you each week. These will be political decisions that will significantly influence the future of Croydon. Some will be one off decisions (deciding whether a particular event goes ahead) others will be ongoing policy decisions (like giving funding for an ongoing project) which will change the borough for years to come.

For every decision you’ll be given a briefing – information from your aides as to what the likely impact of making the decision will be. This will tell you the main arguments in favour of taking the decision, and the main arguments against it. With almost all political decisions some people will be in favour of it and some people will be against it, and you’ll be told what their arguments are. In politics there’s rarely a ‘right’ decision that everyone agrees on, so you’ll have to use your judgement to decide what you want to say yes to and what you want to turn down.

You will also be told how much your decision will cost you. Almost all decisions will have a one-off ‘set up’ cost, which you will be charged the turn you make the decision. Many decisions will also have ‘upkeep’ costs, which you will have to pay each turn that the decision is in effect.

So, imagine you are asked if you want to run a campaign to persuade young people not to carry knives. The set up cost might be 2 units – which you’ll pay the turn you make the decision. There might then be an ongoing cost of 1 unit per turn for each turn that the anti-knife campaign runs. The set up cost covers the initial design of poster, leaflets and so on, whilst the upkeep cost pays for them to be printed each year, distributed to schools and so on.

Sometimes decisions will have no upkeep costs at all, as once they are set up they’ll keep running without costing you any more. Sometimes you may even find that if you make a particular decision it will actually give you more money to spend in the long term (for instance, it would cost you money to set up a new shop, but once it was set up it would actually bring you in money each turn afterwards).

You’ll have to think carefully about how much money your decisions are costing you. If a decision will have an ongoing cost you can always cancel the scheme later if you think it’s costing too much, but you will lose the benefit of it once it’s been cancelled. Each week you’ll have a certain amount of money to spend which you’ll have to divide between your decisions and your Budget.

Budget

In addition to making policy decisions you will also have to set the budget priorities for Croydon's spending. We won't ask you to deal with pounds and pence, instead you'll be told how many budgetary 'points' you have to split between the key budget areas within the borough and the decisions you make.

Each week you’ll assign budget points between the eight budget areas.

These budget areas are:

Environment – this is the amount of money that goes to keeping the environment in Croydon positive – this isn't just green areas like parks, but also upkeep of street furniture, repairs to public buildings, etc;
Leisure – money from this areas is spent on sporting and leisure facilities within the borough such as swimming pools, libraries, play areas and sports fields;
Education – this represents funding for schools within the borough but also for adult education classes and colleges;
Housing – money spent in this areas pays for council housing, keeping it in good repair and keeping it run effectively;
Policing – this is the amount of money you spend on supporting your local police force;
Health – this represents the amount of money you spend on health services within Croydon;
Transport – this shows you how much money is spent on buses, trams, and repairing roads within the borough;
Communication / Engagement – money spent in this area helps communication between you and the residents of Croydon, ensures that all geographical areas, ethnic and social groups have their say in the running of the borough and generally ensures that people know what Croydon is doing and understand the issues that it is tackling.

You can change budget priorities each week depending on what is happening in your Borough – if your other choices have caused a bit of a crime wave you may have to increase spending on policing, or if you’re worried that the health level of your residents is falling then you can boost your spending on health services. Sometimes changes to budgets will have a quick impact, other times it may be some years before the increased spending changes the path of Croydon.

You can't decrease a budget area by more than 2 points in a turn, or increase it by more than 3 points. That's because such a sudden, sharp change would be too disruptive. If you want to grow a particular budget area, you'll have to build it up gradually.

Sadly no leadership can do everything it might wish to – many of the projects, schemes and initiatives that are placed before you will require funding. These will tie up budget points which you won't be able to put in your budget areas. If you say yes to too many policies you may find you can't fund your budget areas to a sufficient level, which may damage the performance of Croydon. Politics is always a matter of compromise, and you can't make everyone happy all the time.

Note that you are setting the priorities of your spending, not assigning actual amounts of money. This means that if you’re short on budget points, and you reduce a budget area to zero, it doesn’t mean that no money at all will be given to that area. If you reduce policing health to zero it doesn’t mean all the hospitals will close – it just means they’ll be given the minimum level of funding them need to function, and the service they provide won’t be all that great.

On the positive side if you make good decisions your Croydon will become more successful and more wealthy and this will result in you gathering more tax from businesses and residents – this will give you more budget points to assign meaning you can give the go-ahead to more projects and funding your different departments to a higher degree.

Comments

Politicians always have to justify their decisions and you are no exception. Each time you make a decision you will be required to submit a comment on why you took the decision you did and why you are running Croydon in the way that you are. These comments will be published to all of the teams in the game so you can keep tabs on the thinking of your competitors. At the end of the game a special prize will be given to the team with the best and most considered comments on their decisions.

Winning the Game

The game will run for 10 weeks (with a week off for half term). Your aim in this time is to make Croydon as successful and prestigious as possible. In addition to the Stats you will be given one other statistic to describe your Croydon – Top Croydon Points. This indicates how well regarded Croydon is by the rest of the world. Large projects coming to Croydon, cultural events and success in stats all earn you Top Croydon Points. You are in direct competition with the other teams in the game to create the most prestigious future Croydon. At the end of the game the team with the highest Top Croydon Points wins – and will win a prize for their school.

In addition to this main prize other awards will be given for teams who perform well in particular stats and who contribute most to the game as a whole.

How to play the game

Joining up

To join the game, you have to contact the ImagineCroydon team, who are organizing it.

The front page

The front page has a general explanation about what the game is. You can log in to your position here, and you can also view the pages of other teams.

Your profile page

This page holds your team's picture, and your vision statement. It also holds the list of names of the spokespeople on your team -- these names will be used in news stories about what your team has been doing. For the goals and the spokesperson areas, you can mouseover or click on the question mark icons to get an explanation of that topic. If you want to update your list of spokespeople, contact the ImagineCroydon team.

You can look at the profile pages of other teams too, by choosing their name from the "View another team's page" dropdown menu at the bottom of the page.

Your results page

This page normally tells you what happened to your team in the current turn. You can also look at previous turns, if you want to remind yourself what happened, using the "View previous results" dropdown at the bottom of the page.

First it reports what you decided to do about the three policy options that you were offered last turn: did you decide to accept them or reject them?

Next you'll see a cloud of adjectives describing how your Croydon is seen by the outside world. Depending on what policy decisions you take, some of the words will get smaller or bigger. Keeping an eye on their changes is a good way of gauging the overall impact of your policies.

Next comes your budget. Each turn you'll have had an amount of budget points to spend, and you may have spent some of those on maintaining existing projects, and some on starting new ones. Whatever's left over you will have divided between the 8 different budget areas. This table shows youhow they were divided. You're also told whether your population and wealth grew or shrank last turn.

Each of your policy decisions will have generated a news story. Read these carefully, as they give an idea of which kinds of people have been affected by your decision, who likes it, who objects to it, and what you might want to do next.

Last is the stats table. Your Croydon is rated in eight different areas (mouseover or click the question mark icon to see an explanation of each). You'll be told what's your current score, and what it was last turn. If you've made a particularly good improvement (or got particularly badly worse) in one of the statistics, it'll be noted alongside that people have noticed this. Then you're told your Top Croydon Points score, which is the overall measure of how well you're doing. At the end of the game, the team with the highest Top Croydon Points will get a prize!

The tables page

The tables page lists the top teams in order of Top Croydon Points, in order of bonus stars earned, and also in order of each of the other statistics. So you can easily compare yourself with the other teams, and see how everyone's getting on in the game. For each table, it also shows which team improved the most during last turn.

Underneath the tables, each team's press release (if they wrote one) from last turn is displayed.

Your orders page

At the top of this page is the deadline for your orders (unless it's already past). You have to get your orders in before this date / time -- if you don't, they can't be accepted.

Next are the three policy decisions that are being offered to you. Each one has a briefing, which you should read carefully and consider. You need to decide who will be affected by this decision, and in what way. Some of the decisions are yes / no, others have several differnet options. In each case, the options are listed below, and each one tells you how much it will cost to set up, and then how much it will cost per subsequent turn to maintain. You just need to click the circle beside your choice.

Underneath that are "Projects to cancel". If in a previous turn you decided to set up a particular policy, you can cancel it on any subsequent turn. You won't get back the initial budget that you spent to set it up, but you will save the maintenance cost per turn, which is listed here alongside each existing project.

Next you're told how your budget for this turn breaks down. You have a total amount of points, but some of this will be used up in maintaining your existing projects (unless you cancel them) and in setting up new ones. Whatever's left over, you can divide between the eght budget areas using the set of dropdown menus. Just set each dropdown to the amount of points you want to put into that area this turn. The "Running total" box will keep track of how much you're spending, including new projects and cacellations (you might need to click on it to get it to upddate). When it equals the "should be" total alongside it, your orders are ready for submission. Click the "Submit decisions and budget" button.

If it was all correct, you'll come back to this page and see a message that your decisions and budget have been accepted. If not, you'll see a page explaining that you need to spend more (or less), and telling you to go back and correct your orders.

You can use the box below to enter a press release -- whatever you want to say to the world about what your team is getting up to, and how you think your Croydon is going. Please avoid abuse or insults ;-)

After you've submitted your budget, decisions and press release, you'll need to enter the confirmation password. This is a security measure, to make sure that your orders aren't tampered with. You should enter the confirmation password last thing, once you're certain everything is as you want it.

Advice

Tips on Playing the Game

First, and most importantly of all, always be aware of your budget. Sadly, no can do everything they want to, so you will have to prioritise. Each week you’ll only have a certain number of money points to spend and you’ll have to divide them between the decisions you make and your budget. How you do so is up to you, but think about what your current priorities are and what your stats are telling you. Just because a project that is proposed seems like a fun thing to do doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a good idea – what benefit are you going to get from it? How much does it cost you? How do you think it will impact on your Top Croydon Points? Ask all of these questions and decide whether you’re getting value for money.
Don’t leave any money unspent! Make sure before you submit your decisions that all of your budget points have been assigned to decisions or to one of the budget areas.
If you’re short of money don’t forget you can always free up funds by cancelling earlier programs. If there’s a decision you really want to make one week but you can’t afford it, you could always cancel one of the decisions you’ve already made that is costing you money to keep running.
When choosing whether to say yes to a decision or not think about whether it’s value for money. It may be something you’d really like to do in Croydon, but can you actually afford it? Would your money be better off spent elsewhere?
When looking at a decision look at both how much it will cost you on the first turn you say yes, and how much it’ll cost you each week afterwards. Some projects are quite expensive to set up but then won’t cost you very much. Others will even earn you money. But some cost a lot of money to run in the long term and can be quite a big commitment.
It’s often the case that a decision will have a positive effect in some areas and a bad ones elsewhere. Imagine you decided to get rid of all the traffic wardens – this might seem like a very popular move, making people happy, and might save you money in terms of wages, but the chances are as people started parking anywhere they wanted to the streets would start getting clogged with traffic and fewer shoppers would come to Croydon, meaning businesses would suffer. When thinking about a decision think about who benefits and who might suffer and take that into account when choosing whether to go ahead or not.
Remember that giving a particular budget area zero points doesn’t actually mean it’ll get no money at all. Giving it zero means it’ll have the bare minimum money that department needs to function – it will keep running, but not very well. So if you give the Police zero points that doesn’t mean there’ll be no money at all for the police, just that there will be only the minimum needed for them to run the local force.
Check your vision – if you are struggling to decide what to do, or where to put your budget points, don’t forget the vision you described at the beginning of the game. Your most important job is to earn Top Croydon Points and make Croydon successful in as many areas as possible, but if you have to choose check on your vision and use it to help make decisions.
Hopefully your borough will become richer with time – if you run Croydon well more people will move to the borough and those who already live there will become more wealthy. This means you’ll take more money from them in taxes every year and you’ll have more to spend on your budget and your decisions. Each week you’ll see on the site how your income has changed – try to make sure it’s going up each week so you’ll be able to do more things later in the game.
Remember that if Croydon is doing well in one of the stats people will start praising Croydon and talking about it more, which will boost your Top Croydon Points. Try to get as many stats as you can high and you’ll earn more and more Top Croydon Points.
Don’t have many people in your team? When setting your spokespeople names, don’t forget that one person can speak for more than one budget area.
Some decisions you make will have a big impact on Croydon. If they are likely to get Croydon talked about nationally, or even internationally, they are likely to result in a Top Croydon Points boost as more people hear about Croydon and want to move there. Bear in mind the reputation of Croydon when deciding which decisions to make. Will the Top Croydon Points bonus you are likely to get make the cost of the scheme worthwhile, or are you better off using the money elsewhere to boost your stats?
You can chose to change the name of your spokespeople in the different areas of the game if you wish – you’ll see their names appearing in the news stories in the game, but if you wish to change them you will be able to.
You can’t please everyone all of the time – for many decisions you’ll be faced with there will be arguments on both sides. Whichever decision you make some people will like it and some people won’t.
If one of your stats gets particularly low people will start to criticise Croydon, and this will lead to a reduction in Top Croydon Points. Keep an eye on your stats and notice if any of them are getting particularly low – if one is try moving around the points in your budget to address the issue, or look for decisions that can help boost your performance.
You earn Top Croydon Points from having high scores in your stats, and the more stats that are high the better. Generally it’s better to have several stats which are all quite high, rather than having one stat which is very high at the expense of the rest. Although you will get a bigger bonus the higher a stat goes, it will usually be more efficient to put your resources into getting smaller bonuses from several stats rather than one big bonus from a single stat.
Some decisions create one off events, others ongoing schemes. Ongoing schemes are usually more expensive as you often have to pay an upkeep price to keep them running. However, they have an ongoing effect that will keep affecting your Stats every turn. One off effects often costs less, but their impact will fade with time – so if you host a one off sporting event it may boost your Culture / Leisure stat for a few weeks, but the affect it has will get less and less each week.
If you don’t like the affect that an ongoing scheme is having – for instance you feel that it is generating more Crime in Croydon – you can cancel it on any turn after it has started. One off events obviously can’t be cancelled, as they only have a temporary effect anyway. Some decisions can’t be cancelled because they have too big an impact to reverse – but you’ll be warned of this in your decision briefing.

Click here to open up the general game discussion area, in a new window