About CityForge Play

How it works

CityForge turns architecture and city planning into things you do — not just facts to memorize.

• Structure Lab — choose a material (wood, brick, concrete, or steel) and enough support columns so a building carries its load all the way down to the foundation, meets the building code, and stays on budget. Predict whether it will stand before you run the load test — thinking through your design first is exactly how real engineers work.
• City Planner — fill the empty lots of a city block so homes, shops, and parks make good neighbors. Watch citizen happiness and sustainability change as you plan: homes next to a factory are unhappy, a park lifts the whole block, and shops need a street to reach them.
• Concept kits — 16 short question rounds, from what makes a city, through streets, bridges, zoning, and water systems, up to city economics, housing, and resilient future cities.

What's not here (and why)

The iPad app tests buildings inside a real physics simulation — force vectors flow through beams and an earthquake shakes the structure until weak parts fail. The web version can't run that physics on every device, so instead it teaches the same structural reasoning — material strength, load paths, "lower floors carry more," and the building code — as a clear rule-check. The reasoning is the real lesson; the shaking was just the stage.

Planning for people

CityForge plans for the neighbors first, not just the buildings. Good plans keep the homes that are already there, add parks and schools people can walk to, and don't push anyone out — repair before replace, and listen before you plan.

Meet the cast

Block, Stoop, Lane, Hub, and Dwell each stand for one big idea of fair city design — zoning with your neighbors in mind, public space as the city's living room, walkable streets, transit that reaches everyone, and housing you repair rather than replace. You can read their stories and hear them on the cast page.

Our privacy promise

CityForge Play is free, works offline, and collects nothing. No accounts, no ads, no tracking, and no data ever leaves your device — your level and streak are saved only in this browser.

Mistakes are part of it

A design that collapses or a block that isn't approved yet is data, never failure. It just tells you what to change next — that's exactly how architects and city planners work.