Urban Cipher is a creative way to unpack how cities and federal agencies created urban apartheid by design. It is a refreshing twist on the monopoly genre.
By illuminating how public policy and real estate practices shape our destinies, Urban Cipher is a fun learning tool to use in schools, staff trainings, and organizational workshops.
Product Description
Urban Cipher comes in a colorful cardboard box 11.6" x 11.6" x 2.25" in size. It includes a game board, instructions, player pieces, dice, cards, and game cash for gameplay. The game box contains cipher cards to highlight urban policies and the official redlining map for each city for players to examine after the game.
City Editions
We currently have in stock a few games for Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, St. Louis, and New Orleans. The Chicago, Montgomery, Memphis, Joliet, and DC editions are currently sold out. We have Baltimore games in inventory, but they are committed to use for our workshops.
Shift in Business Model for Our Existing City Editions (April 11 Update)
We still want to sell the games and make them available particularly for educators! However, due to rising tariffs and shipping rates, our ability to maintain an inventory of games for ready purchase has been severely compromised.
For the foreseeable future, we will have to prioritize larger custom orders from clients who can buy games in bulk (20 or more) and pay $2,000 in advance for 20 copies of the city editions we have already created as we will be ordering inventory on demand.
We can create a special order page on Shopify to handle the bulk purchase. Expect delivery in 3 months. Use the Contact link in the menu bar to discuss this arrangement.
Creating New Editions
We can create a new edition for your city if it has a high-quality redlining map available on Mapping Inequality. If your organization is interested in supporting the creation of an edition for your city, we accept a $3,000 commission fee to defray expenses for:
- graphic design for custom game box and property cards ($300)
- neighborhood identification with alphanumeric code ($300)
- game production and manufacturing ($1,000)
- shipping from overseas manufacturing facility and tariffs ($1,300)
- shipping from our assembly facility to customer ($100)
This will base commission will cover the production for a batch of 20 games. Additional games can be added at a price of $50 each. Use the Contact link in the menu bar to submit a request.
