I had an idea for a game. Not "quit your job and hop on Kickstarter" good, but I've liked the idea for the 10 minutes I've been thinking on it.

Simulation games (for example, Sim City), in the right context, can be incredibly addicting. I played one on my phone for upwards of 10 hours that was simply managing a software development business. They're fun to play for a few reasons:

• They're timed/engineered perfectly to ensure that you're both improving upon your creation, while at the same time serving your creation's random needs and wants, at a consistent rate to keep you interested.
• They're designed to feel like you're doing small, simple tasks, but with vast consequences.
• They're often based around things that people can approach, have little knowledge about, but still feel comfortable making decisions despite.

Working next to and around the telecommunications industry, my thought was to have something related. Not quite "Sim Tower," but more like "Sim Cell Phone Tower." I think this is a good simulation context, given that everyone seems to have opinions on cell phones, cell phone reception, phone plans, phone models, and relative speed.

The game would be equal parts:

• Tower placement and planning (Identifying good/bad signal areas, in combinations with high/low population density areas, as well as trying to balance tower signal "conflict").
• Tower reselling (Charging competitors to rent space on your tower, but reducing your own reliability/bandwidth)
• Network bandwidth backbone throughput (Each tower can do X many calls, Y much bandwidth, how can you balance those things out while charging competitively and maintaining good user experience?)
• Available phone choice (Balancing user demand vs. network capabilities (Edge network, 2G, 3G, HSPA, etc.) vs. network drain vs. licensing/contracting/exclusivity requirements with phone manufacturers)
• Marketing budget (Increasing new/incoming customers versus leaving customers, keeping existing customers, etc.)
• Spectrum licensing (Large up front lease cost, but gives you further room to support more signals, more technologies, better network availability)

It'd be fun to balance those things in combination with computer player, and see how well people can manage around random events. For example:

• Conventions, sporting events, emergencies (where everyone calls their family to see if they're alright) that dramatically spike usage.
• Random weather, solar flares, etc., that interfere with signal strength, probability of dropped calls, all that.
• Poor city planning (Somebody erects a 30 story building next to your tower. The building completely blocks signal to half of the tower, and signal echoes off the building reduce signal quality to everything else on the tower.
• Tower sabotage (other companies, vandals, etc.)

Each game could also be sort of a technological race as well (a la Civilization). Everyone could start out with the equivalent of "analog" cell technology, move up through time-divided signal technologies, code-divided signals, texting, data transfer, where your choice could be between cornering a market with your current technology in order to beat your competitor or to develop and innovate past them.

The above is my idea for the basic game mechanic.

The turn is that you could play with either a) your friends or b) Internet rando's, competing against their management of their cell phone network against yours.

The prestige would be that you play it on Google Maps with real locations, accounting for things like elevation, weather, and solar activity. You could finally answer for yourself the question of why it's hard to get cell phone service at your house when you live in a hole, or on the opposite side of a hill from a tower.

Thoughts?