Joe's City (a working title) uses cards - Events and Buildings - and chits - people. The aim of each player is to build a certain number of Buildings of each type and fill them up with Tenants up to their maximum capacity. For this he uses his own Citizen pool (which is continualy refilled from the main Population pool) and thus he is able to put Tenants into the Buildings, utilizing the Event cards.
Event cards have multiple uses - they can either be used as a stated Event (impacting given players), or as a means of getting Citizens and adding Tenants. Therefore everytime the player has to decide whether he wants to use an Event card to pay for new people, or if it is better to use an Event against his opponent(s), or even to help himself out a bit.