Grand Canyon/Scenario Guide

Remember: The Scenario Guide below is only a suggested strategy for completing this scenario—it may not work for all players. The General Scenario Guide and Hints and Tips articles may also provide helpful information in completing this scenario. There are usually multiple strategies to successfully completing a scenario; these can be discussed on the scenario's discussion page or written down in an existing or additional section of this article.

Grand Canyon — Finished

You start this scenario off with $10,000, of which $5,000 is loaned from the bank.

The first thing to note about this scenario is that it is a park entrance fee scenario, which means the rides are free. You should therefore ensure a steady flow of guests walking through the park entrance in order to generate the income needed to continue building rides throughout the course of the scenario. To this effect, you may want to consider demolishing all the food and drink stalls, as well as the two Restrooms and the Cash Machine; this will give your guests less reason to stay in your park once they have paid the entrance fee. Leave the merchandise stalls near the entrance as they are; sold merchandise generates good revenue for the cost required to restock every month. It is perhaps important to note that, even without any food and drink stalls or restrooms, and with the game reminding you every month that guests are hungry and cannot find anywhere to buy food, you can still get a park rating of 999 if you have a well-maintained and tidy park that lacks food, drinks, Restrooms and Cash Machines. Alternatively, you will need to close the park every once in a while in order to force most of your guests to leave before reopening the park so that new guests will enter your park (and pay the entrance fee).

The next thing to note is that the loan interest rate in this scenario is 15%, which is somewhat on the steep side. Pay off your $5,000 loan immediately. For the remainder of the scenario, you should try not to borrow any money from the bank.

Of the three rides that are already built, only Monster Trucks 1 has been tested, so open it. At the same time, open all the shops and stalls that are in the park. As for Vertical Spike and Calamity Coaches, set both of them to Test Run. Given its length, Calamity Coaches will take a while to finish its test run, so focus on Vertical Spike first. While the train on Vertical Spike is doing its test run, open the park and increase the entrance fee to $40.00—the lowest amount of cash a guest will have in this scenario.

Open Vertical Spike once its train finishes its test run. Next, go to the Research tabs in your rides list and uncheck Shops & Stalls. You won't be building most of them anyway, and the time spent on researching them can be better spent on researching other rides that you will eventually build. Leave research funding as it is. At the same time, set patrol areas for your staff, especially handymen. You may also want to consider setting a mechanic to patrol the two exits of Calamity Coaches since it is located some distance away from the other rides.

Browse through the list of rides available for construction. This scenario makes things a little easier for you as you already have a nice variety of coasters to build. In addition, the first ride to be researched is the River Rapids, one of the higher-capacity water rides available.

Calamity Coaches should have finished its test run by this point. You may wish to modify its queue lines before opening it due to its low seating capacity. If left unchanged, Calamity Coaches' full queue length will take up to 9 minutes to clear assuming there are no ride breakdowns.

You should stick to building flat rides and compact coaster designs in order to make the most of whatever space there is available. Despite the size of your park, space might be a potential issue since the designs of Calamity Coaches and Monster Trucks 1 make it challenging to expand into the huge amounts of isolated empty space where they are built. For a start, you ought to focus on cramming as many rides as you can into whatever free space there is already available around Vertical Spike and Monster Trucks 1. While not necessary, demolishing the "American flag" garden patch will give you enough space to build some flat rides and/or a small coaster. If done properly, you won't need to make use of the construction rights you have over the Grand Canyon or build into the vicinity of the native American settlement on the other side. If you do want to expand into the isolated space around Calamity Coaches at any time, an easy way to do so is to build your pathways around the area where the track for Calamity Coaches doubles back to the station. As for the space behind Monster Trucks 1, pathways can be built to the right of the ride as well as from the pathways near the "American flag" garden.

Calamity Coaches, Vertical Spike, and Monster Trucks 1 alone will ensure that, for a few months after you open the park, guests will enter your park at a steady rate, giving you a sizable amount of cash to work with without needing to borrow money from the bank. This is the key to reaching the objective: each new ride built draws guests to your park, which gives you money to build even more rides, which repeats the entire cycle. Building compact rides plays into this, as you will have more space to build even more rides. Keep the guests streaming through your park entrance so that you'll get the money you need to build new rides, and you should be able to reach (and perhaps even exceed) the objective of 1,000 guests one year early, by the end of Year 2!

If research is left at Normal Funding from the start of the game, every item that can be researched will be made available by the end of September, Year 3. You can thereafter set research funding to No Funding as you will no longer get any new rides or stalls from research.