10 Best City Building Games

City building is no walk in the park, with many moving parts and factors that you need to consider before you build any element. A good city building game requires much strategization in order to be successful, and it can be challenging to complete.

Whether you are trying to paint a picturesque skyline like in Cities Skyline or build a successful Fallout Shelter, you can take on this challenging yet enjoyable city planning genre and build your very own shining metropolis.

Table of Contents

Best City Building Games

Are you ready? Grab your thinking caps and let’s dive into this list of the 10 best city building games we have!

BoomTown! Deluxe

In this town building game, your dream of building your own thriving town starts with a few explosive charges and a yellow truck. As you mine the landscape and the money starts to roll in you’ll be able to expand and manage your business empire, buying up buildings, shops and facilities. Soon people will be rushing to set up camp in your fledgling town. That’s when the real challenge begins.

Test your skills through 5 different scenarios, each requiring a different approach to maximise your population and each with a unique set of rewards and complexities that need to be mastered for you to become a true mogul.

BoomTown! Deluxe features

• 5 Scenarios with unique gameplay features
• Control illness, crime, dirt and hunger and keep the town happy
• An in depth array of tools, graphs and stats are available for you to maximize your town planning strategy
• Procedurally generated landscapes
• Loads of mining upgrades, buildings and the gold market
• Every game of Boomtown! is a unique test of your strategic management skills

User Rating: 4.3/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 20 Mb
Price: Free!

Ancient Rome 2

In the Ancient Rome 2 , your people need you. Improve their lives by providing them with important infrastructures such as roads to shorten their travelling time. Use strategic gameplay to be the best city builder over a couple of rounds. Your economy will prosper when your people are happy. Are you ready to take part in this strategy game and improve the lives of your people?

Ancient Rome 2 is thrilling and addictive because it features

• Large lands that give you the freedom of erecting multiple buildings
• More than 30 levels awaits you
• Customizable buildings of your own

User Rating: 4.3/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 56 Mb
Price: Free!

Green City

Green City is a city building sim that sees you clearing away abandoned houses to be redeveloped. As the developer, you will get to start your own little quiet town and grow it into an eco-friendly and thriving big city in this thrilling Sim City styled game. Be your own tycoon today!

Exciting features in this city builder game includes

• 48 smartly designed and balanced levels
• Ecological and Energy-Efficient Upgrades
• 4 types of buildings: residential, commercial, ecologic, energy-providing
• 25 different buildings
• A time management game for serious, enthusiastic, and creative city builders

User Rating: 4.5/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 250 Mb
Price: Free!

My Downtown

In this free city building game, the player will also have to solve various puzzles with match 3 elements. Being the developer, can you clear this puzzle game to develop your town further?

My Downtown has addictive features such as.

• Over 100+ fun but challenging match-3 levels
• Create your own beautiful city with many different types of buildings
• Complete successfully match-3 levels and watch as your city grows
• Hire smart but amusing city managers to help you
• Unique blend of match 3 and city-building game

User Rating: 4.0/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 62 Mb
Price: Free!

Royal Envoy

In Royal Envoy, be the developer in this city builder as you erect important resource buildings and homes that can withstand the forces of nature. Collect resources from these buildings and let your city island flourish. Play as the chief city planner of marvelous Islandshire in this fun building/survival game with time management game play elements!

Royal Envoy features

• 9 delightful islands to re-build
• Over 60 levels with 8 bonus tasks
• Charming and Whimsical Characters
• Wide range of different home and important structures

User Rating: 4.3/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 105 Mb
Price: Free!

Green City 2

In this exciting sequel to the city building genre, you can teach citizens the eco-friendly urban lifestyle of Green City! Help your neighboring cities start their own green life as you restore old buildings, clean up the streets, build eco-houses with solar cells on the roofs, and open new green energy plants.

Features

• 54 levels of green city building
• Unlock achievements as the city’s developer
• Complete 8 challenging eco-quests

User Rating: 4.1/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 230 Mb
Price: Free!

Monument Builder: Titanic

This construction building video game will show you a playful and clear vision of this prodigal construction site. Rediscover Ireland back in the past era and take part in the enormous construction of the famous Titanic. Throughout 50 levels, you’ll have to manage the workers you employ and train them yourselves. You have many carts and delivery vehicles to help you reach your targets. But beware! Bandits have also set themselves up on the roads, so you will have to protect your site against robbers while trading with local and foreign businessmen.

This free game features

• Manage the famous Titanic construction site from 1909 to 1912
• Make the most of your workers and resources
• Improve your knowledge of Titanic history
• Make history with the world’s most famous ocean liner

User Rating: 4.6/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 70 Mb
Price: Free!

Druid Kingdom

This game will send you on a magical trip accompanied by new characters: Jack, the young king of the Seven Hills, and his beautiful companion Etain. Your quest for the Staff of the High Druid leads you on an incredible journey through the mysterious lands of the Druids, the sands of Babylon, the alchemists’ country, and the rocks of Alamut. You will fight against evil desert genies, rebuild the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, save the alchemists’ country from destructive dragons, and learn Etain’s secret.

Druid Kingdom features

• Game mechanic that combines time management, simulator, and strategy
• An engaging plot line
• 4 fairy-tale settings
• Superb graphics and sound

User Rating: 4.3/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 178 Mb
Price: Free!

Jane’s Realty

Jane is back again after restoring her family hotel network and opening a boutique. Complete the city with electric power stations, water powers, houses for rent, stores and a City Hall!

Jane’s Realty Features

• There’s always work to do
• Furbish each house to collect the maximum rental amount
• Unique Sims elements and time management gameplay
• Lots of challenging levels

User Rating: 4.1/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 25 Mb
Price: Free!

Ancient Rome

In Ancient Rome, be a strategic city builder. Build settlements and turn these settlements into remarkable cities. Produce goods and resources from different buildings. Attract workers needed for your economical expansions. Let the Roman empire flourish as it extends its reach throughout the world. Your expansion efforts will be handsomely rewarded by the King. Let your name be forever remembered by generations to come.

Ancient Rome feature

• 30 exciting levels that you can play through
• Build a Roman empire that truly belongs to you
• Captivating storyline

User Rating: 4.5/5
System Requirements: Windows 10 Compatible PC
File size: 60 Mb
Price: Free!

If you enjoy games that involve a lot of strategization and optimization of resources, this list of the 10 Best Time Management Games is for you!

The best building games on PC

‘Building’ is a pretty broad theme. There are a lot of games where you build things, after all, and they can be very different. Helpfully, then, I’ve split this list of the 20 best building games on PC into four sections, each covering a sub-category of this big, messy genre.

There were some general criteria for inclusion on the list: games had to have some kind of «eye in the sky» camera POV, meaning Minecraft, Space Engineers and suchlike will have to wait for another list. I also left out vehicle construction games like Besiege and Nimbatus, since they felt like their own thing.

RTS games with more emphasis on waging war than base-building, including tower defence games, were (mostly) left out, as well as games in early access. But OTHER THAN THAT, ready your mousewheel for a vigorous scroll, for here are the 20 best building games on PC. (Or cut down on the scrolling with these helpful category links.)

Don’t see a game that you think should be on this list, or looking for something different entirely? Let us know — politely — in the comments, or hop over to our picks of the best PC games to broaden your scope.

Best city building games

Games about building cities, where you’re working on too grand a scale to care about the individual lives of your ant-like citizens.

Cities: Skylines

What else should I be playing: The obvious answer is the SimCity series, of which SimCity 4 is the best, but there’s a crop of interesting newer contenders too — Theotown is a decent title that’s also on mobile, and my personal pick is NewCity, which is a bit old-school and rough around the edges, but has a really impressive sense of scale.

The challenger that became the champion of «realistic» city builders, Paradox’s Cities: Skylines grew up in the genre shadow of SimCity, and ended up eclipsing it almost entirely. Skylines nailed so many of the issues crucial to simulating the construction of modern cities, with its suite of road placement and traffic mechanics being something of a masterpiece, and solid systems for zoning, public transport, and all those other things that sound dull on paper but become day-eatingly engrossing once you’ve gotten stuck in.

C:S is as versatile as they come, with virtually any city design being possible with a bit of thought. If there’s a price to pay for this, it’s that it’s very sandboxy to play, without many definite objectives in sight. But if that’s an issue for you, or if you find you’ve reached your appetite for the possibilities of the base game, there’s such a vast catalogue of official DLC and community-built mods, that you’re never going to run out of new ways to build.

Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom

What else should I be playing: Any of the other classic Impressions city builders, although I’d recommend Pharaoh as my favourite. And if you like that, check out Children Of The Nile and the upcoming Builders Of Egypt. If you want to reach further back in time, Dawn Of Man is a stellar neolithic settlement builder, while if you want to have more fights with your history, check out Stronghold HD later on this list, or stay in China and lose the building with Total War: Three Kingdoms.

The series of history-themed city builders made by Impressions in the late 1990s are widely seen as one of the high water marks for this entire genre, and that series reached its Zenith with Emperor, a game about constructing cities through thousands of years of Chinese History. And yes, you can build the Great Wall. It’s a massive but satisfying endeavour, and there’s little more pleasing in my experience of PC gaming, than watching hundreds of little peasants with wheelbarrows, beetling too and fro to fill its enormous timber frames with dirt.

Like older siblings Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus, Emperor is all about supplying housing with all the things it needs to get really posh, largely by making sure that «walkers» generated by increasingly fancy service buildings and markets wander past them regularly. There’s a knack to this, but the game makes it pretty intuitive to pick up, and there’s a great pleasure in using resource-gathering and processing buildings, as well as trade, to get hold of the goodies your increasingly demanding aristocrats need to make it through the day.

Frostpunk

What else should I be playing: There’s really nothing much like Frostpunk for its combination of city builder satisfaction, beauty, and narrative weight, but in terms of the actual feel of play, there’s a suite of smaller-scale, apocalyptic build ’em ups that are worth a punt. Both Buoyancy and Flotsam are early access games with a very Kevin-Costner’s-Waterworld theme, while Cliff Empire sees you building cities across pillars rising from nuclear fog, and Surviving The Aftermath is essentially a townbuilder with big Fallout vibes.

Frostpunk is a gorgeous punch to the gut. You’re in a steampunkish, Victorian setting that’s so well-realised that it avoids the usual cogs-and-twee-banter cringiness of the subgenre, and you’re in big trouble. The world is getting colder and colder at a terrifying rate, and somehow you’ve got to build a city that can survive it, using whatever manpower you can scrounge from the devastation around you. The sense of dread and desperation is relentless, but that makes the moments of progress and achievement all the sweeter.

It really is beautiful, too. From little touches like the footprints left by workers in snow, to the crackly rime that appears on the UI when it gets really cold, to the immense soundtrack, the level of sensory immersion is wild. There’s also a big narrative focus to the game, with a clear story playing out and several events you can pretty much memorise the timing of, and this obviously erodes replay value somewhat. But with several new scenarios released as DLC, and a more sandbox-y Endless Mode to boot, you’ll find it’s a long time before you grow cold on Frostpunk.

Anno 1800

What else should I be playing: There’s six other installments in Ubisoft’s Anno series, covering eight centuries from 1404 to 2205, and although there are some misses among the hits, they all have their merits. Alternatively, if it’s the island-hopping construction theme that appeals to you and you don’t mind a tonal shift, try Tropico 6, or the ever-so-relaxing Islanders.

Anno 1800 sees you building cities across multiple islands in — surprise! — the year 1800. The actual city building is solid but not revolutionary, but what makes it special is the fascinating set of mechanics involved in managing settlements at different levels of development across multiple landmasses. And then the real fun starts, as the New World opens up, allowing you to spread onto a whole new map with its own resources and rules.

It’s a game that gives you a lot of plates to spin: as well as your multiple settlements, you’ll have trade routes to manage, choose-you-own-adventure style quest minigames to play, and even limited RTS naval combat to conduct against AI adversaries and pirates. But once you’ve got the hang of the pacing, this simply means you’ll rarely have a dull moment, or find yourself stuck for something to do while waiting for resources to accrue. It’s delightful to look at to boot, with lush beaches strewn everywhere, and cities that are actually worth zooming in to view up close.

Surviving Mars: Green Planet

What else should I be playing: The nearest experience to Surviving Mars is probably Offworld Trading Company, further down this list.

I was lukewarm on the original release of extraterrestrial settlement setter-upper Surviving Mars, but the Green Planet DLC, which restructured the game around a terraforming megaproject, absolutely transformed it for me. If you’ve ever read the classic science fiction trilogy Red, Green and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, you can be assured that this game is as near to an adaptation of those books as exists in modern gaming.

It’s the sense of constant, infinitesimal progress that I love. Changing the entire surface of a planet is an eye-wateringly huge job, and so you have to start it when your settlement is tiny and new. At that point, before you’ve got the wherewithal for massive planetary engineering, it feels like pissing in the wind — but it adds up over time. When you look up from the water management crisis you’ve been trying to fix for half an hour and see actual green on the landscape, it’s magic, and it captures the slow-burn joy of maintaining a garden in the most unexpected way.

Best base building games

Games about building up and fortifying a base in the face of things that want to wreck it.

Factorio

What else should I be playing: Factorio inspired a whole slew of automation-themed builders, but the two most worth a shout are Satisfactory, if you fancy doing your factory things in first person, and Factory Town if you’d prefer to do them in a jollier, 3D world.

You’re not building a city in Factorio. No citizens will call the place you build home, unless you count automated drones, or the waves of rightfully angry insects that will die to its defences. It is a metropolis planned and built by its sole inhabitant — the trudging spaceman you control — and with a single purpose in mind. It’s a machine. A giant, mind-meltingly complex machine that will eventually construct a spaceship.

And somehow, through the sheer brilliance of its design, Factorio makes this infinitely less daunting than it should be. The game coaxes you towards this feat of engineering through thousands of tiny increments; minor Eurekae that stack up until you look back at what you’ve done in all its immensity, and feel like a genius. Be warned, though: it is engrossing. RPS bossman Graham, in fact, sees Factorio as less of a game and more of a curse: a dark bit of magic that makes time vanish without the player ever being aware it has passed. Let the machine suck you in.

They Are Billions

What else should I be playing: TAB is a Tower Defence game at heart, and the world of Tower Defence games is vast and full of mobile game bollocks. Mind you, there are some treats out there — consider the Creeper World series, or if you want some unashamedly basic fun, ye olde (original) Plants Vs Zombies.

Much like Frostpunk, They Are Billions is a bleak game about fending off overwhelming adversity with Victorian ingenuity, only here the Steampunk is a bit hammier, and instead of the cold, there are a huge, huge, huge number of zombies. They might not actually be billions, but when they rush your base they seem more like a liquid than a mass of individual attackers, so gregarious are they. And of course, the game is largely about building the walls, turrets and soldiers that will stop them from adding your citizens to their big, hungry party.

But it’s not just tower defence; you also have to build the economy that will supply the material for your fortifications, house the workers to make it function, and keep them alive and well. What results is a fascinating double-layered game, where you end up playing a robust little city builder, at the same time as you’re conducting a titanic, permanent last stand at the outer wall. Two great tastes that go well together, in my opinion.

Don’t Starve

What else should I be playing: There’s not a lot out there like Don’t Starve, but if you’re into the art style and general sense of relentless entropy, then Klei stablemate Oxygen Not Included, further down on this list, might be a good shout.

Don’t Starve has one of the best titles in the history of games, and it adheres to it ruthlessly. You’re some sort of hapless animated character, dumped in a whimsical, paper-cut-out hell wilderness, and your stomach is slowly withering. You must find food, or you will die. You must create light at night, or you will die. You must prepare shelter and warmth for winter. or you will die. Getting the picture yet? The whole experience is a constant, tense battle against entropy, where you feel horribly fragile, and solving any problem creates two more problems. It’s ace.

«But it’s a survival game!» Well, yes, it is. But then, the key to survival in Don’t Starve is the slow and painstaking assembly of a basecamp from things you find scattered in the wilds. It’s a crap campfire at first, and maybe a miserable sleeping bag, but eventually there are fridges and rabbit traps and farms, and even weird houses for horrid pig men to live in. It soon takes on the feel of a sort of settlement builder, and you will become immensely proud of the hard-fought-for cluster of hovels and junk that’s keeping you alive.

Stronghold HD

What else should I be playing: Stronghold’s particular brand of castle obsession only really exists in the rest of the Stronghold series, where Crusader is probably the best of the bunch so far, but Warlords is out in September 2020, at which point all bets are off.

There have been some hits and some misses in the Stronghold series of castle-building RTS hybrids. But especially since its HD remaster job, the original game has stood the test of time as the most solid of the set. It’s a game about building a Medieval castle, complete with an economy to keep it running, and an army of soldiers with British regional accents to defend its walls. Then you defend said walls, using all sorts of fun tricks (including pits of tar that can be set alight by flaming arrows!) to keep the oafs and ruffians from your keep.

There are plenty of scenarios included, as well as a multiplayer mode, but the true pleasure of Stronghold is its meaty campaign, which pits you against a number of varied challenges — some buildy, some defendy, and some attacky — with the eventual aim of defeating your nemesis, Wolf Off Of Gladiators. At its best, it’s Helm’s Deep with stiffly-animated knights instead of orcs, and there’s a lot of fun to be had in working out where to put your curtain walls, siege weapons, and nightmarish fire traps.

Age Of Empires 2 Definitive Edition

What else should I be playing: AoE2’s successors, Age of Empires III and Age of Mythology, are both well-above-average RTS efforts, and if you’re after a strange blend of AoE2 and the Civ series, you need to check out Rise of Nations. And if you want to get extremely silly, there’s always Red Alert 2.

2000’s AoE2 was a cracking strategy game: superbly balanced, perfectly paced, and offering just the right mix of economic and military play. It had a superb scenario editor built-in, a great soundtrack, and a colourful medieval aesthetic that aged at least as well as Starcraft’s space one. Definitive Edition, however, is more than just AoE2’s glammed-up zombie. It’s a giant sexy Frankenstein, with the contents of five separate expansions (four of which were originally made by extremely talented fans, with the latest one made in 2016), and a whole castle full of brand new content, sewn onto the body of the original game.

And yes, I know I said this list wouldn’t have any pure RTS games on it. But I love AoE2 so much I had to make an exception. And there’s definitely more building involved here than in your average RTS, with placement of castles, walls, towers and production buildings forming a major part of any game. Even if building skills alone won’t get you far in AoE2’s miraculously revived multiplayer scene, the satisfaction of neatly walling off your settlement and fending off an enemy rush will never get old.

Best tycoon games

Games about building the physical premises of a business, with the aim of making lots of filthy, nasty money.

OpenTTD

What else should I be playing: This year’s Transport Fever 2 is a solid option, while for a slightly more relaxing/low-intensity alternative, Rise Of Industry definitely has its moments.

Transport Tycoon Deluxe is as venerable as they come, hailing from good old 1994, and remains a perennial favourite to people who really enjoy building and managing massive logistics operations. And while the original game can’t be found on most PC storefronts, that’s fine, as it has long been supplanted by OpenTTD — a fan-made successor with bigger maps, LAN support, and the potential for 255-player multiplayer online. That’s. a lot of people.

OpenTTD isn’t a cut-throat thrill ride: it’s as much about sculpting an entire human landscape as it is building train stations and making money. Particularly when you are playing with a horde of other patient, meticulous transport curators, the slow evolution of a map elicits a soothing sort of joy. It’s a bit like playing in an orchestra, only with trucks and things instead of music.

Planet Zoo

What else should I be playing: While the Zoo Tycoon series would be a clear branching off point, I should point out that none of its entries are as good as PZ. If you want to try a different sort of beast husbandry experience, I strongly recommend aquatic management sim Megaquarium. And if you want something a little less spectacular than PZ, but with dinosaurs to make up for it, fellow Frontier title Jurassic World Evolution is a banger, as is the much gentler, more lo-fi Parkasaurus.

Planet Zoo features possibly the most beautifully simulated wildlife in the history of games, and considered as a management sim alone, it’s a respectable 7.5/10. But where it really shines, and the reason it’s on this list, is its phenomenal construction system. Borrowed from Planet Coaster (also on this list), and with a few tweaks and improvements, Planet Zoo’s building tools are unmatched.

When I played the game for review, I spent hours upon hours just building landscapes with the map modification tools, before even thinking about animals or tickets. And when I did get round to building facilities for brute-housing, I was delighted to find a huge library of individual components and construction pieces, which could be positioned in any orientation I wanted, and connected any way I pleased. If you can think of an aesthetic, Planet Zoo lets you go through with it, from dingy lion holes built in caves inside an Immortan-Joe-style mesa, to charming, grass-bordered walkways spiralling above a Roman-themed palace for Tortoises. It’s remarkable.

Offworld Trading Company

What else should I be playing: If you like Offworld but want something less intensely cut-throat, Surviving Mars (earlier on this list) is the game for you. Also, check out Planetbase by Madruga Works, makers of the excellent Dawn Of Man.

Offworld Trading Company is one of the most cleverly designed games I’ve played. As the name suggests, it puts you in the shoes of a business attempting to exploit the boundless riches of the solar system, and competing with a pack of other maniacs trying to do the same thing. Everything in OTC is built on a beast of a simulated commodities market, and success is entirely driven by how well, and quickly, you can spot and exploit opportunities in its frantic fluctuations. There are loads of juicy mineral extractors to build, and drones to watch ferrying delicious goods between your various coin-production domes.

There are dozens of excellent, puzzly scenarios to take on, but the multiplayer mode is where it excels. Without a single laser being fired, it manages to offer some of the most hectically competitive action in the whole strategy genre, and has the feel of a fighting game generated entirely from the gestalt wank fantasies of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

Planet Coaster

What else should I be playing: As with Planet Zoo and Zoo Tycoon, Rollercoaster Tycoon is the series Frontier clearly had in their sights when they made Planet Coaster, and I would say the latest Rolly T is still worth a shout.

Planet Coaster is not, thankfully, about cornering the market for circular discs on which to rest drinks. It’s a game about building a theme park, and approaches the brief as emphatically as Planet Zoo approaches its own. What’s great about it, too, is that once you’ve built your rollercoasters, you can ride ’em. There’s a Ghostbusters DLC too, with Dan Aykroyd in it! And actual, real ghosts. It’s bizarre, but great.

Management-wise, it plays pretty well — but again, like its beastly brother, it’s much more about design and aesthetics than it is about bookkeeping. And if you’re lacking in inspiration, or just want to save yourself a truckload of time in construction, there’s a galaxy of beautiful, monstrous and baffling blueprints built by other people, and available through the Steam Workshop.

Prison Architect

What else should I be playing: If you like the visual feel of Prison Architect, Rimworld (see below on this list) is your best bet. If you want a jaunty simulation of running a serious institution, without the uncomfortable subject matter, Two Point Hospital is remarkably silly.

I’ve got to say, upfront, that I’m a bit conflicted on Prison Architect. Even though the game is well aware of the grim territory it exists in, and has some well-thought-out satire to it, I’m just not sure that it is possible, at this point in time, to make an intermittently goofy, fun game about the prison-industrial complex without a hefty slice of yikes.

But, objectively speaking, Prison Architect is a really fun game. Rightly or wrongly, a prison is a brilliant setting in which to deploy the mechanics of a building game, as walls and towers must be built, cell blocks must be adapted to the needs of their inmates, and schedules must be managed to lessen the odds of canteen shiv wars. Prisons can be tiny hypermax facilities incarcerating a handful of Banes, or sprawling, relatively lax facilities aimed ostensibly at rehabilitation. Plus there’s a mode where you can play as a random prisoner and try to escape from your own, or others’, creations. But yeah, prisons. Not a laugh.

Best colony sim games

Games about building smaller settlements, with a big focus on the lives of their weird, needy residents.

Dwarf Fortress

What else should I be playing: Many have tried, but there is nothing like Dwarf Fortress.

Dwarf Fortress is my favourite game of all time. And it’s one of the best building games there is, even though its entirely laid out in faux-ascii, as letters and punctuation marks on a black background. Hell, it’s not even meant to be a building game — it’s really a fantasy world simulator, designed for creating mind-blowing emergent narratives from the modelled interactions of uncountable numbers of dwarves, elves, humans and god-knows-how-many varieties of animal person. It just so happens to have set the gold standard for colony sims as a bloody side effect of that, such is the power of developer Tarn Adams’ mind.

Dwarf Fortress is being remade for Steam at present, with much prettier visuals, mouse support, and all sorts of things that will make it more accessible to newcomers. If you’re afraid to take the plunge until then, why not read through The Basement Of Curiosity, and see what this once-in-a-lifetime game is capable of.

RimWorld

What else should I be playing: There’s a whole wave of space-based colony sims drifting into early access at present, and my picks of the bunch would probably be Space Haven, Starmancer, and the upcoming Ostranauts.

Having said that many games have tried to be like Dwarf Fortress and fallen short, there is one game inspired by it which did enough of its own thing to become something different and wonderful. That game is RimWorld. Like DF, it’s about making stories: tales about simulated people with heads full of quirks, living together in the fraught confines of a fledgling settlement. But in your role as a sort-of-god, you do the settlement-building, and that element of the game is a triumph in its own right — and much easier to get your head around than DF, in fairness. I don’t know why, but few things in games feel as good as laying down carpets in RimWorld.

Another feather in RimWorld’s cap is its recent Royalty expansion, which has added even more toys to play with, including deranged aristocrats, psychic powers, and self-assembling, hostile mechanoid hives. The game always had a strange, lovely atmosphere halfway between Dune and a space western, and with the lore and colour introduced in Royalty, its science fiction stories are just that bit more juicy.

Oxygen Not Included

What else should I be playing: It’s a very different game, but Factorio is probably the best jumping-off point on the list, since it too is about building a giant, self-sustaining machine.

Oxygen Not Included may look cute, with Klei Entertainment’s unmistakable art style bleeding over from Don’t Starve. But don’t be fooled. This side-on colony simulator, about trying to carve out a toehold for a bunch of hapless astronauts (‘dupes’) trapped in the centre of a giant asteroid, is a cruel, cruel game. It’s absolutely packed with ruthlessly simulated environmental factors, from gas flows to temperature modelling, and while they’re not necessarily «realistic», they are at least internally consistent, forming their own, mean, shadow version of the laws of physics.

Much like Don’t Starve, the clue to how ONI plays is in its name. Keeping your dupes alive will mean finding sources of oxygen for them to breath, let alone feeding them, stopping them freezing or roasting, and finding places to store their piss. Long-term sustainability is all about making constant nudges to systems veering slowly away from temporary equilibrium, and there’s a stressfully brilliant «hole in my bucket» feel to it, where solving any major catastrophe will involve solving several seemingly unconnected problems first, with each fix seeding a future catastrophe of its own. Relaxing stuff.

Banished

What else should I be playing: Ostriv and Foundation are two good quality early-access-ers with their own takes on medieval townsmanship, and if you want to make a peasant’s paradise with absolutely no stress involved, for a change, you should certainly check out SUPER BUILD, which very much does what it says on the tin, or the artier, even more relaxing Townscaper.

Banished looks a bit like it might be a game in the vein of the old Settlers franchise: rustic, mellow, and pleasantly ant-farmy. It’s not. Banished is the ghost at the LARP feast, reminding us all why living in the middle ages was almost universally horrendous, rather than a bucolic lark in furs and chainmail. Building your settlement here is less about an inevitable upward trajectory into cityhood, and more about clinging on for survival’s sake.

It’s not mosntrously hard, once you get the hang of it. But it’s not forgiving while you’re in the process of learning, and there’s something refreshingly different about having every single soul in your village starve to death in spring because you beefed it during last year’s apple harvest. And hey, that sudden «oh, they’re dead» feeling has a great upside — because when you do manage not to cock up, and you see your village actually hobbling along in relative comfort, you feel like a benevolent and capable god.

Rise To Ruins

What else should I be playing: They Are Billions (further up the list) is probably the place to go, as it’s got a similar mix of townbuilding and tower defence elements. And if you subscribe to the «losing is fun» mentality, it was (I think) the Dwarf Fortress community that coined the term.

Rise To Ruins is one of those games that isn’t technically in early access, but is ever evolving through meaty content updates. Its general shape, however, is that of a top down town builder on the prettier end of the pixel art spectrum, with an absolute bastard of a difficulty curve. Laid-back lumberjacking segues into a last-ditch defence against floods of ghosts and skeletons faster than you’d expect, and possibly more than any of the games in this section of the list, Rise To Ruins takes the Doctor No approach to victory, in that it expects you to die.

Still, RTR now has a more chill, building-focused difficulty setting — albeit one I’ve not had a go with yet — so it doesn’t have to get all Super Ghouls And Gits if you don’t want it to. And there are ways to cheese the game even on harder settings, once you know all its tricks. With that said, I rather liked it on the classic setting, where I treated it like the final level of Halo: Reach, and enjoyed the slow, iterative process of creating increasingly impressive failures.