OK, back on the computer now… let’s talk about the absolutely absurd amount of games now in this genre! From Townscaper to Cities Skylines to everything in between, this genre is absolutely thriving right now, and has divided itself into many sub-genres that can scratch every itch imaginable.
Lightweight
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Dorfromantik on Steam has you build a city one “tile” at a time, almost like that board game Carcassonne
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Save 70% on ISLANDERS on Steam is another “minimalist” builder, one building at a time but not with tiles
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Town to City on Steam starts easy and pretty but ramps up nicely. Your “palette” of options are very basic at first, just a house and some decorative plants, but as your population grows, so do their needs and corresponding buildings available to meet them.
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Frostpunk has you control a small settlement through a frozen wasteland, with moral decisions that pop up throughout the game to steer the narrative (and your settlement outcomes)
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Save 40% on Foundation on Steam is a medieval gridless town builder… I only played it a bit, so can’t say a whole lot. Pretty though.
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Station to Station on Steam is a lightweight, train-focused voxel town builder
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Kingdoms and Castles on Steam has you build up your idyllic town into a castle and eventually defend it against threats
Midweight
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Corsair Cove on Steam has a bunch of pirates stranded on a beautiful island in need of a settlement. What’s really cool about this is the verticality: rope bridges and zip lines connect your buildings to each other, and you can build on beaches and cliffsides alike.
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Timberborn on Steam is more of a colony sim, but also a city builder. You control a small colony of beavers, and it has the usual colony mechanics (hunger, etc.), but also the water simulation plays a HUGE part. You can divert rivers, control floodplains, create dams, pumps, etc. and that all plays into the town’s needs and outputs. You control water to farm, to provide mechanical hydro power, to maintain a surplus during droughts, etc.
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RimWorld on Steam is another colony sim, with people and no water, but a lot of depth. We have another thread on this one altogether: Rimworld: old west meets sci-fi - #209 by Skywatcher
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Save 25% on Going Medieval on Steam is similar to RimWorld, but medieval
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Save 35% on Manor Lords on Steam is another medieval builder
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Farthest Frontier on Steam is another; can’t really remember much about it, but pretty
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Terra Nil on Steam is an anti-city builder, where you’re using nature to restore an ecosystem after industrialization left it broken
Heavyweight
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The aforementioned Cities Skylines 2 has gotten quite a bit better since release. A new developer took over from the previous one and is working hard on improving it and making it live up to #1.
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Captain of Industry on Steam mixes a “city” builder with production supply chain management in a realistic way… think Factorio, but set in the modern era.
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Save 70% on Oxygen Not Included on Steam is not really a town/city builder in the traditional sense; it’s a 2D survival settlement engineering simulator, like a tiny microcosm of Factorio in a cutaway space station, but it’s one of my favorite games. You manage not just the typical needs but also things like fluids and gases, all simulated. Probably a bit too out-of-genre compared to the other games in this list, but worth a brief glimpse, at least.
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Dwarf Fortress on Steam is the OG of hypercomplex super-simulations, down to the needs of individual units. The modern release has a graphical layer on top of the old ASCII one, but it still looks like crap… people who love it, love it, but I could not get past the first hour or so. However, it’s supposed to be so good it made the two brothers who made the game millionaires overnight.
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There is of course the Anno series: Anno Franchise - Ubisoft (US) but they are kind of formulaic by now. If you’ve never played them, though, it’s worth a Ubi subscription for a month to check them out. There are several games in the series, each set in a different time period and theme. They’re all very pretty, but the basic gameplay across all of them boils down to supply chain management in a big grid of roads and zones. They don’t feel as dynamic/alive/charming as the more indie games above.
There are a LOT more games in this genre than just those. That’s just a shortlist of well-received or notable (to me) games… if you have specific interests, let me know and I’ll try to think of a few more.
PS If your computer isn’t very recent/modern, a subscription to GeForce Now will let you play most of these games, on max graphics too, even on a very old laptop. Works best if you can connect via ethernet cable to your router, instead of wifi, but otherwise it’s a pretty seamless and incredible service.