Islanders

Sometimes you find yourself having to curb your aesthetic instincts for the sake of your points tally

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Ah, and those mansions fit together so neatly, too. Like two L-shaped tetrominoes locked together in a permanent embrace – and right next to the city centre, to boot. But this new one needs moving. Shifted a little to the left and rotated to a jaunty 60-degree angle or thereabouts, it gains us five extra points. And what do you know? That leftover space looks just about enough to squeeze in a tower. Or maybe a park. But then again, that cluster of houses on the other cliff could be a more inviting spot – and we won’t lose any points to the brickyard if we stick it there…

Islanders is nominally a laid-back, streamlined strategy game about building cities on procedurally generated islands. But it’s a city-builder without any of that pesky infrastructure to worry about. There’s no resource management to speak of. You’ve no need to concern yourself with how to get workers from residential area A to industrial zone B. And yet despite its self-imposed limitations, it’s still a game where you have to think very carefully about location.

That’s partly because space is at a premium. You can’t flatten out these islands; rather you need to take natural features into account when designing your city. And progress depends on how you arrange your buildings: each comes with a points tally when placed, which can rise or fall depending on where it lies in conjunction with others. You’ll need to reach a certain total to unlock one of two packs of six buildings, repeating until you eventually accumulate a score big enough to move on to a fresh challenge on a larger (and usually more topographically complex) archipelago.