Important takeaways
- City builders provide endless creativity and relaxation for players, such as Dorfromantik.
- Dwarf Fortress offers deep world building and endless gameplay for veteran city builders.
- Frostpunk's endless mode presents challenging decisions and scenarios for ambitious city builders.
City builders are known to be a genre where the player's imagination is allowed to run wild. If it can be done in a way that is efficient and optimized, then it can be done in no time. Of course, some city builders are more difficult than others, and with that difficulty comes limitations, but for many, this is a genre to sit back and relax with.
But why does the fun have to end? While some strategy games have set dates or end goals, others can possibly go on forever. Whether new players or veteran city builders looking for something to sink their teeth into, here are some city builders with no end in sight.
5 Village romance
A cozy puzzle-based city builder
For players who don't want city building to be a hair-raisingly stressful experience, Village romance may be the game they are looking for. This title is a cozy tile-matching puzzle game where the puzzle comes together and acts as an idyllic, relatively simple city builder. The game can be surprisingly intense at times, but beginners needn't be intimidated, just take it easy and enjoy the peaceful, rural towns that are put together.
There is no real endgame in it Village romance. Just Continue to expand a sprawling city farm into one with the idyllic countryside around it, completing quests along the way to earn more resources for more tiles.
4 Dwarven fortress
A terrifyingly detailed game
Dwarven fortress not only gives players a city to build. It gives players an entire world, an entire history, centuries of political development across a procedurally generated continent, the rise and fall of empires, and then asks them to build a city in that world. Dwarves need food mead and shelter to survive, they need engagement activity and purpose as well, and the player must create a mountain home that can meet all of these needs while continuing to grow and push further down to get more minerals that can be turned into valuable works of art, tools, jewelry or on almost anything.
The game ends only when players feel like they've created the perfect mountain home – which, spoiler, will never be – but when the upcoming adventure mode gives players an opportunity to explore their world from a whole new perspective.
3 Frostpunk
Endless Mode provides endless challenges
Frostpunk has come to the surface of the discussion once again after the release of the smash hit Frostpunk 2and rightly so. This is a title that is all about making the player make tough decisions. How many concessions for survival can one make while still calling oneself human? What things is the player, as the captain, willing to do to survive in this bitter, frozen world? And once the citizens of the city have learned to adapt, there's another pressing question to ask: what's next?
Frostpunks scenarios are about creating the challenge of keeping this city alive against the cold in different ways. The challenge has specific goals that must be met, and that usually means the game must end. But Frostpunk's endless mode does exactly what it says on the tin, providing three distinct, endless modes for the ambitious or masochistic city builder to tackle forever.
2 Timberborn
Beavers living next to or against nature
There are many important functions that work in Timberborns favor, making it one of the most promising titles currently available for early access. The first is that beavers are adorable and awesome. There's also an incredibly robust industry-focused city builder here, with water physics playing a central role in how efficient the city is. Automation, production and interestingly, for a title in this genre, vertical growth is what players will focus on in this game.
Timberborn really just asking players to keep building and exploring the differences between the two available factions. There are goals to set and challenges to beat, but the game only ends when the player says so.
1 Against the storm
Brace Cities Against The Storm
Against the storm is an interesting title because it is built with infinity in mind. Like many roguelite and roguelike titles, this is a game where death – and coming back from it – is an integral part of the game. It is expected that the storm will claim a few villages as players continue their task of exponential settlement for the Burnt Queen. Although the expedition and all settlements are ultimately gone, the game continues, with all resources collected for the next expedition.
Like many fantasy city builders, there's a lot of room for imagination and role-playing here, especially with the various classic and more unique fantasy races available for the player to build their village with. Each race has unique advantages to provide their solution, making it a little easier to survive the endless storm. It's a bleak but incredibly poignant title, perfect for anyone who wants to keep their city building forever.
