City Builders Boom: 2026 Was a Golden Year for Urban Planning Games
If you’re a city-building enthusiast like me, 2026 has been an absolute feast! It feels like the perfect year to dive deep into this genre, with so many high-quality titles vying for your attention. The challenge now is finding the time to play them all!
Whimsical Beaver Cities and Roman Town Planning
After years in early access,
whimsical Timberborn finally launched in March. The game is exactly what it sounds like: you play as a beaver planner building a giant beaver city! It’s a crunchy management sim where you manage water flow via aqueducts and dams, making the most of limited space on your island. Once you get used to the early-game learning curve, the real challenge is optimizing that limited space.
Speaking of water, Nova Roma entered early access earlier this year. It’s like a streamlined version of Anno 117. You start with a small Roman town and expand it into a bustling city by establishing production chains and meeting the needs of your adorable citizens. Water management is key, as are reactions to sudden weather changes – sometimes it’s just nature, other times you’re dealing with the wrath of the gods! They have strong opinions in Nova Roma.
Anno 117 itself has been having a big year, with Ubisoft Mainz releasing the first two expansions: Prophecies of Ash and the surprisingly in-depth Hippodrome. These fill some noticeable gaps in the base game. Even more exciting is the upcoming Delta expansion, which adds Roman Egypt to the mix. While details are scarce, who doesn’t love Roman Egypt? (Please don’t let us build pyramids, Ubisoft! That practice was long abandoned by 117.)
Pirate Havens and Theme Park Towns
In July, Limbic Entertainment – the team behind Tropico 6 – released Corsair Cove, and it’s sublime. It might not be historically accurate, but that’s part of the charm! You’re building the last outpost of pirate glory on a series of barren cliffs, needing living quarters, foundries, and all the usual settlement necessities, but with a pirate twist. Verticality plays a huge role, creating unique opportunities and vertigo-inducing decisions. Resource management is also key, as you send fleets out to gather goods and contend with the problem of attracting unwanted attention from pirate hunters. The bigger your settlement, the more likely you are to be noticed.
We also checked out the demo for Crux Games’ Combolands that month, and it was full of promise. The full version lives up to every bit of that expectation! It’s a roguelike where every turn gives you a randomized selection of buildings or infrastructure to place, and it’s like Balatro, where you rack up combos by taking advantage of multipliers and building the right thing in the right place. Failure is inevitable, but brings new rewards for your next run, and you can influence the types of tiles you get by aligning with a specific guild at the start, like a nature-themed guild. Combolands is impressive for its seemingly infinite variety, but also for how Crux Games condensed large-scale strategy into something much smaller (a run can be completed in 15 minutes or less) without losing any of the intricacy and satisfaction you expect from more expansive city builders.
And if that wasn’t enough, July also saw the launch of Town to City, a less raucous but equally enjoyable city builder. As the name suggests, you transform a small town into a thriving city by building things that make people happy, rather than through taxation and budgetary skullduggery. If your citizens are bored, build them a theme park, a puppet theatre, or upgrade the paths. Customization is everything in Town to City, with options rendered in the game’s charming voxel style.
Looking Ahead: Lego Skylines, Tropico 7, and More
The list of exciting city-building games doesn’t stop there. Iceflake Studios and Paradox are launching Lego Skylines, a brick-built take on Cities: Skylines. Polygon had the chance to leisurely tinker with an early-game and late-game scenario, and it’s shaping up quite nicely. And at some point in the not-so-distant future, Kalypso Media is launching Tropico 7, developed by Gaming Minds Entertainment. A fresh take might be what the series needs, too. The roads are much better now, thanks to Cities-style street parking (no more parking garages!), and there’s full-fledged terraforming, where you can extend land into the ocean or create a giant rock in the middle of town. The roads automatically adjust to match whatever elevation you end up building, so it all looks very smooth and intuitive.
Management sims and builders might not seem sexy enough for the major publishers, but this niche is expanding as developers push the boundaries of what makes a good city builder. If you’ve ever been curious about the genre, there has never been a better time to get into it!
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