Gift Guide: City-Builder & Management Games

I know I certainly shouldn’t be placed in charge of building or managing anything more complex than a desktop PC, let alone an entire city, school campus, dungeon, small Caribbean country, or settlement that’s home to the last vestiges of humanity in the face of a snow-covered apocalypse. Even so, I still enjoy games that let me simulate those processes. If that applies to you and/or any of your loved ones, allow me to fire off a few suggestions in terms of games that might serve as excellent gifts, especially if they’re discounted during a Steam Sale sometime soon.

Against the Storm ($29.99 USD)

In Against the Storm, cataclysmic rains have begun to drown the world, and what’s left of society is ruled by its Queen. As one of the Queen’s Viceroys, you’re tasked with building settlements that are efficient enough to fulfill any tasks delegated to you by the Queen. If you carry out your orders quickly, you’ll earn the Queen’s favor; take too long or fail entirely, however, and you’ll incur increasingly harsh penalties. You’ll need to figure out how to make the most of what the varying races of your settlers are best at to ensure both their survival and your own.

Two Point Campus ($29.99 USD)

Two Point Studios’ Two Point Hospital gained notoriety for following in Bullfrog Production’s footsteps by making a mockery out of health care and the maladies it’s meant to treat, and now the developers have done the same with higher education in the form of Two Point Campus. You can build facilities where your (probably overpaying) students can attend “Knight School” and learn to cook such laughably impractical foods as pizzas the size of small houses. I do hope those courses aren’t scheduled back-to-back, though; I’d imagine it’s difficult and messy to eat such a massive pizza while wearing a suit of armor.

Dungeon Keeper Gold ($4.99 USD)

That’s right: EA has finally deigned to release several games it published back in the late 1990s on Steam, including 1998’s Dungeon Keeper Gold. Dungeon Keeper is a God Game that lets you play as the latter half of the “good versus evil” trope for once. You can construct dungeons full of traps and a menagerie of monsters to thwart all those pesky heroes who want to steal your treasure, so long as you treat your dungeon inhabitants well. Dungeon Keeper 2 is also available on Steam, and War for the Overworld is a great spiritual successor to both games if you’d prefer something more modern.

Tropico 6 ($39.99 USD)

In all the Tropico games, you play as the leader (“El Presidente”) of the titular small Caribbean nation. You’ll need to build prosperous, industrial towns to both keep your citizens happy and productive, and to export all your luxury tropical goods in exchange for lots of money. You’ll have to carefully balance your relations with the United States and the Soviet Union, as getting too chummy with one will cause the other to invade Tropico. You’ll also need to ensure that you’ll continually be re-elected, though certain policy decisions and the ability to spy on Tropicans to an absurd degree can help you game the political system.

Frostpunk ($29.99 USD)

Frostpunk is likely the most depressing title on this list, even if you have a demented sense of humor like me. Most of Earth is buried beneath apocalyptic amounts of snow. You, as the leader of one of the last surviving human settlements, must build necessary structures and make policy decisions to keep as many of your compatriots as possible sheltered and content. Screw up too often or too badly, and you’ll be exiled into the frigid wastes to perish. You’ll need to accept the fact that you won’t always be able to protect everyone. I guess you could say you’ll need to be “as cold as ice and willing to sacrifice.”