2026 Has Been the Best Year for City-Builders in Decades

I picked the best possible year to get deep into city builders, at least in terms of being spoiled for high-quality choices. Having the time to play them all? Yeah, that’s another matter entirely. 2026’s release calendar has already been packed with some excellent new games, and there’s more to come heading into 2027 as well.

After years in early access, the 1.0 version of Mechanistry’s whimsical Timberborn finally launched in March. I call it whimsical because it simply couldn’t fit more whimsy into it: You’re a beaver planner building a giant beaver city. It’s a crunchy management sim nonetheless. You’re managing water flow via aqueducts and dams (what else?) and making the most of limited space on your island, which means building up once the lateral space runs out. Once you get used to the early game learning curve, the real challenge is making the most of that limited space.

Speaking of water, the excellent Nova Roma finally entered early access earlier this year, too. It’s a bit like Anno 117-lite. You set up a little Roman town and turn it into a big city by establishing production chains and meeting the needs of your adorable, tiny citizens. Most of this happens through carefully managing the flow of water and reacting to sudden changes in the weather. Sometimes, it’s just nature being nature. Sometimes, it’s because you pissed the gods off. They’re very opinionated in Nova Roma.

Anno 117‘s having a big year, too. Ubisoft Mainz published the first two expansions in the game’s first-year pass, the volcanic Prophecies of Ash and the surprisingly in-depth Hippodrome. They’re excellent and fill some of the more noticeable gaps in the base game, but even more exciting is the upcoming Delta expansion, which adds Roman Egypt to the mix. That’s pretty much all we can say about it, as Ubisoft Mainz has been rather quiet about what the Delta expansion actually consists of. But hey, who doesn’t love Roman Egypt? (Please don’t let us build pyramids, Ubisoft. That practice was long-since abandoned by 117.)

Image: Limbic Entertainment/Hooded Horse

In July, Corsair Cove from Limbic Entertainment — the Tropico 6 devs — launched, and it’s sublime. Historically a bit wonky, but again, it’s the Tropico 6 devs. You expect entertainment, not scholastic accuracy. And it’s very entertaining. You’re building the last outpost of pirate glory on a series of barren cliffs. You’ll need living quarters, foundries, and all the usual things a settlement requires, but pirate-flavored and built into rocks. Verticality, and the constraints and vertigo-inducing opportunities thereof, guide every decision. There’s a good resource management component as well, where you send fleets out to gather goods and have to contend with the problem of being perceived. The bigger your settlement, the more likely you are to attract attention from pirate hunters.

We checked out the demo for Combolands, from new studio Crux Games, that month as well and called it full of promise. The full version is out now and lives up to every bit of that promise. It’s a roguelike, where every turn gives you a randomized selection of buildings or infrastructure to place, and it’s a Balatro-like, where you rack up combos by taking advantage of multipliers and building the right thing in the right place, if you’re lucky enough to have the right thing on hand that turn. Failure is inevitable, but brings new rewards with it that you take into your next run, and you can influence the kind 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 (you can do a Combolands run in 15 minutes or less) without losing any of the intricacy and satisfaction you expect from more expansive city builders.

As if that wasn’t enough, July also saw the launch of Town to City, a less raucous, but no less enjoyable, city builder. Like the name suggests, you take a small town, and turn it into a city. But, the method by which you do this is building cool stuff that makes people happy, rather than through taxation and budgetary skullduggery. If the people are bored, maybe you should build them a theme park. Or a puppet theatre. Or a street organ. Or upgrade the paths. Or design a garden. Or — well, you get the idea. Customization is everything in Town and City, and the options are manifold and always quite pretty, rendered as they are in the game’s charming voxel style.

All of this happened in just six months. That’s not even taking the city builder-adjacent games into account, either, like Two Point Museum with its fantastic new art-themed DLC or how Frontier’s Jurassic World Evolution 3 keeps getting better. There’s much more to come, too.

Image: Urban Games/Paradox Interactive

On the “adjacent” front is Transport Fever 3, ostensibly an economic-slash-infrastructure management game, but as you do those things, a big, multifaceted city starts to build around your traffic routes. Your job is making sure that city has everything it needs to grow, and it even promises to fix some of the more pervasive issues in Cities: Skylines, like limited control over traffic flow. So it’s kind of a city builder? Well, whatever you’d call it, it looks very promising, and it’s out on Sept. 29.

The exploits of El Prez continue on Jan. 28, Kalypso Media is launching Tropico 7, this time developed by the publisher’s recently acquired studio Gaming Minds Entertainment, not Limbic. A fresh take is probably what the series needs, too. I enjoy Tropico 6, but after going back through the series and playing Tropico 4 and Tropico 5, I get the complaints about how it was “just more of the same.” Who knows, Tropico 7 might be more of the same, too. But, there are some very exciting new additions. Like roads! The roads are much better now, thanks to Cities-style street parking (no more parking garages in your tiny farming hamlets). There’s full-fledged terraforming as well, where you can extend land into the ocean or make a giant rock in the middle of town if you so choose. The roads automatically adjust to match whatever elevation you end up building, so it all looks very smooth and intuitive.

And at some point in the not-terribly-distant future, Iceflake Studios and Paradox are launching Lego Skylines, a bricked-up 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. Bonus points if, like me, you enjoy a generous bit of decorating in your city building. There’s a lot of that in Lego Skylines. Just no release date.

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 felt curious about the genre, there’s never been a better time to get into it.