This is an amazing turn-based city builder! It is one of those games where you just want to play one more turn and suddenly you realise it is...02.00 in the night. The sole developer is very dedicated with lots of new content after release and a lot of quality of life fixes, improvements and rebalancing. I am playing this since december 2023 and it has improved a lot since then.

You are a village Elder and start with 4 pips (people) and you gradually expand to a town with 40-60 pips. Initially every pip can be assigned to every job available. As you build more advanced buildings, they require specialized pips. You can train your Pips and assign professions, such as Lumberjack, Stonemason, Miner, Toolmaker, Hunter, Farmer, Cook. A big part of the game is the research tree which lets you constantly research new (and more powerful) buildings. Every PIP also needs 1 food per turn. The game has no combat.

The aim of the game is to withstand against 4 threats, Sickness, Fear, Cold or Heat (depending on the season of the year) and Cataclysm (Physical catastrophies, pollution). Each of those threats peak at certain points for some rounds and to overcome them you need to produce certain points of Happiness, Health, Heat or Cold and Environment. During the whole game you need to constantly prioritize between encountering threats, researching, building/expanding, producing food etc. As you play the game you gather points and unlock different buildings that could come up at future runs.

There are 5 different game modes (Elders), many difficulty levels (Easy, Normal, Hard, Harder). Every starting map is randomly generated with different resources, the research tree is also slightly different every time, so there is a good amount of replayability there.

If you like turn-based games with resource management, city builders, worker-placement board games, I highly recommend this amazing game!

A passion project that is pleasant to play through.
Good set of options like font choices, animation skipping, UI-focus mode, and most importantly the controller support.

Some minor nitpicks:
- Only one 'story' active at a time. Why? Taking away the ability to save & load within the same playthrough to avoid save scumming is somewhat understandable, but why can I not, for example, have a separate slot for every difficultly?
- The list of Pips is not searchable or sort-able with a controller. There is a search on Keyboard+Mouse, but only by the names of the Pips, so still not able to search for specific jobs or tasks.
- No controller re-binding. There is an extensive menu for keyboard+mouse, but sadly not for gamepads (at least DS4/Dualsense)
- Trying to navigate to the bar that shows the percentage chance of good/bad event can be sometimes very cumbersome with a controller.