Town-building puzzle games

These are not city simulators. There are no budgets, traffic jams or disasters. Each is a quiet puzzle about putting one piece in the right place, and then the next.

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• Little Plot is ours: a five-by-five map, twelve buildings in a fixed order, and a best score to chase. A new town every day and a Journey of 170 levels across 12 worlds, each with a rule of its own. Free, with nothing to install. Play it now.

On computer and console

• Dorfromantik has you lay hexagonal tiles to grow a countryside of forests, villages and rivers, matching edges to earn more tiles. It is the gentlest of the group and can be played for hours.
• Islanders gives you a handful of buildings to place on a small island. Each scores from what stands nearby, and reaching the target unlocks the next set. Its scoring by neighbours is the closest relative to Little Plot.
• Townscaper is more toy than puzzle: click on the sea and colourful houses, arches and towers build themselves. There is no goal and no score.
• Pan’orama is a tile-placing landscape builder in the same family as Dorfromantik, with objectives that reward careful planning.
• Tiny Glade is a relaxed building toy for making small castles and cottages, with no score to worry about.
• Triple Town is a match-three puzzle in disguise: combine three bushes into a tree, three trees into a house, and keep the board from filling up.

On the table

• Carcassonne is the classic: draw a tile, add it to a shared map of roads, cities and fields, and claim what you build.
• Kingdomino has players draft domino-like tiles to build a five-by-five kingdom, scoring connected regions.
• Tiny Towns asks everyone to fit the same resources into their own four-by-four town, where one careless cube can block a whole plan.

How they differ

The main question is how long you want to play. Dorfromantik and Townscaper are for an evening. Islanders takes half an hour. The board games need company. Little Plot is the short one: a puzzle takes two to five minutes, you can see every piece before you start, and there is a new one tomorrow.

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More to read: Strategy guide · Daily puzzle calendar · Daily games like Wordle · Town-building puzzle games