If 2022 is going to be the year of anything, it’s going to be the year of the city builder, a strategy subgenre that’s been gaining popularity lately, mostly on PC. While most efforts focus on sprawling cityscapes and Viking outposts, and others make city builders with even more systems, The block goes in the opposite direction.
If you have ever seen or played Cityscaperor village romance, The block has a similar idea: strip down city building to the bare essentials and let the player do nothing but put stuff on a map and be happy with what comes out of it.
The block however, cuts things even closer to the bone; While both of these games simulated a village, or at least the surrounding landscape of a village, The block is only interested in a single … block. That’s all you get. There are also no guidelines to follow, you just get a very small space and you can build whatever you want on it.
At the start of each game, you’re randomly assigned a style (e.g. European or Middle Eastern), you can choose the size of your block, and then you’re given a map with a single tile that’s pre-filled with something. From there you get your own tiles and you have to build from the center and only construct a new building (or a park or a road) if it touches an existing one.
That is the totality of the experience. No clocks, no meta, no optimal construction routes, no electricity requirements, no public transport, no traffic jams. It’s almost more of a toy than a game, like a LEGO architecture set or a box of wooden blocks, because there’s no right or wrong way to build.
I was slightly critical of ixion last week for his repeated interference with what I love most about city builders: the zen-like experience of nurturing something and watching it grow. Here’s all that, and while this is a very basic thing (and correspondingly inexpensive, at just a few dollars) I am in love The block for its clarity.
