I recently found myself with a few dollars in my Steam wallet (thanks to selling trading cards and Counter-Strike 2 drops), which I used as an opportunity to find some hidden gems for cheap. First, I finally added Fallout: New Vegas to my Steam account for a measly $2.49, but I still had some left over. That’s when I found Tiny Civilization.
What Type of Puzzle Game is Tiny Civilization?
At first glance, Tiny Civilization is a Threes/2048-style game that mashes together Sokoban, sliding puzzles, and match-3 puzzling in service of civilization building. Instead of merging numbers to get bigger numbers, you merge people to get more people, agriculture to get more agriculture, industry to get more industry, etc. Anyone who has played Triple Town will find a pretty similar framework here.
However, Tiny Civilization has unlocked the potential held within this deceptively simple framework by including a tech tree and skills that you can use during the game by spending action points. These few additions (such as the “carriage” skill, which allows you to move a tile much more than you would usually be able to move it in a turn) immediately move Tiny Civilization from a fun distracting puzzler to a serious simplification of (non-tiny) civilization-style games. Perhaps the best illustration of this is the fact that this game is not easy, as you can die by running out of food even if you’re a whiz at matching and merging.
Tiny Civilization is Fully Playable in English
As the Steam reviews say, don’t get freaked out by the fact that the Steam product page title seems to default to Chinese and that some of the screenshots show Chinese: the entire game is fully translated into/playable in English. I’ve only played a bit myself (and have only just made it to the Medieval Era), so I’ve only seen a fraction of what this game has to offer, but I can already tell that it’s a special one. If you’re like me and you like puzzle games that think outside the box (with some random examples including A Monster’s Expedition, Baba Is You, and Cell Machine Indev) or slimmed-down civilization games (like The Battle of Polytopia or Dorfromantik), Tiny Civilization is waiting for you.
You can typically buy Tiny Civilization on Steam for $1.99, which is already a no-brainer price for such a great game, but I got it for sale at $1.39, which quite honestly feels like I just robbed the developer. I can’t wait until the developer releases a mobile port, but until then my laptop will do just fine, as will yours. Go check it out!
