City-building games are the best.

You can conjure a metropolis from your fingers and watch as your citizens scurry to and fro. Or build up a village and help your villagers survive bleak winter months, or even just plop down buildings in the middle of an infinite ocean just for fun.

It's a genre rooted in building and management, but it spans many different types of games. So, here are the eight best city-building games you absolutely must play.

1. Cities Skylines

The current zenith of the city-building genre is Cities Skylines, the wonderous, maddening, sprawling title developed by Colossal Order.

Although Cities Skylines first launched in 2015, it's still top of the pile more than seven years later. That success and longevity is in no small part down to its vast army of modders, thousands of individuals dedicated to bringing new assets, styles, maps, lighting schemes, and so much more to the game.

In that, the game at the time of writing, in 2022, is vastly different from its 2015 release. Many would argue that, at least on PC (there is no modding on the console version), playing vanilla Cities Skylines is a fool's errand when so many quality of life upgrades exist in the Steam Workshop.

But the modders aren't going it alone. In 2022, Colossal Order released the Airports DLC, the ninth major DLC for the title among a host of other smaller content creator packs, radio stations, and more.

2. Townscaper

From mass-transit and sprawling cities to the quaint and artistic, Townscaper is more of a zen-city building experience than anything you've played before.

Oskar Stålberg's Townscaper has "No goal. No real gameplay. Just plenty of building and plenty of beauty." The developer nails the description, and you can spend a lovely little chunk of time plopping down buildings to arise from the watery starting scene.

The lack of direction does put some people off. But the joy of Townscaper is figuring out how different buildings work together, changing their colors, and creating ridiculously cute towns one block at a time.

3. Frostpunk

From the developers of critically acclaimed This War of Mine came survival-cum-city-builder Frostpunk, an at times brutal game where your survivors trudge through life in the midst of a devastating volcanic winter.

The cold sweeps in and is constant. You'll have to balance the need to keep your survivors warm, and you know, alive, with the need for your civilization to expand and grow. Insulation and stockpiling, you'll quickly find, is key to keeping your generator up and running. Without it, you're going to have a bad time.

Throughout Frostpunk, you'll also have to make some tough decisions relating to politics, working conditions, and even child labor laws. It's not a jolly city-building experience. It's filled with sickness, death, and worry, and it's a great experience overall.

Want to know the best thing of all? Developers 11 bit studios are working on Frostpunk 2!

4. SimCity 2000/3000/4

Before Cities Skylines, there was only one name in city-building games: SimCity. The original SimCity was great, but it wasn't until the launch of SimCity 2000 in 1993 that the series really caught the imagination.

The 1999 follow-up, SimCity 3000, was released to critical acclaim, receiving exceptional reviews across the board, and you can still find new user-content releases for modern buildings more than 20 years after the game first launched.

Then, with SimCity 4, the game embraced a fully regional design, where you build multiple different city types, combining sprawling metropolises with regional industry, farming zones, power generation, and much more. SimCity 4 still holds up today.

SimCity's last release, the titular SimCity in 2013, was universally slated at launch, despite general excitement beforehand. EA elected to launch SimCity as an online-only game, where you couldn't play or access your single-player cities without an internet connection and a connection to an EA server. At launch, servers were overwhelmed with users, meaning hundreds of thousands of people couldn't play. Then, there were huge issues with the game's pathing and routing, delays to patches to fix these issues, and much more.

Its poor overall performance killed the SimCity franchise, with EA closing the Maxis studio, only launching a free-to-play mobile game since. Still, you cannot have a best city-building games list without SimCity, and if you can get your hands on the old titles or find a way to play SimCity online, it's absolutely worth doing.

5. Banished

When Banished launched in 2014, it was remarkable for a couple of reasons.

First, despite its scale, development was the sole charge of a single man, Luke Hodorowicz, who started the development of Banished in 2011. Second, relating to the first point, Banished's city-building mechanics are complex enough to keep you playing for hours as you attempt to guide your fledgling village into a thriving community.

Banished's focus does shift as you gain resources, moving away from the harsh survival mode required in the early days of your settlement to resource management, trading, and expansion when your world becomes more secure.

Regardless, it's a great city-building game, and that it continues to receive excellent reviews on Steam years after its launch is a testament to the depth and replayability of the game. Also, there are numerous mods and overhauls available on the Steam Workshop that can breathe new life into the original game once you've given it a few run-throughs.

6. Islanders

Islanders is different from the other city-building games on this list. Instead of just plonking down zones and managing your infrastructure budget, Islanders requires precise placement of specific structures to create a big enough score to unlock your next set of buildings.

Each turn becomes a delicate balance of creating something eye-catching and placing buildings that trigger a specific point tally near each other.

Like Townscaper, it's surprisingly addictive, and really has that "just one more turn" vibe that will keep you coming back for more, and its no wonder it also features on our list of the best base-building and kingdom-building games.

7. Caesar III

Caesar III is the best title in the ancient Roman city-building series, and the last developed by legendary studio, Sierra Entertainment.

In Caesar III, you take on the role of a Roman governor, building your newly founded Roman city into grandeur and improving your subjects lives with it. You work through missions, progressing through goals, attempting to solve problems and bring prosperity to your people.

It's fun trying to figure out the best combinations to help your city grow. You'll need to port water around your city for drinking and bathing, along with building markets to enable trading, barracks for defense, and all while keeping an eye on the gods, who also must be kept sweet.

There is a decent amount of micro-management, fine-tuning taxes, building outputs, and so on, but you don't necessarily have to get involved—but it does help. Caesar III is available on major gaming platforms, but you might need to figure out how to play old games and software first.

8. Tropico 6

The original Tropico launched in 2001—just two years after Caesar III. The graphical jump between the two games really is night and day. For many, Tropico was an exciting, exotic 3D city builder with the added twist that you're not just building out the island, you are "El Presidente," and your word is absolute.

Although Tropico 6 launched nearly 20 years after the original, your goal remains unchanged: stay in power, at all costs.

Tropico 6 expanded the game world to include multiple buildable islands, a greater focus on infrastructure, and better individual citizen simulation than ever before. It's a sumptious-looking city simulator that ticks a different box than most, building out a tropical paradise makes a pleasant change from the wastes of Frostpunk or the blank canvas of Cities Skylines.

What Are the Best City Building Games?

The eight games above are some of the best city-building games you can play, old and new. But this list is far from comprehensive. There are heaps of other city-building games that you should check out, including the ANNO series, The Settlers, Caesar, Foundation, and Surviving Mars.

In short, the city-building genre is extensive, and for as long as we've gamed, we've attempted to simulate the world around us so we can control it as we see fit.