Island Council

Island Council is a calm, turn-based island builder drawn as a hand-painted board: small tiles with rounded edges floating on a sunset sea, foam lapping at every coast, boats drifting past the reef. You start with four islanders, a handful of timber and twelve years on the clock. Everything after that is a choice about where things go.

Eight tiles, and each one wants the right neighbours. Fields drink from the water beside them and sleep all winter. Fishing huts need a beach and count every reef tile within reach. Groves cut timber and break the wind for anything next to them. Quarries want the high ground and leave the neighbours grumbling about dust. Houses are happier beside a market or the temple, markets count the houses around them, and a lighthouse steadies the whole island when the weather turns. Every working building needs one villager, so a season is really a question of who is doing what, and undo is there for the whole season if you change your mind.

Once a season the council brings you a petition — a card with two answers and no obviously right one. Give the fishers the last of the rope or tell them to mend the old nets. Spare the old grove or fell it for timber. Board up the huts before the gulls fly inland, or trust the lighthouse. Every third year a hurricane comes through and finds out which buildings you sheltered; storm-struck tiles stop working until you repair them. Three islands set three different goals — forty-six islanders on the Coral Atoll, nine hundred prosperity on the Misty Isle, a five-tier wonder on Volcano Rock — and Endless Seas runs with no clock at all. It saves itself to your browser and plays with a mouse, a keyboard or one finger.