Landnama

You wanna play Civ, but without all those pesky mechanics like diplomacy, war, or a whole lot of choices? Well have I got a game for you. Played for a total of 4 hours, beat the 'saga', and felt like I basically got a load of the entire game. You just need to make sure that you've got the resources at the end of each year and then keep plugging along. Explore, build, repeat. All around a chill game to play when you can't think of anything else to play. I don't regret buying it, but I can't see myself playing it for any extended period of time.

It's a small repetitive game which I really enjoy. It doesn't have much going on but if you like this kind of games were you try to test yourself to complete it faster or score higher (or getting all the achievements) then this is a good game for you.

Landnama, developed and published by Sonderland, is a strategy experience that strips the genre down to its essentials and rebuilds it around tension, scarcity, and careful decision-making. Rather than focusing on expansion through conquest or complex economic systems, it centers everything on survival in a harsh environment inspired by early Icelandic settlement. The result is a game that feels more like a strategic puzzle than a traditional city-builder, where every move carries weight and success depends on how efficiently you manage limited resources over time. The most defining feature of Landnama is its reliance on a single core resource that governs nearly every action you take. This streamlined approach creates a constant push-and-pull between growth and sustainability. Expanding your settlement, unlocking new tiles, and upgrading structures all draw from the same pool, forcing you to weigh immediate benefits against long-term consequences. There’s no room for careless decisions; even a small miscalculation can ripple outward, leaving you unprepared for the challenges ahead. This simplicity is deceptive, as it creates a system where strategic depth emerges not from complex…

The big thing to me is that it seems to punish cleverness and/or efficiency, the difficulty of each winter is based on the amount of resources your colony can produce, meaning you are punished for quickly ramping up production but rewarded for keeping it artificially low. It's also real time rather than turn-based, despite everything happens at the end of discrete units of time, which makes it indistinguishable from turn-based except for the fact the player is forced to sit and watch bars go up. These two design choices made the game feel like it was just dragging out the length of the game for no good reason I can see. As a puzzle there's not a lot of different choices to make or options to consider, it's not pretty enough to really motivate exploration, nor is the narrative really something I could get engrossed in. I like the theming, and if the developers had rewarded cleverness instead of punishing it I think this could have been a nice, light, little puzzle-like experience, but as it stands I don't see this game living through the winter.

Very nice game. Has more to chess or mine sweeper then it has to base building.

Great game and well worth the price for the entertainment you get! Also, you're supporting a group of indie devs who truly put their hearts into the games they create. Gameplay seems easy at first, but once you get deeper, you'll have to plan and strategise your next moves. Recommended!