Colony sim games
The genre where you lead a small community that gathers resources, builds a settlement and tries to survive.
What is the colony sim genre?
In a colony sim you manage not a single character but a group of people. You decide who works on what, what gets built first and how to prepare for winter. The difference from city builders is scale and closeness: The population is a few dozen people rather than thousands, and each of them has their own skills, relationships and mood.
That makes the genre very good at producing stories. A famine, an illness or a quarrel between two colonists creates events the game's script never wrote. In most of them the goal is not to win but to survive and keep the community standing.
What defines it?
Every member of the colony has their own skills, backstory and mood.
Where you send your limited workforce decides the fate of the colony.
Winter, famine and raids test your setup on a regular basis.
Events that no script wrote are born from systems colliding.
Landmark games
Well-known examples often used to explain the genre. For the list on our site, see the games section below.
At a glance
Colony sim games (13)
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between a colony sim and a city builder?
In a city builder the population is an abstract number and you manage the infrastructure. In a colony sim every colonist is defined one by one, and their skills and mood are at the center of play.
Why do these games look so hard?
Their interfaces are dense and their systems are intertwined, and seeing your first colonies collapse is a normal part of the genre. Most games let you adjust difficulty and how often events happen, so the pace can be softened as much as you like.