PicoMayor
"Be the mayor of a tiny city and carefully plan your way to glory!"
PicoMayor is a city builder game where you have to balance seven Resources (Wealth, Labour, Professionalism, Science, Art and Culture, Logistics, and Happiness) while trying to grow your city. Each building can either consume or produce one or more resources, in addition to either requiring a yearly upkeep or generating a yearly income. Many buildings also interact with each other in ways that may or may not be beneficial, so planning is crucial for your success.
(hint: when inspecting your city, you can move your cursor left to inspect the resource production and usage, or down to view the income and spending.)
There are in total 42 buildings in PicoMayor, but only low density residences and farms are available when the game starts. Additional buildings will become available once you meet their unlock conditions. There is no final goal, but there are eight achievements you can unlock.
You can view the full list of buildings, including their unlock conditions, as well as the list of achievements, from the pause menu.
If your city runs out of money or lacks any one of the seven Resources, it enters a Crisis. You must resolve a Crisis within three years or it is game over.
There are three save slots and you can save your city from the pause menu. By default the game also autosaves every five years, but you can change the autosave frequency or turn it off entirely. Be warned that you cannot save the game (nor will it autosave) when there is an ongoing crisis.
Remarks
The core idea of this game where you balance abstract resources comes from SimCity: Societies, that one cursed and forgotten SimCity installation. The more modern games Block'hood and Urbek City Builder are similar, but they also let you accumulate resources over time.
If you enjoy PicoMayor, you will probably also like Mare Mercatus, my earlier turn-based simulation / strategy game about maritime trade: not-articulated.itch.io/mare-mercatus.
This is awesome - easy to learn and slow gradual pace that is balanced and is still a bit of a challenge. Very cool
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