Cities: Skylines II is still the default answer for city building games, and Anno 117: Pax Romana is the best new one you can buy today. That is the short version, and for a lot of players it is the whole answer.

The longer version matters because the genre quietly split in two. One half wants you to zone forty thousand people and then argue with a traffic simulation about a single off-ramp. The other half hands you eight settlers, a rain cloud and ninety minutes. Both are city builders, and picking the wrong half is the most common reason people bounce off the whole category. This list covers PC, console and mobile, names what is still unfinished, and ends with a straight recommendation if you have never built anything. Two rules decided the order. A game had to be playable in its current state, not in the state its roadmap promises, and it had to give you a problem the other five do not.

The Picks at a Glance

Game	Platforms	State	Best for
Cities: Skylines II	PC	Patch 1.6, console still unannounced	Scale and mods
Anno 117: Pax Romana	PC, PS5, Xbox Series	Released November 2025	Production chains
Timberborn	PC	1.0 since March 2026	Terrain puzzles
Against the Storm	PC	Finished, plus DLC	Short sessions
Manor Lords	PC	Early access, Update 8	Medieval detail
Pocket City 2	iOS, Android, PC	Finished, paid once	Phone play

1. Cities: Skylines II

Buy this one if you want a real metropolis and nothing smaller will do. No other city builder lets you run a road network at this size, and the simulation underneath now actually keeps up with it. Patch 1.6.0f1 in June 2026 added a road zoning toggle that stops the game auto-filling every block you draw, which sounds minor and quietly reorganizes how you plan a district.

The honest criticism is the release history and what it left behind. Development moved from Colossal Order to Iceflake Studios at the start of 2026, and the console version that was promised in 2023 still has no date, with Paradox only confirming it will not arrive before summer. If you own an Xbox or a PS5 and want a builder now, this is not it, and the wider best PC strategy games list covers what else the same rig runs. Go read the studio handover notice before you preorder anything.

2. Anno 117: Pax Romana

This is the best city builder released in the last two years and the one to pick if you like supply chains more than zoning tools. It landed on November 13, 2025 on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, which also makes it the strongest option on a console right now. You run two Roman provinces at once, and moving goods between them is the actual game.

The catch is weight. Anno has never been a game you learn in an evening, and 117 is no exception once the second province opens and your first province starts starving. It also carries a season pass structure that splits content across a year, so the version you buy in September is not the version people will be discussing in December. Worth checking the current Steam listing for what is actually included before you pick an edition.

3. Timberborn

Play this if you want the terrain itself to be the opponent. You run a beaver colony in a dried-out world, and water is the whole puzzle: dam it, channel it, store it, and survive droughts that get longer every cycle. It left four years of early access on March 12, 2026, which makes it one of the few genuinely finished strategy releases this year, and the 1.0 build finally added automation plus a proper visual pass.

Nobody attacks you here, which will disappoint half the people reading this and relieve the other half. The late game also thins out once your water network is solved, because there is no external pressure to force you to rebuild it. Mechanistry documented the full 1.0 feature list in its launch announcement, and it is a fair guide to what you are getting.

4. Against the Storm

Pick this one if you have ninety minutes at a time and no appetite for a save file you have to maintain. Each settlement is a run: you get a random biome, a random mix of humans, beavers and lizards, and a storm timer that ends the map whether you finished or not. Then you bank the progress and start again.

The roguelite frame is the reason it works and also the reason some people hate it. You never get the slow satisfaction of watching one town grow for thirty hours, because the game takes your town away on schedule. The Keepers of the Stone expansion added frogs and a coastal biome in late 2024, and if you want the full pool of species and maps you are buying it on top of the base game.

5. Manor Lords

Buy this for the village simulation and treat everything military as a bonus. It is the most detailed of the town building games on this list: plots get subdivided by hand, families take up trades, and a bad ox route in spring shows up as a food shortage in autumn. Update 8 arrived on August 27, 2026 with livestock breeding, cider, mead and cheesemongers, and the game has now passed four million copies sold.

It is still in early access after more than two years, with 1.0 currently pointed at 2027 and no firm date. The battles remain the weakest part, thin enough that treating them as the main course will leave you annoyed. If sieges and standing armies are what you came for, our medieval strategy picks serve that better.

6. Pocket City 2

This is the phone pick, and it earns the spot by charging you five dollars once and then leaving you alone. No build timers, no premium currency, no notification asking you to come back. You zone, you lay roads, and you can drop your avatar into the streets and drive around the thing you built.

Set expectations on depth. The economy is shallow next to anything else here, and once the whole building set is available there is not much pushing back. It is a commute game and a very good one. If you want mobile strategy with actual opponents, our list of multiplayer mobile strategy games is the better shelf to browse.

Sandbox or Siege: Which Kind of Builder Do You Want

Answer this before you spend anything, because it splits the genre cleanly. A sandbox builder judges you on efficiency and lets you take as long as you like. A builder with combat judges the same layout on whether it survives contact with an army, and a road that made economic sense becomes a corridor someone marches down.

The practical difference shows up in where you put your storehouse. In a sandbox you park it next to production and never think about it again. In a builder with a threat model, that same warehouse is the thing the enemy walks toward, so you end up trading throughput for a longer haul behind a wall. Neither habit transfers cleanly, which is why players who love one half often find the other half tedious, and it is the clearest example of the strategy and simulation overlap doing real work.

Cities: Skylines II, Timberborn and Pocket City 2 sit firmly on the sandbox side. Manor Lords and Anno 117 straddle it. If you already know you want the fighting to matter, skip this list and go to our roundup of builders where armies show up, which covers Northgard, They Are Billions and Stronghold. If you would rather the pressure came from a balance sheet, the games that are mostly spreadsheets scratch that instead, and the wider economic simulation guides go deeper on the systems.

What You Can Actually Play Free

Nothing on the list above is free, and the honest answer is that the good ones are not. What exists instead are two workarounds. On console and PC, a Game Pass subscription is the cheapest legitimate route into the category, and Frostpunk 2 has been on it since its September 2025 console launch. Our Xbox strategy lineup tracks what else is currently in the catalog.

On mobile, free means free-to-play, and free-to-play means timers. SimCity BuildIt is still the biggest of them, still updated in 2026, and still built so that the interesting decisions arrive on a schedule EA controls. Play it knowing that. Search around and you will find plenty of lists of awesome city building games that quietly count these as equivalent to a fifty dollar builder. They are not the same hobby.

Where to Start

Never built a city before: Against the Storm. A run is short enough that a bad one costs you an hour, and the game explains its own systems better than anything else here. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you like the genre at all.

Two purchases are worth thinking twice about. Cities: Skylines II is the wrong first buy on a marginal machine, because the scale that makes it impressive is the same thing that makes it stutter. Manor Lords is the wrong buy if you want a finished game, since 1.0 has no date and Update 8 landed at the end of August. Everything else here is done, and it will be the same game a year from now.

One last piece of advice that applies to all of them. Your first city is going to be bad, and it is supposed to be. Build it badly, work out which system you kept fighting, and start a second one with that in mind. If the lesson turns out to be that you wanted somebody shooting at you the whole time, the real-time strategy guides cover that side of the family. Everything we rank lives in our rankings, and the rest of the site is at Strategygame.org.

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