A Big Year Ahead for City Builder Fans
The city building genre is enjoying an incredible run right now, and 2026 is shaping up to keep that momentum going. Instead of just plopping down houses and roads in familiar modern settings, a new wave of builders is taking us to stranger, more imaginative worlds.
From rebuilding a Rome watched over by furious gods to managing a settlement on the back of a space whale, these upcoming games are twisting the classic city builder formula in creative ways. If you love strategy, management, and simulation games on PC, these are seven titles you will want to keep on your radar.
Fresh Settings and Creative Twists
What really stands out across these upcoming games is the variety of settings and mechanics. Instead of another generic modern metropolis, each game builds its identity around a distinctive world or core idea.
Nova Roma drops you into an alternate Rome where the gods are not just myths but active and easily angered. You are tasked with rebuilding a fallen Rome, but every decision you make is under divine scrutiny. Build and expand too carelessly and you may find your city punished with lightning strikes and other godly disasters. It adds a layer of tension and risk management on top of traditional city planning. Nova Roma is scheduled to arrive in January 2026 and already has a demo available for those who want an early taste.
DarkSwitch moves away from sprawling flat maps and takes the builder idea vertical. You are building an elvish metropolis wrapped around a giant sacred tree in a dark fantasy world. This colossal tree becomes your foundation, forcing you to think in terms of height, layers, and vertical expansion. The setting is not peaceful either. A creeping fog surrounds the world and can send your citizens spiraling into madness if you are not careful. Managing morale and safety becomes just as important as efficient layouts and resource flow. DarkSwitch is planned for March 2026.
Steel Artery: Train City Builder takes the concept of a fixed city and puts it on rails. Instead of sitting in one place, your city lives on a gigantic steampunk train thundering through a post apocalyptic world. You are not just laying out districts and housing, you are doing it all on moving cars and carriages that make up a constantly traveling settlement. Thousands of autonomous citizens including orcs and elves need homes, jobs, and services while your train rolls through a dangerous landscape. Balancing economy, mobility, and safety turns the usual builder formula into something more dynamic.
Beyond These Stars might be the strangest and most charming concept of the bunch. Here your entire city is built on the back of a cosmic space whale that roams the universe. Your people, called Peeps, rely on you to grow a sustainable settlement as the whale travels through different environments and hazards. You can research new technologies that eventually let you communicate with the sentient creature carrying you through space. The challenge is to expand without destroying the fragile ecosystem on the whale's back, turning city planning into a careful ecological balancing act.
County of Fortune takes a broader view of city building by giving you an entire medieval county to manage instead of a single town. You build multiple settlements and connect them with trade routes and infrastructure, watching each develop its own social, cultural, and political identity. The focus is not just on one bustling capital but on a network of towns that rely on each other. This scale opens up interesting strategic choices about specialization, trade, and regional planning.
Tamer Town is what happens when a city builder meets a creature collecting game. Set in a world filled with collectible monsters called Mokiton, you design and grow a city that revolves around creature training and battling. You build arenas, training facilities, and support structures for trainers and their teams while also decorating and expanding your town. With over 130 creatures to collect, the loop of capturing, training, and battling blends with typical builder tasks like zoning, resource management, and beautification. It is a playful twist that will appeal to fans of classic monster battling games who also enjoy strategy and simulation.
Metropolis 1998 is a love letter to the classic isometric city builders of the late nineties but with plenty of modern depth under the hood. The visuals embrace a retro aesthetic, but the simulation driving your city is far from old fashioned. One standout feature is the ability to design and decorate every single building yourself, giving you a rare level of creative control over how your city looks. With a frequently updated demo already available, players can get a feel for its nostalgic yet fresh approach even before the full 2026 release.
Why These Builders Are Worth Watching
Across all seven games, a few themes stand out. Each one takes the familiar core of city building and adds a strong twist:
- Unusual locations like cosmic whales, trains, and sacred trees.
- Stronger narrative or world flavor, from angry gods to dark fantasy fog.
- Blended genres such as monster collecting and large scale county management.
- More focus on personality and aesthetics, like fully decorating buildings or capturing nineties vibes.
For PC players who enjoy strategy and simulation, this variety is great news. Instead of just one or two big city builders carrying the genre, 2026 looks like a year filled with experimental ideas and bold settings. Whether you prefer calm planning, reactive crisis management, or creative customization, there is likely a builder on this list that fits your style.
If you are building a wish list for upcoming PC games, these seven city builders are well worth adding. They show that the golden age of the genre is not slowing down and that developers are still finding new and imaginative ways to let us design the cities of our dreams and sometimes our nightmares.
Original article and image: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/city-builder/the-city-builders-of-2026-will-let-us-build-in-some-wild-places-including-a-pokemon-style-world-filled-with-collectible-creatures/
