You never just drop a brewery somewhere. No-no-no. Not at first, anyway. At first, you should take it for a walk.
Or rather, you should take it skating. I like to grab a brewery and sort of skim it over the landscape, like a skater describing dreamy arcs on the surface of a frozen pond. It’s capitalism – it’s potentially even empire-building – but at this stage it’s also speculative, a quiet thing of drooped eyelids and keen hearing. You are waiting for the land to speak to you. You are waiting for the land to tell you where the brewery should best be placed.
Islanders: Console Edition reviewPublisher: Grizzly GamesDeveloper: Grizzly Games, CoatsinkPlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC, Xbox, Switch and PlayStation
Ultimately, I like to think of these early stages of Islanders, a city-building game like no other, as if I am dowsing. But that thought journey seems important in itself. Walking, skating, listening, dowsing: this is one of those magical games that is broad enough to be absolutely about what it claims to be about – building civilisations on a series of lonely islands – but can also serve as an analogy for numerous other things. How best to store different teas in a cupboard. How to entertain fractious kids of a long holiday. How to formulate an argument with rigour and a certain kindness, a certain willingness to have your mind changed by something you subsequently learn. (Granted, I was having a pretty cosmic playthrough when this one occurred.) What could be nicer?
You’re moving breweries around because breweries like to be near certain things, like hop fields and seaweed farms and warehouses, but they don’t like to be near other certain things – namely, other breweries. It makes sense. A brewery needs easy access to things it can brew, but it shouldn’t have to deal with redundancy or competition. In Islanders, these proximities come down to points: you get points for proximity to the things the brewery likes, and you lose points for proximity to the things it doesn’t like. And while you are learning all this, internalising all this, you are best served by moving the brewery over the ground – skating, dowsing, listening to the rattle of potential points as they move past.
ISLANDERS Launch Trailer – Minimalist City Builder Watch on YouTube
It’s not just breweries that need to be given a tour. Islanders works by giving you an empty island, and then offering packs of themed buildings to choose from. Once you choose a pack, you have to hit a points target with the pieces it offers in order to unlock the chance to choose another pack. So a brewery pack might come with a brewery and a bunch of fields and hop fields – arrange them well, maximise the points, and you earn the right to do it all over again with a different pack, say lumber or bricks, or something for a growing city. Fail to earn enough points before you run out of pieces to place and it’s game over. Succeed and eventually you get to move to a bigger island and start the process once again.