Townscaper

A gamer dad and his 4-year old daughter found a game to play together when relaxing after a busy day or weekend of activities. It's simple, silent, peaceful, aesthetic, and gives you back as much energy as you put into playing it. Of course, we look forward to more comfort features, like a better save/load mechanism, but give 5 stars nonetheless not for what it does, but how it makes us feel.

It's a relaxing little toy for drawing little european-style dreamy little towns. As you've very little control on the output and the grid tend to be a bit uneven, I do not reccomend it if you've even an hint of obsession for order and clean designs. In the current version there is a bug that for me make it hard to use as an occasional relaxation toy: the interface does interact badly with other controllers plugged in the computer (in my case saitek throttle and stick), making it impossible to use it until I unplug or disable them. Having to disable the devices and restart the computer before being able to play it, kind of defeat its role as a 5-minutes distraction tool. I've read of other people having this problem, it appeared with the last release, and hopefully it will be fixed, in the meantime, you've been warned.

Not sure if this is really a game, but basically you build houses of different coloured blocks on a grid set in the sea. You literally start from the foundations, and can make your buildings as large or as small as you want, but the underlying algorythm will dictate how it looks until you learn how it works and can manipulate it. Towns, farms, docks, castles, factories, luxury hotels, you can even have a city in the sky, and the more you play the more you learn how things work. And the more you look at the clock when your town or country is finished and wonder where the time went! We all need something creative in our lives, and this is one way to achieve it. It costs less than a movie ticket or a bottle of wine, and you feel much more relaxed and happy after playing it.

Not a game, but just a safe zen relaxing place where you can build your city, island, tower, flying town, etc. etc. etc.

This game is really nice. The controls are easy and it's easy to make something aesthetically pleasing despite my complete lack of ability to make things look aesthetically pleasing. I'd give it 5 stars, but it needs a bit more polish that it's probably never going to get. - It could really use some tools like a fill tool or brush or copy/paste. - An option to lock the camera so it doesn't move when I click somewhere would be helpful. - And I was a dissapointed at the 3D models it exports. They don't contain details like windows or doors that are rendered in game. I was hoping to 3D print an exported model but 3D prints aren't very good when all the small details are missing.