Time Played: 6 Hours
Simmiland, developed and published by Sokpop released in 2018. Officially called the Sokpop Collective, the company is a group of four game designers residing in the Netherlands who make a game every two weeks. They have over sixty games on Steam, with most available for three dollars.
Simmiland is a God Game, a genre where the player controls godlike powers. The player effects the weather and resources, by playing cards, guiding a small colony of humanity to build a civilization. The player starts with a small deck of cards. In each session, the world is created with one randomly generated, moderately sized island, and one or two more of smaller size. The map itself is small, only a bit larger than the computer screen. The player, as god, places the starting campfire, and two humans. In Classic version the player plays through their deck until there are no cards remaining. The final card is always, The End Card. Playing this reveals the a score screen. On this screen there is a list of achievements and points earned.
New points are used to buy more cards. There is a limited variety. Weather cards include rain, wind, sun, and thunder cards. Mineral, plant, and tree cards create most of the resources, along with meteor and earthquake cards. Cards that create living creatures are Human and Critters. It's possible to Remove or Kill inanimate and animate objects. The Plague card has the same effect as The End Card, but is essential to earn a difficult achievement, Vaccine. The most innovative part of Simmiland are the Sample and Inspect Cards, which allow for technological advancement.
After placing the campfire, the player's hand fills with sixteen cards, I think. I retrospect, I can't remember if the first game had sixteen, or if the number expanded as I purchased additional cards. Each card has a faith value, and the upper left corner of the screen records the god's faith supply. Each human being, of which the player will never have more than twenty, wishes for something (unless they are a baby). Playing the card that they wish for spends faith points, but returns even more as a reward. Playing a card that no one wished for spends the points, but brings none back in return. The player often needs to play cards no one wished for. People will wish for anything, and as the player buys more cards their wishes diversify. They wished for dangerous events like an earthquake or meteor, but such wishes can be granted, by placing the danger far out to sea (meteors create new land if they crash into the ocean). People will even wish for a plague, but don't do fulfill this unless they are technologically advanced enough to master advanced medicine.
Simmiland helpfully has multiple ways to see what people are wishing for. A drop down tab lists everyone's wish. Also, the title of cards in the hand will be purple if casting it will fulfill a wish, and white if it will not. But fulfilling wishes can be tricky for the beginner. It's easy to create a tree, or a plant, but what about a willow tree or an herb? Most cards generate different results depending on the terrain. A tree card will create a tree on grassland, an apple tree in the woods, or a palm tree in the desert. This wide variety of outcomes encourages experimentation. What if a plant card is played in the tropics? Terrain includes water, grassland, forest, desert, tropics, swamp, volcano, oil, mountains, and wastelands. How can one create these? By further experimentation, but mostly with weather cards. Every world should include a little of every type of terrain, but mostly grassland and woods. Grassland is easy to create, as are forests. Deserts and swamps aren't difficult either. Some terrain, like mountains, snow covered wastelands, and volcano are rarer because of minor difficulties in their formation. The tropics and oil that are frustrating to create. A little too much of one component will revert them into one of the more common terrain types. In spite of this finickiness, the system is ingenious enough.
It is time to take a closer look at technology. In the beginning the people know nothing. The world was empty, and so were they. An initial creation of plants allows the first people to eat. Then create a mineral nearby. Inspect it, and humanity learns about pickaxes. But a pickaxe requires a rock and a twig to make. How can they mine, if they can't create a tool? The chicken or the egg paradox. Sample cards break off a piece of something, when the people are too busy, distracted, apathetic to do it themselves. If played on a mineral, it splits off parts to be used. The player can also play an Inspect card on the shards, and people will learn about flint for knives. While early technology is fairly obvious and abundant, later tech is obscure and rare, making it difficult to discover. My advice, set aside time to hover over the screen with an Inspect card activated, looking for new technology to learn.
As the people learn their IQ improves, fostering further technological innovation. With so much to learn it can be difficult to keep track of everything. Simmiland includes a drop down tab for this as well, but it isn't as useful as the wishlist. Technologies are often independent (not connected like the technology tree of Civilization VI), but a few technologies can only be discovered after a preceding technology. The tech tab does not display the branching paths, but only lists the learned abilities. This frustrates in the second, third, or fourth playthrough, when the player tries to remember how to learn everything again. All knowledge is lost after The End Card is played, though Simmiland does include a Compendium where the player can look up Technologies, Resources, Objects, Buildings, and Foods. After finishing the third world I made a list, and every time I learned a new technology I wrote down how to discover it.
If one ever finds their hand packed with cards they don't need, like an abundance of Inspect Cards, the player can recycle them, earning a faith value of twenty, by left clicking the dollar sign in the upper right corner. Unfortunately, it is possible to have too much faith. If the player ever accumulates one thousand faith the people build a church to their god. This awards the player an unlimited amount of faith, which sounds wonderful, but it also prohibits any additional technology. It is only possible to remove the Church by a disaster like the meteor, but the people will build another church if faith reaches one thousand again.
The community also develops a nature, peaceful or evil. They begin as neutral, but the actions of the god directs them towards one or the other. Once they become fully evil or fully good, they lock into that personality regardless of further actions. The only difference between the two related to food. After teaching the people about farms, fertilizer, domestication, fishing, and a number of other tools, like how to cook, they always ran out of food. The peaceful people refused to kill the chickens they'd domesticated for food, though if I killed them, they'd cook the meat and eat it. The evil people would slaughter their animals in a second, and yet they still suffered from food scarcity. It wasn't that they didn't have food to eat. There would be farms full of grain, and trees bursting with apples, but eventually they'd starve to death unless the god continually created plants to eat.
After playing a bit, I unlocked the Endless game style. The difference was that instead of a random selection of cards from my deck, the player's hand always included one of each type of card. One tree, one plant, one thunder, etc... That's a sixteen card hand. But even though there is only two meteor cards in the Classic Deck, the player has an unlimited, as long as they have the two hundred faith needed to play it. In Endless the deck never runs out, and the player can play forever with an unlimited number of food cards. It might be an interesting area to experiment, but contains a limitation. The player can't earn any achievements.
In Conclusion, Simmiland is a quick paced God Game, which includes terrain modification and a reasonable amount of technology. Early games take only five to ten minutes, while a full deck expands the playtime to just past a half hour. Simmiland's packed with eighteen types of food, thirty-four resources, thirty-seven technologies, twenty-six objects, and twenty-one buildings. Yet for all those, the player can't command the people. Sometimes they become directionless, spending their time collecting unnecessary resources, which they already have in abundance, while neglecting those they need. They have difficulty finding food even when the land overflows with wheat and apples. The faith system is easy to use, but it's difficult to begin when there are only two people and one wants a polar bar, while the other hopes for a plague. It's also difficult to avoid the devastating 1,000 faith cap, and the church which bars future advancement, essentially ending the session. It's a pleasant enough experience for a short time, but don't expect it to hold your attention for an eternity
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