These Doomed Isles makes two genres more accessible for newcomers | Hands-on preview

I’ve always liked the idea of city building games, but in practice I’m very bad at constructing a functional virtual town. Whether it’s struggling to make enough money to expand or making all my citizens poor and miserable, the end result of my city planning career is always rather disastrous. I am pretty good at card games though, so when I heard that These Doomed Isles would let me use cards to build a fantasy settlement I was more than a little intrigued.

As one of a selection of gods (with two available in the current demo) you are tasked with building and expanding a civilisation centred around your holy relic. This is done by taking structures or other bits of land from the cards in your hand and placing them into the world. First you’ll probably want some cabins for the people of this land to live in, then you’ll need to build places for them to work and gather materials for you. It’s pretty simple in theory, but it won’t take long for you to realise there’s a lot to think about when building a functioning town.

Each card costs materials to play, so making sure you earn enough of these each turn is a good starting point. All the usual suspects like wood, stone, metal and gold are here, but there are other important numbers to keep track of too. One of these is faith, which powers cards that use your godly powers. These include blessings that make your citizens happy, as well as more aggressive powers like lightning bolts and meteor storms. You’ll also need faith to draw a new hand when you run out of cards you want to play, otherwise you’ll have to end your turn and go to the next season.

Moving to the next season will give you all the resources your subjects have gathered, allow any enemies to move, and will visually change the weather. Once a whole year is up, you’ll be presented with a selection of new cards to buy with the gold you’ve gathered. You’ll probably want to focus on extra cabins for your homeless citizens first (because once they’re happy in a new home you can put them to work) but then it’s up to you to decide if you want to buy storehouses to hold more resources, crossbow towers to keep enemies at bay, or extra land so you can expand across the water.

Growing the area where you can build things is incredibly important early on, because you start on such a tiny island. By placing the little Tetris blocks of land across the water, your aim is to connect to other islands so they become part of your domain. What’s really cool about this is that when you gain a new landmass you’ll be given a reward, and these hugely boost your kingdom’s power. Sometimes you’ll be offered the ability to max out one or two of your resources, other times you’ll gain a permanent buff that grants you extra stuff if you max out a supply at the end of a turn. It’s a really rewarding system, and even without it expanding is satisfying.

After a few expansions you’ll probably start getting messages that enemies are on their way from a certain direction. This is your chance to set up some defences before they arrive so they won’t damage your settlement. I found the bow towers to be the best for this, but if you misjudge where the raiders are going to approach from you can also unleash god powers on them when they arrive. Since everything is turn based you don’t have to worry about rushing to wreck your shit, but you’ll probably want to redraw a new hand or two to get what you need to take down the baddies.

In this demo build of These Doomed Isles you’re given three objectives to complete to finish the level, and once you do a boss will appear that needs dealing with. These objectives were all pretty easy, involving keeping a number of citizens happy, building wonders and beating up raiders, but the boss was much more of a challenge. Spawning right on top of my city centre with thirty health (when the highest I’d seen before that was three) it took me building new bow towers and throwing a load of spells at him to eventually take him out, and not before losing a few buildings.

Once he’s beaten though that’s pretty much it, and you can either return to the main menu (which also triggers a level up of your god and gives you some new cards for a replay) or carry on building endlessly with less of an aim. It’ll be interesting to see how the game progresses after this thirty minute gameplay section, because so far I’m loving These Doomed Isles.

Although there wasn’t a whole lot of content in this demo, it got me incredibly excited for the full release of These Doomed Isles. Combining card game mechanics with city building is a wonderful way to make both genres more accessible for newcomers, and expanding across to multiple islands is really satisfying. I’ll be back to continue my godly adventure when the full release comes around, so watch this space.

These Doomed Isles is due to release on PC in September 2023.