Founders' Fortune

Founders’ Fortune is a colony building game that sees players creating a colony from scratch in a randomly generated world. With similar aspects to games like Stonehearth, Rimworld, and The Sims, Founders’ Fortune is a deceptively childish game in appearance. But once players start their first colony, they can expect a surprising amount of depth and complexity.

Colony Creation

At the start of the game, players can expect to be given a number of options when creating their colony’s world. Like in other games, Founder’s Fortune lets you tweak a great number of options to make sure that your playthrough is exactly what you want it to be. There are options for island biomes, peaceful enemies (pirates and goblins), difficulty, and villager aging.

Once the player is in the game, they’ll be able to choose their starting villagers. This process will be familiar to fans of games such as Rimworld or Oxygen Not Included. These villagers are randomly generated, which means that each and every playthrough is unique and offers a bit of variety each time. Villagers have different personality traits that can benefit or hinder your colony. For example, some villagers have advanced flu treatment abilities, while others might be allergic to tomatoes.

Villager Management

Part of what makes Founders’ Fortune stand out from other games is its emphasis on villager management. Each of the player’s villagers has unique aspirations and wishes that can be fulfilled to earn points.

Each villager has unique wants and needs, as well as abilities and skills. This splinters off into skill trees, and each villager in the player’s colony can be upgraded to have better and better skills to benefit the colony as a whole. Players can expect to spend a lot of time leveling up their villagers’ professions. While the game might be a colony builder, the game offers a lot of focus on the nitty gritty of managing your villagers.

The game doesn’t offer anything too revolutionary in its skill trees. If you’ve played games like Rimworld or even Minecraft, you can expect the usual jump from wooden to stone tools, etc, that will have your villagers progress from small wooden huts to a fully fledged colony.

The Sims: Colony Edition

Founders’ Fortune does well to mimic well-established mechanics seen in games like the Sims. Villagers can interact with one another in much more detailed ways than other games of this type. For example, if a villager wishes to forge a relationship with another villager, the player can help facilitate that by having the first villager make a flirtatious joke.

These aspects of gameplay will feel right at home to Sims fans, and they add a nice bit of variety to what gamers have come to expect from building-focused colony simulators.

PROS:

• Detailed villager management system
• Lots of complexity when it comes to individual villagers
• Mod compatibility

CONS:

• Art style feels very bland
• Not as much emphasis on the colony creation