The city-builder where the people get a vote BUILD 2.3
🏗️
Build a city. Roads, zones, power. It fills in on its own.
🗳️
Keep your seat. You face re-election every few years.
📜
Buy your land. Most of the map belongs to the county.
Choose your game
The game explains the rest as you go. Press ? any time for the full briefing. v2.0
The land isn’t yours yet
You start with one small town’s worth of land. Everything beyond the amber city limit belongs to the county — and it has to be bought.
Green · city land
Zone it, pave it, build on it. This is your city.
Hatched · county land
Roads may cross it. Nothing may be built on it until you annex it.
📜 Annex land — press T
Drag across the hatched squares to buy them. Land is sold in 4×4 parcels; the price rises with your city and with the value of the ground, and falls in a recession. Expanding is a decision, not a formality.
Some of it already has people on it
The little houses with picket signs are homesteads — families who were here decades before you. Annexing the parcel does not buy their home.
Run a road at one and it stops at the fence. You’ll be offered every exit there is: pay far over the odds, fight it through the courts for months, or bend the road around them — and that bend stays on your map forever. Some owners simply will not sell at any price.
How the voters think
Your Approval is your vote share on election day. Two forces set it — the basics, and the civic mood.
1 · The basics
↑ approve
green space, and homes & jobs keeping up with demand
↓ disapprove
pollution, crime, high taxes, blackouts, debt
2 · The civic mood
A single meter at the top of the screen. It reads what the city wants from you right now:
← ease offcontentbuild more →
Wants growth: demand is hot but land sits empty. Just build — zoning and developing eases it. (Bulldozing forest does not.)
Wants restraint: you’ve dropped towers into quiet, park-side blocks. Keep high density near offices & shops, not in leafy neighborhoods.
Keep the meter near content and approval takes care of itself. Lose two elections in a row — or stay in the red for ten months — and your run ends.
Your first moves
Lay a few roads (R), then drop a power plant (U) and wire it to them.
Zone Residential (Z), Commercial (X) and Industrial (C) within three tiles of a road.
As people arrive, add parks (P) and a school, and watch the demand meter up top.
Watch the mood meter up top — if it leans amber (“build more”), zone and develop; if blue (“ease off”), stop cramming towers into quiet blocks.
And mind the treasury — debt charges interest, and ten straight months in the red ends your run.
Controls
Left dragUse the tool — roads draw lines, zones draw rectanglesRight dragPan · scroll to zoom · Q / E to rotateR · U · PRoad · Power plant · ParkZ · X · C · VZone R · C · I · Mixed (tap again for density)BBulldoze — or the De-zone tool to clear zoning onlyG · N · SpaceData maps · night · pause
ISOPOLIS
A tiny isometric city sim — a love letter to the classic 90s city builders.
Built as a single self-contained HTML file, rendered in real time with three.js. Open source under the MIT license — view the source on GitHub.