Growing my village is a chill challenge in this beautiful new strategy city builder

I’m greeted with a nice little surprise while placing a cluster of cottages in early access strategy city builder TerraScape (opens in new tab)—one of the several new city builders that arrived on Steam this week (opens in new tab). As I plop my fourth cottage down, the handful of tiny buildings suddenly transform into a massive wooden longhouse that dwarfs the other homes around it. I’ve just merged my first buildings, and now that I’ve learned how to do it, I want to do it again.

In TerraScape, these merged buildings appear when placing specific structures in a certain arrangement. In addition to cottages becoming a longhouse, chapels and churches can be merged into a mighty cathedral, and several large homes can be combined into a stately villa. Careful placement of buildings is already key in TerraScape, but this merged building feature not only makes my already beautiful city even more pleasing to look at, it also gains me extra points. And it rewards me with something even more important: a bomb I can use to blow up a structure I’m not happy with so I can build something else.

TerraScape has a strong Dorfromantik (opens in new tab) feel to it, except instead of building a map with hexagonal tiles, a hex map is generated for you and then you play decks of cards to fill it with buildings. Each building card can be placed to earn points based on the spot you choose to play it, and the logic of that placement will make immediate sense to anyone who’s played a city builder before.