Last updated on January 3rd, 2026 at 02:26 am
TownsFolk – Simulation Game Review
TownsFolk is a Simulation/Strategy game from Short Circuit Studios AB, first launched in 3rd April 2025.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 2,680+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes TownsFolk Stand Out
TownsFolk – Build. Survive. Explore.
Lead a group of settlers into the unknown and build a thriving colony in a world full of mystery and danger. Manage scarce resources, make tough choices, and face the unpredictable frontier. Will your town prosper or fall?
Lead, Expand, Survive:
• Build & Expand – Grow your village by managing Food, Gold, Faith, and Production.
• Explore the Unknown – Clear the fog, discover treasures, and uncover dangers.
• Survive Challenges – Overcome disasters, wild animals, and moral dilemmas.
• Appease the King – Deliver tribute, or risk your colony’s fate.
Game Features:
▪ Roguelite Strategy – New challenges every playthrough.
▪ Skirmish Mode – Test survival skills in standalone scenarios.
▪ Puzzle Challenges – Solve strategic puzzles for rewards.
▪ Pixel Art World – Handcrafted visuals & atmospheric music.
▪ Deep, Minimalist Gameplay – Easy to start, challenging to master.
▪ Weekly Challenge Mode – A new scenario every week with leaderboards.
▪ Factions – 5 unique Factions, each with their own strengths, stories, and playstyles.
Can you build a settlement that withstands the test of time? Download TownsFolk today!
Play for Free – Upgrade Anytime
TownsFolk lets you jump in for free! Enjoy the How to Play missions, test your skills in Puzzle Missions, and try out Skirmish Mode with a fixed setup.
Want more? A one-time in-app purchase unlocks the full Campaign and lets you customize settings in Skirmish Mode for endless replayability.
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, TownsFolk is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 20th December 2025
Recent improvements include:
Improved controller support, fixed issues with unit ranged attacks and movement in Conquest Mode, and resolved bugs related to the campaign quest tracker.
Download & Availability
TownsFolk is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Starts off fun but over time you realize just how random (and unbalanced) some of the effects are. Discover a volcano early in the game? We guess thats it for you that game. You know the dynamic is broken when the strategy is to simply to work around the chaos hexes, but even normal hexes can unleash horrors on you. So the strategy is not to explore at all and just slow play it? That turns out to not be very fun.
Great game, except when using Apple Pencil on an iPad it selects a nearby tile after making a selection on your current tile. Very annoying.
This game is great quality and very relaxing, and Im planning to get it as one of our gifts for Christmas. There is a single issue Ive found: the achievement No sacrifice to great is spelled wrong. It should be too. But thats it.
We absolutely love this game!!! We cant afford the payed version, but even the free one is super fun! Its sort of like catan and civilization, we really like it.
We are really enjoying this game. We liked it so much that we quickly purchased the expansion. This game makes sense and the mechanics are fun to work out.
Great game all the way around. Love this strategy game and we dont even play these sorts of games but it has us hooked.
We have to say that the style of the game works for us. We love pixel-art style games, and this does it well. The game does everything it says it does even when it doesnt. Numerous times while playing the objectives would glitch, sometimes causing us some grief, sometimes winning objectives we were still working on, sometimes breaking maps or other nonsense. We have to say, this is a good game. However, its not the game you bring home to Mom. So much wasted potential with bad programming. We think after some new features and bug fixes this would be solid. As it stands its a fun distraction, but nothing you would put serious time into sadly.
Pros: 1. Art style feels retro 2. Once you get used to the game it feels enjoyable 3. The game is complex with each civilization having different things theyre good at. 4. Very replay-able 5. Updated regularly with fixes to bugs or new content Cons: 1. A few bugs here and there. (Nothing Ive personally experienced to be game breaking yet) 2. Bad spawns. Listen if the game spawns you in surrounded by water youre doomed early on skirmish. Devs you need to come up with new ways to add housing and food on water. 3. Going back to water, it just feels like the freedom is lacking on this tile. It just feels like its just there and not something we can interact with until late game until we get the terraformer. 4. While the game does have some interesting features it just feels like there could be a bit more. Overall despite the cons we would say our overall experience in the game has been worth the money spent. We look forward to seeing changes such as 1v1s being updated as well as more features. Buy the game if you can afford it and support the devs.
Im stuck in the tutorial endlessly fighting barbarians.
All of the defeat barbarians missions do not complete. Doesnt even show Ive killed them. We do it manually, let our towers do it nothing works. EDIT: guess there was a patch that released literally while we were playing that fixed the issue.
We completed the tutorial and loved the game! But is it worth it to buy the full game.
Really enjoying game, but cant progress campaign. Northsmen top spawn, large middle area, is unable to be activated despite clearing 2 other areas of that region. Other 2 remain locked. Restarting campaign and trying to choose that place first, same thing. Wont respond to opening zone. Guess Ill try a different faction Edit, Bug has been fixed: Enjoying Game all over again.
This latest update put "peaceful mode" behind a paywall. It used to just be you'd uncheck the "tributes" box and get a little notification that says "your score won't be posted to the leaderboard" and then off you go to conquer the entire map and play around to your hearts content, helping you to learn the game mechanics and such. But not anymorenow it's called "peaceful mode" and is locked behind the paywall. Also, the new update is basically just that one "isn't free anymore" thing and paid content stuff. So, yeah, obviously we regret updating. We were already on the fence about buying it (some of the mechanics are a little wonky, so we thought we'd wait for an update), but this particular update was sour.
We saw that the devs answer most comments so our question is that can we not go on infinitely without paying for the base game because we were playing and it stayed we earned the crown then it reset our game please help us devs.
Its a great game and Im enjoying it. Our only ask is that it would go into further detail of stats, especially when you loose. Or just let us go back to our map to see what was eating up our resources. We had a population deficiency and we wasnt sure why especially since we had a good amount of upgraded villages.
This game is incredibly simple and enjoyable to play! We also love the absence of adds as well as the speed up feature that you can use for free! Overall, a really great game.
The game has been super fun so far, we haven't bought the full game yet but we might buy it soon, the game is great so far and the devs seem to actually care about it which is something you love to see, we look forward to seeing what happens with this game.
We previously rated 3 stars due to balance issues with the RNG. We are improving our rating because we see how hard the devs are working to listen to feedback and improve their game. Im sure it is very difficult to balance a game of this nature, so we will be forgiving of that! The art and base gameplay are lovely. Keep it up devs.
The trial game is fun the tutorial is plenty of content already not to mention puzzles and weekly challenges, one bug Ive noticed is when building an enclosure around animals the buttons are wrong but the game still works.
By strategy and art alone, very addicting and a lot of fun. However, if youre fast at clicking, the game puts an upper limit on how fast you can do stuff (real time, not game time). This review is targeted more towards the developers than players and has a list of concrete things we wish the game improved. 1) we just want an option to increase button speeds. Harvesting replenishable trees, animals, and whales every couple turns becomes a chore because the buttons take half a second to show up. This could also apply to the map scrolling over to a tile when its selected, but the buttons appearing faster or even simultaneously is the more important part. Faster buttons would also help with the Terroformer shifting all the buttons. 2) Also for wanting to click faster, when harvesting fish/whales/chickens (and other animals probably), the resource animation interrupts another tile being selected. (whale->harvest->[+resource] then immediately click another tile). This is especially annoying for the puzzle level where whale hunting is the main way to get exploration. 3) This might be small, but clicking in the middle of nowhere should deselect the current tile (although faster buttons would help this too since the Back button appears last) 4) This one is actually gameplay. You might have a floating-point error on your day cycle with turn-based mode? A few times, Ive built farms and they dont completely finish after clicking the Next Day button and Im not sure if they produce food. (we went back and tested this by destroying/placing a farm repeatedly on one tile and got it to happen 4 times in 24 turns. It did not give food for the day it was supposed to be done, which means it affects the game mechanically.) If the problem was diagnosed correctly, you can probably fix this by just setting it to 0.999 internally (including other buildings) and having the external display round it to the nearest int. We do want to say, thank you for the Reduce Motion option! The screen zooming was a bit much.
Is not fun when your settlement slowly burns. Im a fan of rogue like games, where dying is expected, but the fire is just annoying. Uninstalled after the third city burned down.
Should just have this under paid game. The game seems like it might be fun if you pay for it.
We went through the whole tutorial, loved every second of it. Only to unfortunately find out we have to purchase the base game. Needless to say we were very disappointed.
Super peaceful, with great sounds and music.
Townsfolk is an amazing game! The atmosphere, mechanics, and overall polish really impressed us. We love how every session feels unique and keeps us coming back for more. One thing Id really love to see in the future is a game mode where you can just survive forever, we think it would add even more replayability. Overall, definitely a must play for anyone who enjoys survival and strategy.
Best game like this we have ever played aside from Settlers of Catan but we love this.
We normally delete a mobile game after a week but TownsFolk is different. There is always so much happening and theres so much strategy in the game. Ive played many mobile games and this is a master class. There also are no ads unlike other games and to do well in the game you do need to pay to unlock the full game though. But this is a great game that we think if you like tycoons or home building games you should definitely give it a try. Granted its tough at first when you have no idea what youre doing, but the game just keeps getting better and better. In summary its a great game with no ads that we think anyone who likes tycoons should play.
The game is really fun and very well made. We havent been able to put it down because its that addicting. That said, we would really love to see an endless mode to have one town with all our progress.
We would recommend adding more things including more upgrades.
One of the best games Ive played in years, its a refreshing addition to mobile gaming. Its true strategy and you can tell this game was made with care and love. Im excited to keep playing.
Overall good game, though, definitely not worth the cost of paying for full access.
Very nice game! We like it forever.
Can you please make some sort of way to auto fill deposit structures? Its very annoying to have to do it one by one. Especially when you have progressed very far.
We dont typically write reviews but we really enjoyed the game overall! We cant wait to see the game develop more, we hope you guys continue to expand it, and add more events and maybe more structures to build. Im a little stuck on how to build a lighthouse in one of our saves or if theres pre reqs (outside of the tech upgrade). Other than that this is a grade S mobile game.
This game is great, didnt even finish all of the puzzles before deciding to buy. That said, the game is so good that we hope the dev decides to continue growing and updating it in the months/years to come. Thanks for making an awesome game.
This game is probably going to be our favorite once we get the campaign. Ive really enjoyed the how to play section. We call it the best free trial Ive experienced because theres no time limit. You can choose to waste hours doing all the training segments and its still very fun. The idea of being able to endlessly expand while dodging the goal of the level. We just wish there was a kind of endless mode. Maybe there is and we just dont see it because we havent bought the game yet but we love it so far for what it is.
Good graphics, gameplay, and system. One of the few games that we may spend on.
Definitely worth a try so far Im having a good time.
The start of the game is totally a hollow knight reference! We dont know how good the game is, we just saw hollow knight reference and immediately wrote a review.
We dont think Im THAT good at this kind of game but we completed all the tutorial and the puzzle levels within a week or two. Maybe sooner if we had time. It does require a little bit of strategy and replay but not what bad reviews imply. Also tornados are avoided by having a church and asking for a blessing. Its not that difficult folks. Glad to see a lot of people know what a demo game is because frankly the free parts are already worth five dollars. Will buy.
Add more challenges without the king, like rival kingdoms.
We like to call games that you can play offline for hours airplane games, and this is a great example of a good airplane game. There are also no ads, so you play uninterrupted. The economic system of the game is also very good. Its neither too hard nor too easy, and the random events tie it all together by making you think ahead of the possibility of losing resources in the future! We really like the art and we find the music pleasant but not distracting. We really enjoy how you can have turn-base mode too, we occasionally like to swap it out and give a refreshment in the gameplay. Just the free version is really good, the amount of gameplay available is perfect, it makes you want to have more access but doesnt restrict things to the point of forcing you to buy it! Very virtuous of the developer, especially for a The game isnt complete yet, and new. Our one complaint is how everything looks so similar, we think there should be 2-3 skins per object that each object has a probability of getting that skin, (we know thats a lot of work) but it would make the game more visually exciting without having to add more structures. Anyway, great work dev team, you guys made a really cool game.
Like Civ meets stacklands, plus Ive played for a couple hours now and gotten no ads.
If we purchase the full version now, will we have full access to future versions, understandably complete separate additives wouldnt transfer over but we loved loved the intro we played.
This game has been fun and easily played on our phone. Theres a good amount of content for the free/demo version and only a one time payment for the full game which is really great! Ive been playing it almost non-stop the last few days and thats just playing with the free content. We highly recommend the game.
Great game. Im just writing some glitches we noticed so far. For tributes if we complete all, for example, 4 tributes the status below still shows 3/4 but appeared in green as completed. This is not only a display issue. When we quit the game and enter again, it asked us for a new tribute although we have already done 4, and update the tribute to 0/4. We think you need to fix it by update the completion number state before updated it as completed.
At first we thought this game was a RPG game but when we tried it was really fun and nice.
We love this game. The strategy is great. One small tweak. Please stop natural disasters (fires, tornados) from wiping out the home base (or at least have them start 3 or 4 spaces away). We played an entire region and was about to win the last section we needed in the region when a tornado popped up one square away from our home base and then immediately wiped it out. Would be nice to have some time to react.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.3.10
- Size: 220.63 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, JA, KO, PL, PT, RU, ZH, ES, SV, ZH, TR
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Short Circuit Studios AB
Last updated: 20th December 2025 | Genre: Simulation, Strategy | Developer: Short Circuit Studios AB