The Nerdy Type

I pride myself on being a pretty well-rounded gamer, at least in terms of the genres I play, but there’s one where I fall short because I’m simply not very good at them – management games. If a game expects me to manage money, I can pretty much guarantee I’m going to suck at it – there’s a reason that “motherlode” is my favorite and most-used Sims 4 cheat. 

Boardwalk Builders, an indie game developed by Studio Primitive, is different. Mainly because I found myself forgetting that it was a management-type game (at times to my detriment) and instead, I fell in love with the pixel art style and the many features on offer in the demo. 

On the boardwalk

Boardwalk Builders tasks you as the new and naive manager of a boardwalk, complete with rolling waves and a nearly cloudless sky as your backdrop. You need to make this waterfront location a hit with the locals and tourists, and to do that, you need shops and attractions that will get them parting with their hard-earned cash. 

Starting with one single, lonely attraction, you’ll soon have a trickle of inquisitive visitors coming to give you their money. Once you’ve earned enough, you can buy a new attraction or store, allowing you to make even more money. It’s a pretty simple process: the more you have on offer, the more money you can make, and the more you can offer. Rinse and repeat until you’ve got a tourist attraction that will draw in the crowds from miles away. 

However, for each store or attraction that you unlock and place down, the cost of the next one increases. This seems like it would be frustrating, but it actually means that you always have a goal to achieve that grows as you grow, giving you a reason to keep upgrading and merging your attractions. 

Business mergers

In the demo of Boardwalk Builders, there are only a limited number of base attractions that you can install on your boardwalk. However, you can merge two attractions to create a whole new, sometimes nonsensical but always preferable, attraction. You can create a spa, a gym, a toy store, and an arcade by merging two different base attractions. 

These attractions not only become more popular (and therefore bring in more money), but they also come with an added bonus. Once you’ve merged two base attractions, you can then add an additional copy of the original base attraction that you chose to merge, really opening up your options for expansion and your money-making capability.

On top of the appealing boosts to business that come from merging, you also gain Fame Points for every merged store that you create. Using these Fame Points, you can unlock maintenance workers and entertainers, who roam your boardwalk and boost your income by improving the experience of visitors, making them spend more. 

Boosts and bonuses

As you earn more money and improve your boardwalk, you’ll gain experience points. Each new level comes with a bonus that affects the boardwalk and the money you can possibly make. Bonuses such as ‘Word of Mouth’ increase the number of visitors you get overall, while other bonuses can be applied to individual stores (such as one that speeds up serving time) or attractions (such as one that reduces maintenance costs). 

At the end of the day, Boardwalk Builders is a management sim, and it’s all about drawing in the visitors and taking their money to improve your boardwalk. As part of that, you can run advertising campaigns through social media, radio, or TV. These campaigns are pretty expensive, but they really do help to spread the word about this up-and-coming tourist spot, and you’ll feel the benefit almost immediately. 

Above everything else, Boardwalk Builders is utterly adorable, and it’s easy to forget that you’re meant to be managing your funds, because you can multitask and leave it running in the background to almost passively draw in the funds while you go about your more pressing tasks. 

Boardwalk Builders is currently in development and does not have a set release date just yet. However, there is a demo available to try out that will have you immediately hooked, so make sure to wishlist and follow the game over on Steam to get updates as development progresses.