The Best City-Building Games of All Time

Voting Rules
Vote up your favorite city-building sim games.

The best city building games offer more than enough variety for every type of gamer. These highly rated city-builder games for PC, mobile, and Mac are ordered by popularity, so only the greatest city-building games are at the top of the list. Spanning the entire history of the genre, these builders are considered the best in the genre. If you're only familiar with the SimCity franchise, then prepare to find a ton of other games that are less known but equally as fun. If you're a fan of the Settlers franchise in particular, then you'll want to check out this list of the best games from the Settlers series.

This list includes all challenging city-building video games that have ever hit the shelves, so it doesn't necessarily have all the more obscure or new city-builder games. Popular games like SimCity and Pharaoh are known to many, but there are plenty of great city builders you've probably never heard of. This list answers the questions, "What are the best city-building games?" and "What is the greatest city building game of all time?" If you're looking for a list of games like SimCity then this list is exactly what you need.

Photo: Metaweb / GNU Free Documentation License
Ranked by
  • Cities: Skylines
    1
    1,552 votes
    • Developer: Colossal Order
    Cities: Skylines is a city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a single-player open-ended city-building simulation. Players engage in urban ...more
  • Banished
    2
    1,352 votes
    Banished is an upcoming city-building strategy game focused on careful resource management and survival as an isolated and growing society. The player guides citizens of a remote community of ...more
  • Pharaoh
    3
    2,249 votes
    • Developer: BreakAway Games, Impressions Games
    Pharaoh is an isometric city-building game set in Ancient Egypt created by Impressions Games and published by Sierra Entertainment for Microsoft Windows. It involves the construction and management ...more
  • Caesar III
    4
    Jan 01 1998
    1,839 votes
    • Developer: Impressions Games
    Caesar III is a video game developed by Impressions Games and published by Sierra Entertainment; the third installment of the Caesar series, part of Sierra's City Building Series. It was released in ...more
  • SimCity 4
    5
    1,383 votes
    • Developer: Maxis
    SimCity 4 is a city-building/urban planning simulation computer game developed by Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. It was released on January 14, 2003. It is the fourth installment in the ...more
  • Anno 1404
    6
    916 votes
    • Developer: Ubisoft, Blue Byte Software, Related Designs
    Anno 1404, known as Dawn of Discovery in North America, is a city-building and economic simulation game of the Anno series, with real-time strategy elements. Released in 2009, it was developed by ...more