Islanders: Mobile brings the beauty of this minimalist city builder to smartphones, coming soon

• Islanders: Mobile brings minimalist city building to mobile
• It offers bite-sized sessions of simple but challenging strategy gameplay
• Build and develop your island with new structures you unlock as you accrue points

City building, at least to my knowledge, is one of the slightly less popular genres on mobile. Sure, you could point to a few exceptions, but compared to RTS and even grand strategy, it's not quite as potent. But that seems to be changing with some choice new releases, including that of today's subject - Islanders: Mobile!

Arriving November 20th, Islanders: Mobile is as you might expect - an adaptation of the minimalist city builder Islanders. In it, you are given a peaceful and tranquil island to slowly colonise and transform into a thriving community.

You start each session with a limited inventory of buildings, and it's up to you to choose where and how to place them. Depending on their placement, you'll slowly accrue points and unlock more buildings, developing your community and enriching the lives of your island's inhabitants.

That's a thinker

The core selling point of Islanders, and by extension its mobile version, is that it dials back the sometimes unwieldy strategy required in city builders. Which may seem as if it's at odds with the core appeal of the genre, but I think we can all agree that sometimes the resource and happiness-management index can become a bit unwieldy in many releases in the genre.

Islanders, meanwhile, focuses not just on looking good but delivering shorter sessions that still require a bit of thought. So, with a release not far off, it's well worth taking a gander at Islanders: Mobile and deciding whether you're ready to turn a desolate spit of land into a thriving island paradise.

And if you do want to see what top competitors are out there to feed your hunger for city building, then we've taken the legwork out for you. Simply dig into our list of the best city builder games for Android for some of our top picks.