Cities Skylines meets Balatro in the excellent new roguelike city builder Combolands
Combolands is a roguelike city-building game from Crux Games that combines Balatro-style escalating score targets and combo chains with the placement strategy of Cities: Skylines. Based on its Steam demo, Polygon finds the result absorbing and distinctive, because every building placement and adjacency bonus feeds directly into a city’s population growth and a run’s success.
Each run begins on a procedurally generated island, with eight weeks to meet a population target using a limited set of actions, rerolls and demolition opportunities. Players begin with basic resource buildings, then must adapt as multipliers, enclosed walls, railways and broader terrain requirements complicate their layouts; failures are expected, but unlock further opportunities. The game also allows one extension of three turns per run, though careful planning remains essential as targets rise.
- Combolands blends roguelike scoring with strategic city-building placement.
- Adjacency bonuses drive population growth and combo chains.
- The demo suggests a challenging, highly replayable game.
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Combolands is a city-building video game in which players place buildings and develop settlements on small islands. Unlike many traditional city builders, it is designed around repeated, self-contained attempts, with each new map and set of choices changing the challenge.
It borrows ideas from roguelike games, where failure is part of learning and can lead to new options in later attempts. Its scoring system also draws on card game-style combinations: buildings can boost one another when placed in useful patterns, helping a city reach increasingly demanding population goals.
Crux Games is the developer behind Combolands. Cities: Skylines is a well-known city-building series focused on planning roads, services and neighbourhoods, while Balatro is a card game built around creating high-scoring combinations; the comparison signals that Combolands combines layout planning with score-focused strategy.