A town-builder drawn in ink, played a term at a time. You are the mayor for a term of 45, 60, or 90 minutes, and then another, for as long as the town stands. Lay the roads, house the settlers, build the chains that feed and clothe them, and raise a hamlet to a village, a town, and a city of burghers. Or watch it go bankrupt, revolt, or empty out.
▶ Play Inkline Town in your browser · free, nothing to install, saves stay on your device
Thirty seconds in a town 80 minutes old, as it plays at double speed. Watch it in full quality.
Inkline Town plays like a small Anno in a small box. Every building, cart, and person is drawn live in thin 3D line art. Pan, zoom and rotate the island; every map is new, and every term ends with a verdict and the story of how you got there.
Each town starts with a charter. You choose the size of the land, how rich it is in forest, stone, ore, and lakes, and how long your term runs. Every seed makes a different island, with a wandering coast and capes reaching out.
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| small land, 25 minutes in: townhouses round a fountain, the town hall in scaffolding | large land, 80 minutes in: a village of 350 spread across the island |
Lumberjacks fell trees and sawmills cut planks. Quarries and mines dig stone and ore for the smithy's tools. Farms grow wheat for the mill and the bakery, sheep give wool for the weaver, a carpenter turns planks into furniture for the townhouses, and fisheries feed the first settlers. You never move a crate yourself: carriers push their carts along the roads, each loaded with what it carries, and markets send walkers through the streets with baskets of fish, bread, and cloth.
Settlers need food. Give them bread, cloth, and a chapel's faith, and their cottages grow into two-story citizens' homes that hold and pay twice as much. Then they come out in long coats and top hats, each household dressed in the colour of its roof.
Every street has a desirability. A smithy or a quarry drags it down for several cells around; parks you lay out yourself (lawns, flower beds, walks in from the street, lamps, a fountain, a statue), a chapel, and paved streets lift it. Citizens will only live on a decent street, and the finest streets, with every service calling and furniture in the parlour, grow three-storey townhouses. Settlers do the rough work and citizens the skilled, and nobody walks more than fifteen road cells to a job, so the far-off mine needs its own workers' cottages. Zone the town well and it sorts itself into a fine centre, an industrial edge, and cottages by the mill.
Then keep it standing. A fire watch, a healer, and a watch house send walkers to keep down the risk of fire, sickness, and theft; a sign goes up over a home long before disaster, and a fire watch's firefighters race to any blaze. Fish and bread rot unless a granary keeps them, tools wear out, and a builder's yard has to mend what runs down. Each year's winter is mild, normal, or hard, and the almanac tells you which a year ahead. Map views show desirability, workers, fire, health, order, and condition across the town.
The bigger the town, the harder it pulls. Winters stop the fields and thin the catch. Running the town costs more for every home. Traders pay less the more you sell. The crown asks for goods on a deadline, and it remembers when you don't deliver. Approval decides how many people each home holds.
You hold the levers: taxes for settlers and citizens, what to sell or buy and how much to keep, which buildings to pause, and when to answer the crown.
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| the town panel: goals, approval, treasury, taxes, trade | the build menu, unlocking as the town grows |
A town is founded as a hamlet. Hold every goal of the next rank for two minutes (enough people and coins, a share of them citizens, a town that approves of you) and it rises to a village, then a town, then a city, whose finest streets must hold burghers in townhouses. Each rank brings a reward from the crown and opens upgrades made where buildings stand: the town hall becomes a guildhall and then a city hall, the market a market hall, the bakery an ovenworks, the quarry a masonry, and more, with scaffolding rising while carriers bring their materials. Nothing ends when a rank is reached.
Three minutes in debt, two minutes of uproar, a town that empties out, or three of the crown's requests ignored, and the term is lost. Otherwise time runs out and the term is judged: flourishing, holding on, or declining. Stand for the next term to carry on the same town, or retire and found a new one. The open stone and ore run out, but the worked faces they leave keep giving a little, so a long reign never runs dry (or clear them to build).
The reckoning shows how the term went: residents, coins, and approval across it, with the winters shaded, and the chronicle of everything that happened.
There are no sprites or image files: every picture in the game is drawn in code with two weights of line on a pale ground. Each building wears the colour of what it makes and keeps its work in its yard: a log pile, a silo, a pen of sheep, a striped market stall. Trees, rocks, water, and roads are different on every cell.
As the town rises, its buildings rise with it. The town hall becomes a guildhall with a clock tower and banners, then a city hall with a dome and columns. Scaffolding goes up around every upgrade, with its bays and ladders filling as the carts bring the materials.
Play Inkline Town at inkline.typeonce.dev. It runs in the browser, on a computer or a phone. Saves stay in your browser, and the town autosaves every two minutes of play. Share a picture of your town, or a link that opens it running for anyone, who can then play on from where you left it.
New to the game? How to play covers the controls, the rules of a term, and how the town works underneath. To run it yourself:
pnpm install
pnpm dev