Eaves

A quiet town you build at your own pace. Click land to raise a house and click a house to take it away again — that is the whole interface. There is nothing to score and nothing to lose; the pleasure is in watching a scattering of separate cottages knit itself into a village as you fill the gaps between them.

• Only land can be built on. Water stays as it is.
• Houses are not drawn independently — a house's height and which walls it shares are decided by what is next to it, so neighbours physically join up.
• That means the same cluster always looks the same, and adding one house can change how several existing ones look.
• Seasons and the day-night cycle turn over on their own while you build.
• Nothing is scored, timed or lost. Removing a house is as valid a move as placing one.

• Desktop: click to build, use the on-screen Clear / New / Save buttons
• Phone & tablet: tap tiles to build, tap the buttons to manage

• Cluster houses to encourage knitted, lived-in neighbourhoods
• Watch the day-night wash for the most atmospheric moments
• Save a layout you love before starting a fresh coast

Eaves is original, and its ancestry is the model village rather than the city-building game: the miniature landscape laid out and looked at, where the pleasure is in the arranging and nothing is being optimised.

The whole interface is two gestures. Click land to raise a house; click a house to take it away. There is no economy underneath, no population to satisfy and no failure state waiting for a bad decision.

That omission is deliberate and is what separates it from the genre it resembles. A city builder asks you to keep a system alive; this asks only whether you like where the houses sit, and lets the village knit itself together around your choices.

Eaves is an original relaxing town-building toy with no fail states, a calm, free browser sandbox about growing a small place to call home.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.