Island Settlers: Trade & Build

Island Settlers is a real-time strategy race for one island and twelve victory points. There are no turns and no dice. You run your settler around a 19-hex island in person — chopping wood, digging clay, shearing sheep, reaping wheat and mining ore with your own hands — while three rival settlers do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. A match takes about three and a half minutes. The Number On A Hex Still Matters It just means something different. Every hex wears a wooden disc numbered 1 to 10, and that number is a plain ranking rather than a dice probability: 10 is the richest hex on the island and 1 is the poorest. It sets two things and only two — how much the hex holds when it is full, and how long it stays bare once you have swept it clean. A 10 carries twenty-eight things and is back in six seconds. A 1 carries five and takes thirty-four. And you can only gather where you own a settlement or a city on one of that hex's corners; everywhere else yields nothing at all. So where you place, and how far you then have to walk, is the whole game. The Opening Draft Snake order, two settlements and two roads each, and your second settlement pays out its adjacent resources the moment it goes down. The board deals two of every number except 1 and 2, which appear once each, and the two richest hexes never share a corner — so there is always a real decision to make. Read the board, take the corner nobody else has noticed, and start the clock ahead. Build, Trade, Race Roads, settlements and cities cost what you would expect them to. Trade four for one at the market in the middle of the island, or walk to one of the coastal docks you have unlocked for a better rate. Buy development cards: Knight makes every rival drop half of what they are carrying and lets you park the Raider on a region to lock everyone else out of it, Road Building gives you two roads for nothing, and a Victory Point card is simply a point. Twelve Points Wins A settlement is 1. A city is 2. Longest Road is 4, Largest Army is 2, and a Victory Point card is 1. Get there first. Three Rivals Who Actually Play Alex expands and chases Longest Road. Maya builds and upgrades to cities. Finn buys cards and hunts Largest Army. None of them teleport, none of them are handed resources they did not earn — they walk to every tree they cut and every dock they trade at, exactly like you do. Play With Friends Create a room, read out the five-character code, and up to three other people type it in. No accounts, no passwords, no friends list and nothing to accept. Empty seats fill with bots. Everybody presses START and the match begins. Built For One Thumb Drag anywhere on the screen and an invisible stick appears under your thumb, so the controls are never on the wrong side. Run over a tree, a clay pile, a sheep, a wheat stand or an ore seam and it is yours on contact. The three action buttons can be moved to whichever corner you can actually reach. No Ads. No In-App Purchases. No Account. Nothing is for sale, there are no ads or analytics, and there is no sign-in. Single player works with the network switched off entirely. Multiplayer sends only the display name you choose, a random app-specific identifier and the live match actions needed to run your room. The whole game is inside the app, because every model, texture and sound in it is generated by the game's own code rather than downloaded. A full tutorial walks you through the draft, gathering, building, trading, the board map, development cards and the awards before you ever play for real. Designed and developed independently, Island Settlers combines real-time exploration, resource management and board strategy in a compact original island race.