Boomtown

Stake a claim on a bare patch of desert and grow it into a booming frontier town, then hold it till dawn.

By day you build. Lay out dusty streets and put up tents, cabins and painted houses; settlers roll in on the stagecoach, take the jobs and get to work. Open a general store, a saloon, a bank, a chapel, a jail. Coins pop out of busy shops: click them. Every grown-up pays a little tax to the Town Hall, and the more your folks like the place, the more of them come.

At sundown the bugle sounds and a wanted poster tells you who's riding in. Outlaw gangs come at night to take the town: bandits, riders, torchers who set your roofs alight, dynamiters, bruisers that kick down walls, sharpshooters, rustlers after your cattle, and bank robbers after your gold. Every fifth night a boss leads them: Black Bart, Dynamite Dolly, the Ghost Rider, or the steam-powered Iron Horse. The richer your town gets, the bigger the gang.

Build watchtowers, gatling nests, cannons and mortars, palisades and stone walls, dynamite traps and barbed wire, lanterns and searchlights to see them coming. Or the fun ones: a goat pen (the goats charge anything in a bandana), a tumbleweed cannon, a scarecrow sheriff that draws their fire, and a pie cart no outlaw can walk past. Take the Sheriff into the street yourself with six shots, a lasso and three sticks of dynamite. If they hold the Town Hall, the town is theirs, unless your townsfolk grab their shovels and brooms and charge out to save it.

There's always something happening: medicine shows, gold strikes, a mysterious stranger for hire, the circus, buried treasure, a falling star, and the odd flying saucer.

WASD or drag to look around, wheel or pinch to zoom, Q/E to turn. Click to build, drag to lay streets and fences, R to turn a building. Space pauses, 1/2/3 set the speed. Tab takes the Sheriff. Plays on phones too. Your town saves to your VYRLD account, and exports to a file to carry anywhere.