CivBook

A 4X from 2007, reborn on a crank

Start with a handful of settlers. Found cities, grow them, research your way through history, and explore a world under fog of war — drawn in classic 2:1 isometric, one bit at a time.

Plataformas: Playdate
Idiomas: ES · EN
Preço: In development

Playable skeleton, long road ahead

Isometric world

Eighteen years between two versions

2007
A Facebook app

Written in PHP with MySQL and played inside Facebook, in the golden age of social apps. It placed third in an application contest run by Mentez — first went to "Virtual Tejo".
2009
The database is lost

The project fell asleep and the original database went with it. What survived was the PHP source and some 876 colour images — terrain, units, cities, icons — enough to reverse-engineer the data model and the isometric renderer.
2026
Rewritten for the Playdate

Not a port: a rewrite from zero. New engine, new tooling, and every piece of art redone for a one-bit screen.

What already plays

The single-player loop runs end to end on the console.

Isometric world

Classic 2:1 diamonds. Terrain, landforms, rivers, resources, cities and units stack in correct depth order.

Cities that grow

Found with settlers, then grow and produce units, buildings and wonders.

Tech tree

Research your way forward through history, the way the genre has always done it.

Fog of war

A world you uncover by walking it, with terrain auto-tiling as it's revealed.

Data-driven, like RULES.TXT

Terrains, units, buildings, technologies and civilisations all come from an editable catalogue. The engine hard-codes none of it.

Crank navigation

The console's signature dial cycles through your units and cities.

One rulebook for everyone

Stacking, transports, submarines, siege and air superiority are written as a contract: the engine and the rival AI play by exactly the same rules, and every value comes from the catalogue rather than the code.

Playable skeleton, long road ahead

Combat, a gold economy, rival AI, save and load are still missing — and the largest job of all is drawing the bulk of the one-bit art: units, cities, terrain, flags, icons and fonts.

Not a startup

CivBook isn't a commercial product. It's an author returning to something he made almost twenty years ago and rebuilding it, unhurried, for a tiny console with a crank.