Created by the team behind The Banished Vault, Amberspire is a city-builder that’s part frustrating, part irresistible—built on an eco-friendly moon shaped like a sepulcher.
The moon is full of hauntings. We live among what’s left of a mausoleum that’s long since vanished—raised to commemorate the remains of the city’s earlier avatars. We cling to the belief that the moon won’t erase every last shred of us. This world sits within the Amber planet, and our settlement takes its name from the deep underground spire that defines who we are. Amberspire doesn’t truly “belong” to this moon, yet here it’s trapped in an endless fight against four harbingers of ecological ruin: rust, fog, water, and grass.
Amberspire is an isometric, turn-based city builder run by dice, with your results set against the moon itself. In practice, it’s a single-player digital board game designed for fans of careful, thoughtful sci-fi, drawing inspiration from many sources. Ursula K. LeGuin’s beloved ansible becomes a late-game structure, the Old World Venetian-style buildings echo elements from several Cordwainer Smith stories, and at times it brings to mind interactive artist Ian Cheng’s 2015 Emissaries series, which explored ecological shifts, evolution, and collapse in a “game that played itself.” Amberspire, however, isn’t content to play on its own—that job is mine. I’m the one who must roll the dice, accept what they deliver, and handle the consequences. Too often, the dice steer me toward mistakes.
To keep going, I’ve built a private lineup of joke-filled songs that see me through each stage of play. I also feel a deep tie to the one Chumbawamba track made in honor of working-class togetherness, and I’ve remixed it into a stubborn, Les Misérables-style battle hymn whenever the world gets chaotic and swallows my districts in small bites. Tubthumping could very well be Amberspire’s national anthem—because this is a city that keeps getting knocked down and then rebuilding itself, again and again, atop an ancient mausoleum whose inhabitants faced the same grass and fog in another age.
My first session was cautious, investigative, and honestly a bit overwhelming—the “default setting” for any city builder, and this one follows that rule too. The goal is to pull this neglected outpost into a Golden Age by growing both its population and influence through different layers of development. It’s hard to think of it as a mere small town when the whole moon functions like one vast tomb: the initial seed always grows the young city around an open chasm in the earth. Getting more residents means building additional facilities to collect resources, which you then exchange to boost influence. Those resources range from practical staples like metal and brick to more abstract items such as void and horizon. Importantly, residents can’t be assigned to particular spots. They are more likely to settle near specific buildings—landing pads and starports—so once a resident takes a place, you can’t manually move them anywhere else (they’re, in spirit, this man to me).
Next comes Amberspire’s weather system. Each cycle includes three rolls from the player, followed by a weather roll—so you get three turns to pursue your plans before the computer brings consequences like fog and water. Per player turn, you can roll up to six dice that are usable, but a weather roll may involve as many as ten weather dice. They can pile up and haunt your turns one after another like an aggressive debt collector (and there are also instability dice that can hit residents and buildings). A lot of what happens in Amberspire depends on chance, yet the weather system feels especially like luck mixed with karma. The moon also has a weather baseline, meaning I can’t simply keep lowering water or shrinking grass without inviting trouble. Every weather state can grow and trap the city’s edges in decay and destruction: the weather never ends.
I used to think rust was my only real enemy, but fog is much worse. As I write this, it’s fog season on the moon. Nothing can help my people now—not even me, the celestial hand rolling uncooperative dice—because I mismanaged my approach and my fogbreakers didn’t do their job. When too much rust eats through city structures, it undermines the ground, and large sections of residents fall into the abyss. And don’t even think about grass as a harmless background feature—on this moon, grass multiplies the problems. Build near it, and you’ll rack up extra weather dice. As someone who grew up in Australia during the 1990s, I never really connected with Crowded House, but after playing Amberspire, I won’t be hearing “Weather With You” the same way again.
At last, there are events, which appear to be the game’s weakest component. Events kick in after three event dice are rolled, and they can run from threats like fires in residential areas to major emergencies affecting the entire moon. As many as three factions can take root in Amberspire, each arriving with their own customs and goals. The dice determine my standing with each faction, and depending on how much they like me—and whether they hold enough influence—they can also introduce faction-specific perks or drawbacks, such as extra rerolls or more
dice slots. As an aspiring capital, Amberspire draws the attention of eccentrics from every corner of the galaxy, including the monolith-veiled Gardeners, who have turned space eugenics into a thriving line of business.
Events offer a delightful window into each civilization. Take the entity known as the Coral Monarch: it panics when one of my clockwork constructions, by accident, works out its true measurements—forcing me to either invest a significant amount of influence or dice roll to determine the outcome.
Even though this is ultimately a game of chance, my biggest frustration with the event system is how unpredictable and fickle it can feel. There were plenty of moments where factions stayed neutral for almost the whole match, leaving me with essentially no effect on my gameplay. In one playthrough, my city suffered such severe pressure that the Gardeners decided to leave—an obvious blow—but then they returned just a few turns later, as though nothing had occurred. Beyond the opening stretch, my dealings with each faction often felt underwhelming (except in the rare cases when everyone made it extremely clear they disliked me; then the influence was undeniable). In practice, random dice outcomes don’t reliably build momentum or maintain meaningful tension. The mausoleum backdrop was an interesting touch, functioning more like atmospheric worldbuilding than a driver of the events themselves. Still, the game’s objective—to add deeper historical weight through events—doesn’t land as well as it should.
As my city thickened, I found there wasn’t much room left to expand, with the grass and fog hemming me in like a prized hog. I couldn’t help thinking about that excellent 2019 Popula essay on the shining delusion of Miami real estate, which keeps going even alongside the climate emergency. Environmental disasters are the only way I can swap inhabitants for functional structures on tiles that would otherwise remain taken. For instance, when I see fog veiling a Chapel—or some other specialized building—it can sometimes be smarter to tear it down and put something more useful in its place than to wait an indefinite stretch for the fog to clear, if the dice allow. Of course, demolition comes with its own trade-off: it increases instability.
During my sessions, my thoughts drifted to the sun-faded, earth-toned curves of Arcosanti, the unfinished experimental settlement out in Arizona that I visited in 2015. Arcosanti’s architect, Paolo Soleri, a controversial figure, imagined sweeping possibilities for arcology back in 1970—arcology being a blend of ecology and architecture, not just a strange SimCity-like concept. His vision pulled in all kinds of people: artisans, makers, hippie environmental advocates—who moved there with the goal of building a community that was radically self-sustaining, until it faded into relative obscurity. Amberspire, with its striking Mediterranean-inspired design and alternate futuristic vibe, echoes similar ideas, which makes it especially rewarding to explore alongside its development blog. In an urban planning setting, the matching blog/timeline for a civic engineering project offers key context and crucial public involvement (especially considering the stakeholders) when introducing new directions. In my own country’s government process—Singapore—this is something they do quite a bit: rolling out websites and visualizations for major projects planned for the coming decade, then asking citizens for input.
Within the citybuilding space, Amberspire’s developer diaries read like a creative, engaging form of psychological communication directed at Sid Meier fans who are used to the steady grind of 4X. Each of the game’s small but meaningful tweaks nudges me to reconsider what I expect from shaping a place: am I growing in a way that respects the planet’s needs? If I can’t fully push back the grass, how am I supposed to live alongside it? Since I can’t place residents exactly where I want them, what does that do to how I relate to— and how I interpret—the city as something alive? And why did years of Civilization eventually turn me into someone so intent on control? For me, the entire review experience has become a process of self-examination, and I really value that.
It took a while before Amberspire really clicked with me, and I keep coming back—I’m on my seventh city right now—because I’m still drawn to its ideas, even if they feel unfinished. I also genuinely appreciate that these games can be played through and wrapped up in sensible, bite-sized sessions. I enjoy seeing what the procedural generation gives me with every new save, and when the dice fall my way, I can “finish” a full game in a single long, intense run. It’s a lovely, though incomplete, way of exploring a genre that’s mostly associated with harvesting resources and expanding territory. It’s a solo board game that invites thoughtful reflection on the tension between what a city wants and what its environment requires. I kept wanting more from the world it offers, even though it seems pulled in several directions at once: Amberspire feels like a renaissance-shaped fever dream built by an active imagination filling the gaps, yet it relies so heavily on chance (and yes, sometimes that may simply be the point) that it doesn’t always protect it from slipping into inertia.
My city is now completely surrounded by encroaching grassland. I’m trying—much like a predatory land developer—to convince residents to move into that space, because I still believe a few lucky rolls might eventually turn things around. I’m constantly attempting to zoom the camera out to get a wider, almost godlike view of my territory, but Amberspire insists that I stay close, so I can focus on intricate building networks that are intentionally arranged with the terrain that seems determined to resist me. As a result, my playtime splits into separate biomes, pulling me away from the usual citybuilding habit of integrating and coordinating a larger whole. Still, when I manage to set a personal best of 10+74 weather and instability dice, I start to wonder if it’s time to accept the incoming meteor—because I can’t, and shouldn’t, try to outmuscle entropy. After all, once my version of Amberspire has faded away, and when grass, water, rust, and fog ultimately win this contest on Earth, the city will be rebuilt again.
A copy of Amberspire was provided for this review by Bithell Games.