Colony Founding

Overview

Colony Founding is a settlement survival game played on a sixteen-by-twelve forest grid across five in-game years. Every day takes about a second: farms yield three food except in winter, lumber camps yield two wood when touching forest, and every settler eats one food — two during a cold snap. New wanderers arrive every four days if you have spare hut capacity and more than ten food in store, and every mouth makes the next winter harder. The four building types interlock: huts gate population, farms feed it, lumber camps fund expansion, and storehouses raise the hundred-food cap that would otherwise spoil your autumn harvest. Events land at season boundaries — wolves take a settler, traders leave gifts, cold snaps double winter appetites — so a plan that ignores them eventually starves. Spring of year six is the finish line; the colony falls when the last settler is lost. A full run takes about four minutes, and the season tint on the whole map keeps the clock visible at a glance.

How to Play

Press Start Game. Pick a building from the bar — farm, hut, lumber camp, or storehouse — then tap any free grid cell to build it; forest cells are blocked for construction but feed adjacent lumber camps. On keyboard, arrow keys move the build cursor cell by cell and Space places the selected building. Food and wood tick over daily; watch the season name and day counter to know how long until winter. P pauses, R restarts the colony.

Tips & Strategy

Spend your opening forty wood on two farms and one lumber camp touching forest — that combination is food-positive by summer and self-funding on wood by autumn. Place the lumber camp first if only one forest patch borders open cells, since wood starvation is the slowest way to die and the hardest to notice. Build your first storehouse before the second autumn: without it, harvests above a hundred food evaporate exactly when you need reserves most. Never let population outrun farms — one farm feeds three settlers through the growing seasons but zero in winter, so each hut beyond your farm count is a scheduled famine. When the winter banner lands, stop building entirely; wood spent in winter buys nothing that feeds anyone. If wolves take a settler, accept it — replacing housing you already have is wasted wood, and the colony that reaches spring of year six is usually the one that built least.

What Makes It Distinct

Most survival builders hide their math behind meters. Colony Founding puts the whole equation on the screen — days, seasons, mouths, stores — so every loss is legible and every winter survived feels like arithmetic you won. The five-year arc gives a browser-session game a genuine campaign shape.