Here at Card Gamer, we’re no strangers to seeing deckbuilding roguelikes paired with some pretty unusual mechanics. Upcoming PC title, Islantiles, is another example of that: a deckbuilding roguelike game in which your cards help you to create a successful settlement on an initially uninhabited island. With a demo now available, let’s check out Islantiles!

How Do You Play Islantiles?

In Islantiles, you’re first presented with the blank canvas of an empty island, which has tiles of various types on and around it, along with a hand of cards from your deck to begin. The cards represent buildings (taverns, bakeries and mills for example), people (such as hunters and butchers) and other developments (such as cornfields and mines), and each one can score a wide range of points depending on where it’s placed on the island.

Your cards will have a certain range, and their points come from picking up bonuses from being placed near or on relevant tiles. For example, a hunter card will pick up points depending on how many forest or lake tiles it has within range, whereas a bakery benefits from water and wheat tiles. Certain combinations of cards provide synergies, so a smelter would benefit from being placed near an iron mine, for example. You have a limited number of actions available per turn (or season), and each card costs a different number of actions to place.

You’ll be aiming for an ever increasing points total for each island you reach; if you get to the points total within a specified number of turns, you’ll move on to settle the next island, unlocking improved cards and technologies (which provide their own, passive bonuses to your islands) as you progress. Eventually, you’ll be unlocking more than one island at a time, playing upgraded cards and notching up high scores that give you the same satisfaction you get from building massive combos in games such as Balatro.

Is Islantiles Fun to Play?

The demo gives players a really good overview of the full game, featuring around 30 of the final release’s unlockable technologies, 20 of its 100 islands, half of the expected 6 difficulty levels and the first of 5 civilizations that’ll be included when Islantiles releases.

At first, it does feel as if the optimization of any given score when choosing a card can mostly be done pretty much on auto-pilot. That’s because you can choose a card and hover over any tile on the island to see what it’ll score, so you can pretty much do that with just about every card in your hand to see what will give you the best score, then just play that without any thought needed on strategy or long term plans.

The further you get, however, the more you’ll need to be aware of synergies between cards and card types, as well as take advantage of the technologies you unlock and equip, in order to reap the benefits of the larger combos and points totals you’ll need to progress.

It doesn’t help that once you’ve completed a season, even though you’ll unlock more technologies and either new or improved cards for your deck, you move onto another island, which means you feel initially as if you’re starting from scratch each season and not building on what you’ve already started.

Islantiles is a roguelike which perhaps holds your hand a little too much at the beginning, resulting in unsatisfying early rounds, where you can optimize your play without having to apply any thought yourself. However, that does give way to a much more enjoyable experience later on. At first, it seems a little odd that there’s no simulated citizens, which makes the admittedly beautifully colorful, nicely designed islands feel a little lifeless. Despite this, there’s a lot to be said for the relaxed nature of Islantiles, which doesn’t have time limits or combat, and aims to be a cozier experience than your average, non-card-based city building game.

When Will Islantiles Be Released?

The Islantiles demo will be available to download via Steam on November 7th, 2025, and you can add it to your wishlist using the widget below:

There’s no final date for the release of the full game of Islantiles, but you can also add the full game to your Steam wishlist using the following widget:

Want to check out other unique deckbuilding games? Take a look at our reviews of Into the Restless Ruins and Birdigo. Or, you can check out more city-building card games with our feature on the classic Sim City, and our review of Point City.