Simulation Games — Quirks of Genre

What I learned from 10 years of design experience

14 min readSep 22, 2025

I always found the term “simulation” games to be a bit of a problem. Simulation games are a misnomer. The name itself has been applied to a diverse types of entertainment software since the very beginning, from Microsoft Flight Simulator to city-building games such as SimCity.

However, what I will be talking about in this text is simulation games in a much narrower sense. They can be more rightly described as crafting games or as city and farm simulator games. What I am talking about is the mobile free-to-play game genre that has its origins in games such as Hay Day and Farmville.

In my game design career, I have been working on such games for a little over a decade now. I have had a chance to work on two prominent titles in this category, namely SimCity BuildIt and Hay Day. I also had opportunities to exchange knowledge and game design ideas with people working on several other titles in this genre, Everdale and Family Island, to name but a few.

This text is a summary of some of the important learnings I have collected about what sets this particular genre apart from other casual free-to-play genres. I will reflect on what makes these games so enduring, but also on some of the inherent quirks and limitations of the genre.

Pillars of the Genre

Games of this type, namely ones resembling Hay Day or Township, revolve around two clear design pillars. Above all, there is a building or simulation metaphor. As a player of these games, you are building and developing something, a farm, a town, a space station, or indeed a city. The simulation aspect of these games is based upon this pillar. What you are building is usually some sort of system consisting of several interlocking subsystems. In SimCity BuildIt, for example, you are expected to manage the layout of the city, the network of the city streets, a virtual fire department, city hospitals, police stations, and even the railway. However, this is not the only aspect of these games.

The second design pillar of these games typically represents some crafting system, in which some set of virtual items is transmutated over time into another set of items. These items are usually required by the simulation part of the game for the smooth operation of whatever is that you are building.

These crafting systems typically have two distinct layers. One layer consists of items produced out of nothing, or purely dispensing on time. Crops in Hay Day and Farmville are such items. The player needs to trigger the production timer, and virtual carrots will start to grow. They will be ready for harvesting after a certain amount of time.

The second layer of this system consists of items that require other items as their ingredients. For example, to produce one unit of bread in Hay Day, a player needs three units of wheat. The formula or the recipe for producing bread is trivial; however, other recipes quite often can be much more complex, requiring multiple stages of crafting in which products of the previous step are used as ingredients for another one. In Hay Day, hamburgers, for example, require both bacon (harvested much like wheat, directly from animals) and bread produced independently from wheat.

Production and harvesting of raw materials is usually done in a parallel fashion, i.e., several instances of wheat can be grown in parallel and collected in one go. Crafting of items is usually done in a serial fashion, i.e., only one hamburger can be produced at a time.

These production time constraints and recipe requirements produce a dense network of interdependencies among various production queues. This is what defines some of the key ideas that we need to understand about this genre.

Key Idea: Farm and city simulation games are time puzzles.

What you do as a player of these games is optimize your production queue, trying to make it as efficient as possible, that is, to create as much output in as little time as possible. These games are time puzzles in a very peculiar sense. The player tries to organize the time boxes of various durations in order to have minimal time waste. If you think about it, this definition of the genre explains why this type of game appeals to a certain type of audience.

Key Idea: Time management is what you constantly do as an adult.

In everyday life, as adults, we are constantly expected to manage our daily schedules, meetings at work, taking kids to their hobbies, choosing which route to take on our daily commute to minimize the chance of getting stuck in a traffic jam, scheduling vet appointments for our pets, etc, etc. Real life is complicated. It is not meant for us to succeed (or fail). Games are simpler. More manageable. This is why people choose these types of games. I may be stuck in this godawful traffic grid, but at least I managed to produce seven units of butter.

On the other hand, time planning is not something children or even teenagers excel at. In other words, if you are making a simulation game, you can expect that your audience will lean more towards people over the age of 25, 35, or indeed 65 than towards 15 or 9-year-olds. This is good news since these demographic groups tend to have more disposable income than younger ones.

Metagame vs. Core

As we said, these games are time puzzles revolving around managing production queues. Arguably, these games blur the typical distinction between core gameplay and metagame. In games such as Candy Crush or Super Mario, the distinction is clear. Core gameplay is whatever happens within one level. The meatagame is the wrapper around it, the part of the game that connects individual levels.

In simulation games, there is no such wrapper. Or better yet, there is no distinct core. There are no discernible levels or chunks of games that the player needs to complete as independent units.

Key Idea: The core is the metagame.

This fact has some profound implications. Managing crafting queues can be compelling. Obviously, millions of players worldwide enjoy it every minute. It can also devolve into a simple waiting game. Namely, gameplay sessions in these games can easily degenerate into a pattern of play in which the player logs into the game, quickly collects whatever was produced since the previous session of the game, and triggers a new set of production timers.

Contrast this with games such as Candy Crush or Fortnite, or Clash Royale. Minute-to-minute interaction in these games is much richer than in simulation games.

Key Idea: Minute-to-minute interaction in crafting-based simulation games is lacking.

Indeed, the only genre with even shallower minute-to-minute interaction is so-called idle games.

On the other hand, the simulation games tend to have big sprawling metagames, several orders of magnitude more complex than casual games. The metagame in Fortnite consists of a premium pass and, simple progression of reward tiers that players unlock by collecting points. The metagame of Candy Crush is a series of levels arranged on a map, combined with an energy mechanic. In contrast, the metagame of SimCity BuildIt consists of layers upon layers of interconnected systems.

This is a curse and a blessing. Rich metagame allows for deep gameplay. However, it can also create an information overload in players’ minds.

Key Idea: The complex metagame creates a significant cognitive load that needs to be constantly managed.

Each additional crafting recipe, each new system that gets unlocked, each new game feature adds to this cognitive load. This is something that needs to be constantly managed in order to make these games playable in the long term. With this level of complexity, what ostensibly starts off as a casual game of feeding and milking cartoony cows evolves quickly into a complex simulation more akin to hardcore games such as Europa Universalis or Hearts of Iron, let alone Civilization.

Top-notch UX solutions are needed to keep cognitive load under control. The aforementioned simulations by Paradox can serve as an inspiration and a benchmark. The problem remains how to adapt these UX conventions to mobile devices and make them approachable to a more casual audience.

Intuition and Complexity

The complexity of the metagame of simulation games can cause problems. However, it also offers some very interesting possibilities. Above all, it allows for a very diverse set of intermediate goals that players can pursue and even self-define. Typically, players can choose which items to produce and for what purpose. They can define and pick and choose goals that they wish to try to achieve at any time in the game. A series of these choices inevitably evolves into distinct play styles, tailor-made by player themselves to their own affinities.

Key Idea: Complex systems allow for very diverse styles of gameplay.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all metagame of typical casual games, the simulation games coevolve with their own players. This is a very powerful retention mechanism. If you are designing such a game, you should definitely look for ways to lean into it as much as possible. On the other hand, this diversity of play styles can make your life as a game designer much more difficult, as your player base will inevitably splinter into clusters of players with different approaches and expectations of your game!

As we mentioned earlier, adding each new item, recipe, or formula into such a game adds more complexity and contributes to the cognitive load. However, there are ways of combating this on a conceptual level. The choice of narrative metaphor matters.

Key Idea: More intuitive recipes are easier to remember.

Simply put, it’s easier to remember the ingredients of a sandwich than the components of a space rocket. This is what I learned by comparing Hay Day and SimCity BuildIt. The more familiar, closer to everyday life, the items are, the easier it is to remember their production formulas and their usage. Food and farm products always trump hardware. People prefer to think about food much more than about bricks and paint, let alone photon torpedoes and teleporters.

I would avoid choosing sci-fi as a theme at all costs and think twice about delving deep into something that is not as intuitive as pizza or sushi recipes.

The complexity of simulation games doesn’t come exclusively from the complexity of production queues. It stems equally from the other pillar of these games, from the metaphor of building and the simulation itself. This pillar of design, however, also holds one of the main advantages of this genre.

Building and developing something resonates deeply with basic human instincts. It taps into our urges to nurture and cultivate and can be immensely satisfying. Furthermore, big sprawling matagames offer plenty of choices that players can make, which are not exclusively about the efficiency of virtual farms and towns. These games are often toyboxes that allow players to choose the aesthetic qualities of their creations. The player can decide how their little farm or virtual city will look as well as how it will behave.

Key Idea: Simulation games allow for self-expression; self-expression creates a deep emotional bond.

This self-expression creates a deep emotional bond between the player as a creator and their creation is the reason why the audience of these games can be so loyal. It is much harder to abandon something you invested months in building, into which you injected your creative energy, than it is to abandon a level on which you are stuck.

Empathy and Social Gameplay

Social gameplay can be the glue that holds an invested player base dedicated to a game for an indefinite amount of time. Look at the multidecade success of World of Warcraft or EVE Online. Interaction with other human beings is one of the inherent psychological needs present in all humans.

How to build a compelling social layer in a simulation game is one of the most common questions I have been facing. I had the good fortune to gain hands-on knowledge of several such features in games that I worked on as a designer.

One natural idea that constantly keeps popping up when it comes to social gameplay in this genre is collaborative gameplay. This is understandable. Agriculture and building cities are, after all, largely collective efforts in everyday life. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could build your virtual farm together with your friends? Well, have you ever tried to make a collective collaborative project in school? Something as open-ended as building a pretty town or farm? This never works in practice.

A couple of serious problems immediately become obvious. First of all, there is a clash of visions. Everyone wants to be an architect. Almost no one is willing to invest effort into executing someone else’s vision unless they get something in return. Building a virtual city is about your own self-expression and not about helping someone else express themselves. Typically, even if people commit to executing someone else’s creative plans, they will sooner or later start to deviate and inject their own creative ideas into it. This is a recipe for disaster.

Furthermore, people have different abilities to contribute to the common project. They are also willing to invest different amounts of time, energy, and resources into it. This is another significant factor at play here.

Key Idea: Purely collaborative gameplay doesn’t work.

This tends to end in tears. Supercell has failed in this endeavor at last twice, with Everdale, once by itself and the second time via its subsidiary Metacore. Collaborative gameplay in Hay Day, known as Derby, is indeed one of the important features in the game; however, it is plagued by the second problem that I have listed. The success of the Neighborhood depends on the effort of all players in the group. Not all players are willing and able to pull their weight in these competitions. Even in very tightly knit clans consisting of close real-life friends and relatives, some players will be much more involved than others. Anecdotally, there is always one grandpa or a grandma with all the free time of a retired person that keeps prodding everyone else to get on with producing those muffins so that they can advance in the derby.

The best approach to constructing social gameplay in these games seems to be to follow the collaborate to compete pattern of gameplay. Hay Day’s derby does indeed follow this pattern. However, its main shortcoming is that it requires all participants to complete all the same type of tasks.

Abstract goals such as building a pretty city or a farm also tend to fail.

We had much more success in designing such social gameplay in SimCity BuildIt by departing from the initial metaphor of the city and designing a feature known as Club Wars. This feature allows Clubs of Mayors to collaborate in order to battle other similar clubs. The goal is simple. Collect more points than the opposing club by launching whimsical cartoonish attacks on their cities. Furthermore, the gameplay system of this feature is flexible enough to allow players to contribute to the collective effort by doing totally different types of tasks. Some players can focus on producing items needed to trigger attacks, while others can focus on dealing damage. Some can team up to attack specific opponent cities, while others can just come in and lob couple attacks at an individual city. The level of involvement doesn’t matter as all of the efforts contribute to collective success. Furthermore, each action results in a small reward for the player.

In summary, there are four advice I can give when it comes to designing social gameplay for simulation games:

Allow players to collaborate to compete with other groups of players
Allow players to pursue their own selfish personal goals while contributing to the common effort
Keep goals well-defined and simple
Allow for diverse types of actions so players can contribute in different ways and at different levels of engagement

Timeboxes and Value

One of the features of the simulation genre is that such games tend to monetize worse than some of the other types of free-to-play games, especially compared to match-3 or merge games.

There are several reasons for this, but the biggest seems to be about the perceived value of IAPs in these games. Match-3 and merge games present a clear value proposition. Buy additional energy. Buy more moves. Furthermore, they present this value proposition in a critical context. Oh, you were so close to passing this annoying level. Buy a couple more movements to continue playing.

This is much more difficult in the fluid metagames of simulation games. Ostensibly, these games should monetize on skipping time, i.e., skipping waiting for the production of individual items. Anecdotally, there indeed are players of Hay Day who just use diamonds to speed up every production in the game. This is not something that wast majority of players do.

Key Idea: Monetization is not about skipping waiting but about fixing time planning mistakes.

As we stated in the beginning. These games are time management puzzles. If faced with a choice between using money and waiting without negative consequences, most players will simply choose waiting. On the other hand, players will gladly pay for fixing their time planning mistakes.

In order to facilitate this, it pays off to add more constraints to gameplay. Simply rushing production in the main game is not enough. Putting a timebox around players’ actions makes time planning more difficult and adds urgency to the gameplay. The features, such as Contest of Mayors or Limited Time Events in Hay Day are good examples of this.

Indirect monetization in such games seems to work well in these scenarios. Create a timebox in which players need to achieve certain goals. Allow players to pick and choose their own strategy. Allow them to use money to fix their own mistakes. Allow them to figure out the best way to wisely invest their money to get ahead in the competition, and you will boost the monetization potential of your game.

SimCity BuildIt and Hay Day have taken this approach. They remain largely dedicated to the basic tenets of the genre.

Other important titles have chosen a radically different strategy. Namely, games such as Township and Family Island have decided to borrow more directly from other casual genres. Township has evolved into a metagame for match-3 and other hypercasual games. Klondike, Family Island, and other so-called expedition games have distilled learnings from other types of games and found a creative way to implement energy mechanics into their metagames.

In doing so, these games are able to create the same sort of value proposition present in match-3 and other casual games while retaining the advantages of simulation games.

The downside of this approach is that you essentially need to manage two distinct types of games in one product.

However, the validity of this approach is evident in player analysis data. This goes back to another notion we explored earlier, the lack of minute-to-minute interaction in simulation games. As research data shows, players of simulation games tend to follow a distinct play pattern. They would log into their farm builder, collect new products, and trigger new production times. They would then go out of that game and play some casual game, say Royal Match, while they wait for production timers to finish.

As someone wisely said, every free moment your players don’t spend playing your game, they will spend playing someone else’s game. What Township did was bring this gameplay pattern back inside their own game.

Key Ideas and Takeaways

Farm and city simulation games are time puzzles.
Time management is what you constantly do as an adult.
The core is the metagame.
Minute-to-minute interaction in crafting-based simulation games is lacking.
The complex metagame creates a significant cognitive load that needs to be constantly managed.
Complex systems allow for very diverse styles of gameplay.
More intuitive recipes are easier to remember.
Simulation games allow for self-expression; self-expression creates a deep emotional bond.
Purely collaborative gameplay doesn’t work.
Monetization is not about skipping waiting, but about fixing time planning mistakes.