Amberspire is a science fantasy dice city builder developed by Lunar Division and published by Bithell Games, arriving on May 6. What sets it apart from the crowded city-building genre is a fundamental design choice: buildings don't produce resources. They produce dice.
When you construct a workshop or farm in Amberspire, rolling its unique die determines what resources you get. You might need fuel but roll cloth instead. Buildings may not always give you the resources you need, so you and your city will adapt to what fortune provides. This forces a reactive rather than optimised approach to city planning.
The moon orbiting the gas giant Amber has developed an unusual ecology; viscous floodplains and rust blooms, dense fog and silica grass dominate the environment. Rather than flattening the landscape to build, players must negotiate with these systems. Cohabitation is better than eradication. The ecology evolves according to its own rules. Weather dice trigger terrain growth patterns that shape your city's available space.
Developer Nic Tringali works under Lunar Division, a label of Bithell Games used for "experimental ideas and for projects helmed by new directors". Tringali previously created The Banished Vault, a gothic strategy game about resource management aboard an interstellar monastery. Where that game embraced numerical abstraction, Amberspire takes a different approach.
Tringali did not want the city to feel like it was being represented abstractly, like buildings in The Banished Vault. With a space fantasy setting, specific details are important to communicate the setting and world to the player. That's why Tringali decided to go full 2D and isometric rather than 3D. The choice cuts production complexity while keeping visual detail legible. Hand-drawn isometric art realises the buildings that comprise your city, and lush portraits depict the many factions in the galaxy.
Politics complicate the city further. The citizens of Amberspire have their own goals and rivalries with your city caught in between their grand hopes and nefarious intentions. Factional disputes and political events can reshape your capabilities. Like the dice and ecology, these systems run on their own logic, creating emergent stories rather than scripted narrative.
The game resists the pressure to let players buy their way out of problems. Failure doesn't mean restart; it means watching your mistakes crystallise into beauty. City misfortunes become "a vast, beautiful marbling of crystal and gas", according to design notes. The aesthetic embraces collapse as part of the experience.
For more details, you can explore the game on Steam or read Tringali's design diaries documenting development decisions.