Games Like CENTAVO

Every cent is always in someone's pocket

The city starts empty, and the amount of money in the world is fixed: nobody prints it, nobody erases it. The wage a resident takes home came out of the market's till, which came out of a customer's pocket, which came out of another wage. Every payment has a side that pays and a side that gets paid, and you can open both.

You don't build. You zone and you govern.

People who actually walk

Every resident walks to work, to the market and back home. Nobody teleports, and distance costs time. They get hungry, fall ill and pay the hospital, marry, support their children, grow old and die. A dead resident's house passes to the spouse or a child; a dead owner's business passes to someone who worked there. Those who find neither work nor food leave, and take their money with them. Those who arrive from outside come because there was a job that paid and an empty roof.

Prices nobody programmed

The market buys from the farm and sells to residents, and the price reacts to the shelf and to the queue: an empty shelf gets pricier, idle stock gets cheaper. A town with a single market has queues, and queues turn into hunger. No price is set by decree: the Prices tab shows the history of each one.

Open the city like a ledger

From Camp to Metropolis

The city climbs seven steps: Camp, Hamlet, Village, Town, City, Capital and Metropolis. Each step unlocks new kinds of construction to zone and shows the next goal in residents, buildings and money in the city. Note the wording: the goal is how much of the world's money lives in your city, not how much sits in the government's coffers. Full coffers and poor residents don't level up. And the city can end: by exodus, by starvation, or by coffers that ran dry and never recovered. When it ends, you can restart the same city, with the same seed, and try something else.

Made by one person

CENTAVO is made by a single developer. Everything described on this page is already in the game; what is still going to change is in the Early Access section.