Combolands will take away all your free time

21 Oct 2026 at 12:19 pm UTC | Last updated: 21 Oct 2026 at 1:01 pm UTC
By Liam Squires-Hand

Combolands blends together Balatro-styled score mechanics with a mini city-builder, that has you chasing scores and placing down tiles. Disclosure: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

Created by Crux Games – a two person team composed of Skye Scott & Sam Alfred, designer of Terra Nil. It's simply delicious.

So what exactly is it? A tiny little roguelike city-builder that has you place down different tiles to build up a city across procedurally generated islands.The idea is that you go through multiple weeks (turns) to hit a specific score. You do so with these tiles that each have different requirements to increase your score. Every time you manage to hit the score, you move onto the next milestone with an even higher score to hit.

It's all about building up powerful synergies and combinations, so you can really smash through the required score across each milestone. It sounds simple, it looks simple too, but there's a surprising amount of depth to it to find all the ways you can really mess with it.

Part of what makes the strategy to it interesting are the tile timers. A lot of building tiles you place have timers for activation like 3 weeks between doing anything and adding to your score, other natural tiles like berry bushes also have their own timer to regrow after getting picked - meaning you have to wait a certain amount of turns across your little city until different parts of it activate to push your score up. There's also certain tile buildings to place that only activate once, but might have special bonuses when you remove them and turn into something else and more.

Lots of little moving parts and counters everywhere to keep thinking about.

If you're anything like me, it will take you quite some time to properly figure it out. And, I'm still never entirely sure exactly what I'm doing. Which is part of the fun here, discovering how all thing tiles can end up working together (or not).

Such a relaxed game too. No time pressure, just you sitting back, chilling, placing down tiles and watching as numbers-go-up. The joy I feel when I hear the ticker sound as the game tallies up all my points to dump into the counter - it's refreshing. So many nice touches to it too. Like getting a particularly good combo going, and little buildings slam down on top of the counter to show off how well you did that round.

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Another wonderful part to it is the progression system. When a run ends, it shows off a photo across each milestone you hit and then tallies up your overall score into the level up system so you can unlock new tiles across multiple different guilds (like Agricultural or Frontier for different classes of tiles in your pool). And when you start a new run, you pick the guilds you want for what tiles you can possibly pull during the run on a fresh map.

While the starting game isn't too difficult, it's still pretty challenging to win a game. After that, you can then unlock more higher difficulty modes to really test yourself too.

Key Features

• Satisfying roguelike blend of deckbuilder and citybuilder mechanics.
• A pantheon of 7 guilds with unique buildings and playstyles - pick 2 every run.
• Procedurally generated islands.
• 120+ buildings to construct your town.
• 100+ passive heirlooms to further enhance your build.
• Upgrades to manipulate your buildings' behaviour, and potions to manipulate the map.
• Recruit from 13+ city councillors, each with their own progressions and abilities.
• Work your way up 10 increasingly challenging ranks.

This is one that will end up taking away all of your free time. Very satisfying gameplay overall, I love how different it feels each time with the generated maps on top of the random tile cards from your picked guilds.

The game was tested on Fedora KDE 45 with Proton 11 where it was a flawless experience.

Combolands is great and has the juice.

Review Score: 4 / 5 - GreatSteam Deck 🟡 PlayableRelease Date: 📅 24th August 2026Platform: ⚛ Proton / Wine (Windows)Devs:Crux GamesOfficial links:Steam Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com. Tags: Proton, Review, City Builder, Indie Game, Roguelike, Steam, Strategy, Turn-based strategy | Apps: Combolands 1 Likes All posts need to follow our rules. Please hit the Report Flag icon on any post that breaks the rules or contains illegal / harmful content. Readers can also email us for any issues or concerns.