Prophet Margin: trade routes, hungry gods and one very satisfying puzzle

Prophet Margin is a city-builder that's really a logistics puzzle. You place settlements on a map, each one taking in one resource and turning out another, and link neighbours into trade routes. The longer and cleaner a route, the more it pays. Then the gods come in: every temple wants one particular sacred resource, so you're bending your whole network to deliver the right goods to the right shrine. Please a god and you get a boon that twists the rules, opening up new lines of play. Resources on the map run out, too, so a sloppy chain can collapse on you.

Fans of Slipways will feel at home, and plenty of reviewers make the comparison, but this one runs in real time with pause and has a Euro-board-game feel, with a deck of town cards you can stack and fuse. Runs are designed to last 30 to 60 minutes on procedurally generated maps, there's an endless mode, and new quests and win conditions unlock as you go. There's also a limited undo button for when an experiment goes wrong. Players who've put 15 hours in describe it as simple to pick up but deep, and genuinely unlike anything else.

It's not without friction. The screen gets busy, and a few players say it's hard to see where your surplus resources are. The tutorial has some rough edges, and the one negative review we found wishes for a turn-based mode instead of waiting for gold to fill up and then pausing to build. If you loved Slipways, Islanders or Mini Motorways, though, this is an easy pick at $14.95 with the launch discount (normally $16.99).