01What we do
Ashvarden reviews city-building games for players and families in the UK. We write only about games we have built in across many evenings, and every district report says how long a shift runs, where the game stops cleanly, who can reach you online and what its expansions cost.
02Why a settlement screen?
City builders show you everything at once: the map, the resources, the queue of things to build. We thought an evening deserves the same view. You can see how long it is, what is planned, where the breaks go and when the curfew bell rings, before you load a single save.
03Where the name comes from
Many of the best settlements in these games are built on hard ground: frozen wastes, burnt forests, ash after a storm. Ashvarden is a warden of that ash, someone who builds again carefully and knows when to put the tools down for the night.
04Who writes the reviews
A small team of long-time players of city builders, colony sims and management games, from relaxed sandboxes to hard survival builders, together with parents who set up the family controls on every platform and launcher we mention.
05How the site is paid for
Not by anyone in the games business. There are no adverts, affiliate links, sponsored reviews or products for sale. We host no games, run no accounts and take no payments.
06Conflicts of interest
If a reviewer has a personal or professional link to a game or studio, someone else writes the report and it says so. We accept no gifts, trips, early copies or in-game items in exchange for coverage.
07The artwork
Every picture of a game’s world is an original illustration made for Ashvarden in the spirit of that game’s own look: a frozen industrial city for one, a medieval village in autumn for another, a cut-away asteroid colony for a third. None of it is official artwork, a screenshot or a real person. Our crest is our own.
08Why UK English?
British spelling, UK age labels and UK support services. No pop-ups, no autoplaying video or sound and no tracking of any kind.
09Corrections
Spotted a mistake? Tell us through hello@ashvarden.com. Every report is checked, and corrections are made on the page itself.