Ironhive turns colony survival into deck-building and is inspired by one of the best tabletop world-building games around

In a genre as oversatured as city builders, it's sometimes hard to find original concepts, but Ironhive is attempting to reinvent the tried-and-tested formula through deck-building. In this colony survival game, you're tasked with overseeing the Iron Hive; a rusting bastion where the last remnants of humanity huddle together against the end of the world. 

As the Iron Lord, you've got to balance your people's survival with staying in their good graces, lest they depose you Frostpunk-style. The arrival of each new season brings its own challenges. Narrative events require you to make tricky moral choices about the future of your city, while you'll need to spend your ever-dwindling number of cards wisely to make sure you don't exhaust all your possible actions.

It's a streamlined concept; turning citizens and materials into cards that you play in order to take action and manage your metal metropolis. Another intriguing aspect of Ironhive is the inspiration it takes from a game called The Quiet Year. If you've never heard the name, it's a tabletop world-building game all about, well… the quiet between storms. You've survived the apocalypse and now have a brief window to rebuild before the next one arrives. Will what you make manage to endure it? 

It's a concept that maps super well to a city survival videogame, and games like Frostpunk already illustrate how powerful that tension can be—building something with the knowledge that it all might be destroyed before long. Still, despite its greatness, Frostpunk lacks The Quiet Year's cool card mechanics.

While Ironhive's cards aren't strictly the same—in The Quiet Year they represent seasons and help forge a narrative—its events are inspired by the tabletop game, posing players with tough choices that add more pressure to walking the tightrope of keeping your subjects happy while ensuring the city survives.

Another similarity is that exhausting your cards means the end of the game. Considering cards represent materials and population in Ironhive, running out of them is understandably very bad. You'll need to source new cards as soon as possible if you want to continue taking actions and keep the lights on.

As Chris is always highlighting on the site, it's exciting to see new and unconventional takes on the city builder genre, and I'm curious to see how well deck-building and city management align. While Ironhive doesn't have a release date yet, you can stay informed via the Critical Reflex website.

Sean Martin
Senior Guides Writer

Sean's first PC games were Full Throttle and Total Annihilation and his taste has stayed much the same since. When not scouring games for secrets or bashing his head against puzzles, you'll find him revisiting old Total War campaigns, agonizing over his Destiny 2 fit, or still trying to finish the Horus Heresy. Sean has also written for EDGE, Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, EGMNOW, and Inverse.

Read more
doctors treat plague-stricken peasants in the medieval-ish city-builder Nested Lands
Nested Lands is a 'brutal' survival city-builder about guiding villagers through a plague-infested world, and you can play its open alpha right now
All Will Fall - A concrete and wood ramshackle city in the middle of an endless ocean
This 'physics-based survival city builder' stuffed all my favorite words into its title so I'm automatically psyched
Screenshot from tile-based city building game Dawnfolk
Dawnfolk is a satisfying city builder puzzle game that works great on Steam Deck
Personal Pick: Against the Storm
Against the Storm looks charming and cosy, but it's actually the best and most fiendish city builder I've played in years
Battle Suit Aces
7 years after unique puzzle brawler Battle Chef Brigade, its creators are back with another offbeat genre mash-up: 'People like card games, hopefully they like card games that have really good characters'
A mountain block dropping into place in Drop Duchy.
Drop Duchy is an unholy fusion of city builder, roguelike deckbuilder, and Tetris, and you can try it for free right now
Latest in Survival & Crafting
Wearing a hazmat suit, a Rust player proudly holds up a freshly cooked pie, foregrounded by a table covered with pies and a large pumpkin on the left.
Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades'
A pig, a cow, and two birds dance
Minecraft Live returns in March with everyone's favorite kind of content: 'exclusive movie content'
An explosion in a desert environment
Survival sandbox Core Keeper gets explosive next week with a whole new skill tree devoted to bombs and grenades
Dead in Antares screenshot
The tough luck continues in Dead in Antares, the newest addition to the long-running series about people trying not to lose their heads in bad situations
Jack Black with mining gear.
'3 hours of my life that I'll never get back': A Minecraft modder did the lord's work, creating a mod that adds Jack Black's voice to the game
The Last Caretaker trailer still
Humanity's last hope is a little robot with can-do spirit in The Last Caretaker, coming to early access this summer
Latest in News
Orithopter shooting down another in Dune
Dune: Awakening confirms air-to-air combat in ornithopters
live action Jimbo the Jester from Balatro holding a playing card and addressing the camera
LocalThunk forbids AI-generated art on the Balatro subreddit: 'I think it does real harm to artists of all kinds'
Inzoi - A Zoi's face in three graphical presets showing a progression from a slightly blurry minimum specs to a higher fidelity recommended specs.
Oh great, the full Inzoi system requirements are posted and I'm barely above the minimum specs so I guess my Zois will be beautifully blurry
Mark Darrah
BioWare veteran says a big delay is better than lots of little ones, because sometimes you just gotta 'burn it down and take the other fork in the road'
Two rising ronin facing each other
Rise of the Ronin is another crappy PC port, performance patch coming 'soon'
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down