It's brutal, but it's also wonderfully engrossing. Block by block you'll expand to create more space, more resources, and before you know it your colony is a mess of inefficient pipes and wiring, your crops are withering from the heat, and your duplicants are urgently building life-saving machinery while holding their breath inside a toxic cloud. You'll start by growing crops and turning algae into breathable oxygen, but resources deplete and demands increase rapidly. Where it differs from most of its peers is in the engineering rigour it requires from players. Oxygen Not Included is one of a handful of Dwarf Fauxtress games in this list where you take charge of a small group of hapless people arriving in an inhospitable location, in this case the centre of an asteroid, and you must mine and construct the tools they need to survive. You can write your own entry for the game in the comments, and we'll consider it for inclusion in a future revision to this list. If you don't see your favourite on the list, it must be at number 21. That means we've excluded some formative classics that feel less easily recommended - although you'll still find a handful of games here that are old enough to drink. The only rule is that it needs to be fun to play right now.

We've selected all different kinds of management games below, with something to satisfy you whether you want to run a household, keep colonists sane, process poisonous gases, or obsess over conveyor belt efficiency.

Banished the game family size