A free 3D city builder in your browser
City Architect is a city-building game you play in your browser, free. Start with an empty map and a highway, draw the first streets, and grow a town into a busy city with its own economy, public transport and thousands of residents, each with a name and a home.
Play now, free No download or account needed
What you can build
- Roads of every kind: streets, avenues, one-way roads, walking streets and highways, with curves, roundabouts, ramps and interchanges, bridges, tunnels and viaducts. Set traffic lights and give-way rules at each junction, and choose which lanes lead where.
- Neighbourhoods: zone homes, shops, industry and offices at low and high density, mixed use, low-rent housing and specialised offices, and watch buildings grow, level up and change with demand.
- Utilities: coal, oil, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and nuclear power, power lines and a link to the national grid to buy or sell electricity, water, sewage, garbage and recycling, and district heating.
- City services: police and prisons, fire stations, clinics and hospitals, schools from daycare to university, deathcare, post, internet, parks, squares and landmarks.
- Public transport: bus lines, trams on your streets or on tramways of their own, a metro in tunnels or on viaducts, intercity passenger and goods trains with stations and cargo terminals, taxis, and parking lots and garages.
A city that lives
Every car, truck and bus drives a real route, waits at lights and gets stuck in jams you can fix. Residents go to school, work, shop and grow old; businesses buy goods, pay wages and can go bankrupt; industry turns farmland, forests, oil and ore into products that are sold locally or exported. Weather and seasons bring rain and snow that ploughs have to clear, and pollution, crime, homelessness, tourism and land value all respond to how you build. Divide the city into districts with their own policies, and set a budget for each service.
Your own map
Choose a river valley, lakes, a coast, islands or open plains, and drive on the right or the left as in Europe, America or Asia. Expand by buying more map tiles, or draw a map of your own in the map editor: water, forests and natural resources, saved in your browser.
How to start
- Open the game and choose New city, then a map, a region and a theme. Turn on unlimited money if you just want to build.
- Draw streets from the highway at the edge of the map, then zone homes, shops and industry along them.
- Give the city power, water and sewage, then services as it grows. The advisor bar and the tutorial point out what is missing.
- Keep an eye on the budget and on what citizens think, and unlock bigger buildings at each population milestone.
What you need
A computer with a recent web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari) that supports WebGL, and a mouse and keyboard. Big cities run best on a computer with a dedicated graphics card; the graphics options can lower the detail on slower machines.
Questions
Is City Architect free?
Yes. The whole game is free to play, with no ads and nothing to buy.
Do I need to download or install anything?
No. City Architect runs in your web browser. Any recent version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari with WebGL works; open the page and start building.
Does the game save my city?
Yes. Your cities are saved in your browser, and each city autosaves every month of game time. With a free account your cities are saved to the account instead, so you can carry on from any computer.
Can I play on a phone or tablet?
The game is made for a computer with a mouse and keyboard. It may run on a large tablet, but the controls and the amount on screen suit a laptop or desktop best.
Is it like SimCity or Cities: Skylines?
It is a city builder in the same spirit: you lay out roads and zones, provide services and utilities, run public transport and balance the budget while your city grows. It runs in a browser, so there is nothing to install.
Who makes City Architect?
City Architect is an independent game made in Sweden.
Share the game
Know someone who likes building cities? Send them a link.