Waterworks!
Once launched, the game is available in both English and Polish
Po uruchomieniu gra dostępna w angielskiej i polskiej wersji językowej
Welcome to medieval Grudziądz*!
Waterworks! is a card-based strategy game. You've been placed in charge of the water supply in the medieval town of Grudziądz. You'll have to use your management skills to make sure every house has enough water and at the same time gather supplies for development of new technologies!
Are you up for it?
- Play various cards to supply buildings with water!
- Position your units to maximize their efficiency!
- Manage your deck, decide what to keep and what to discard!
- Collect resources and workers to develop new technologies!
- Build a network of pipes and wells on town's map!
- Put out fires and fulfill the ruler's requests!
- Don't let your Influence drop or you'll fall from grace!
While you're at it
- Witness the city's changes throughout the ages as the game progresses!
- Learn how medieval water supply used to operate!
- Relax while listening to the beautiful soundtrack by talented Chris Carlone !
Not enough?
- Try to master the game on all 4 difficulty levels!
- Come up with new strategies to beat the game in as few turns as possible!
- Collect all 10 achievements!
* How do I even pronounce that name?!
The city of Grudziądz was founded by the Teutonic Order in 1291 in the northern part of today's Poland on the Vistula River surrounded by wetlands. The high location on the Vistula embankment meant that the city was struggling with access to clean drinking water from the very beginning of its existence. With the growing number of inhabitants, the problem of water scarcity became an argument for the use of numerous, innovative (on a European scale) technical solutions in Grudziądz...
Development log
- 1.1.6 changelogApr 02, 2023
- 1.1.5 changelogJul 24, 2020
- 1.1.3 changelogJul 21, 2020
- Waterworks! - Privacy PolicyJul 21, 2020
- 1.0.0 changelogJul 16, 2020
- 0.5.0 changelogJul 04, 2020
- 0.4.0 changelogJun 25, 2020
- 0.3.0 changelogJun 12, 2020
Comments
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Very fun game to play, completed it in 104 turns
grudziądz jumpscare
good game
very fun! it took me 118 turns to win.
i finished in 130
That was very difficult, but I completed all the achievements.
Great game! Fun simple card based resource management. Only need a mouse!
Wow that was a lot of fun
great Job! :)
The only thing I would change is putting at the last technology a masive baner telling the player "THIS IS LAST TECHNOLOGY REQUIERED TO ACHIEVE TECHNOLOGYCAL DOMINION, THE ENDGAME IS NEAR". The end feels better when you expect it, and I didn't pay much attention to the text of every tech.
I can not download the game!
damn just spent 2+ hours playing it. Game is fun af.
Nice game
This seemed like a game that I would take like 10 min with. I ended up completing the game and loved it!
Really nice game!
When the game developer says the difficulty is IMPOSSIBLE, they meant it, like drawing only 3 cards I was overwhelmed with the population growth in the late game. The End-Game project is so expensive, I think I wasted like 50 turns to farm the money and influence, and there it came the first useful thing to buy jewelries, because my influence income is in the negatives. I almost lost because of that, and at the last moment I sold almost everything and finally completed the end-game project.
Great Game!
An incomplete information problem disguised as an unfolding game disguised as a civ-building card game.
Unfortunately, even after mastering the basic mechanics, you have no knowledge upon which to base your decisions. It's a deckbuilding game where you didn't actually build your deck. It's a strategy game where the concept of strategizing is alien. It's a micro-management game where there's only a tenuous relationship between the visible representations of your units on the screen and the areas covered by those units. Even on easy, you will earn spare gold from massive population satisfaction and still need to skip turns because you don't have enough gold.
The worst part is I'm 100% certain this isn't an accident. The game was obviously carefully designed, balanced and play-tested to capture the existential horror of managing a medieval sanitation project. On Normal, I suppose people would be dying of dysentery or sacrificing goats or whatever, and it would be my fault somehow for not putting cards on colored rectangles in the correct way.
Overall, it's the digital equivalent of a gilded, precision clockwork mechanism tasked with smacking you in the face with a dead fish for all eternity, or at least until the gearbox winds down and you run out of gold or stars or whatever and get a Game Over.
I'm only halfway through the second age, and I can already see where this is going. In the future, every possible structure and interface remains clogged with unusable components for permanently-stalled projects, while the deck keeps cycling and piling on new mechanics and fires keep breaking out and nothing works, all because I didn't somehow predict the need for three scribes and a foreman three turns in advance, and after I got the components together, I ran out of money to finish it that turn and had to sacrifice like three red cards at once.
Which is all a fancy way of saying I don't understand how the game works, even though I'm long past the tutorial and I remember everything it taught me. I've learned the mechanics, but the game flatly refuses to let you wrap your head around its dynamics during gameplay. You would need to lose multiple times just in order to know what cards appear in the late game so that you can attempt to make any meaningful decisions whatsoever about which cards to keep, use or discard at any given time.
So I give up. The quaint town of Grudziądz may keep its mysteries, for I will no longer play a hand in its people's suffering.
Seriously? If you keep running out of money, trade influence for income and money, don't buy jewelries, NEVER buy jewelries(BLUE card), it's a scam. For projects, keep 1 foremen and balance out the others, scribes only used on projects rarely, only some projects that uses 2 or more when the game introduces you the scribe. For predicting what cards will come out, well you can hover the discard pile. For placing the water carriers like you need to learn to maximize your placing and learn to sacrifice an angry house for other houses.
I honestly find the game quite easy on normal, maybe because I've played some management games before, I completed normal on 126 turns and got the achievement to complete the game before 150 turns. So, I think your management is a bit lacking, try to be patient and learn how each action contributes to what event comes after
Unfortunately, it only offered me the card that lets you sell influence and get money once or twice at the very start of the game, when I didn't need it.
The one time I did see it offered in the late game, I skipped it because it was literally a worse exchange rate than the "2 influence for 1 gold" you get from overflowing 100 influence.
Trust me, if your influence is in the positive, always sell influence for money.
And I think you misread the card or something, there are 3 donation cards that gives you money for influence (small = 10, common = 20, generous = 40) like their exchange rate is 1:1(unless in hard/impossible), I don't know any card that has worse exchange rate than the influence overflow.
I always use these red donation cards when I draw them. Due to this, I was very rich (300+ money) in normal, hard, and mid-game impossible mode. And with good water carrier placing, my influence never made it to negative in normal and hard mode.
I see. In that case, I suppose my real issue is I thought 100% approval was the goal. Like. It's water. If people in a certain block are only getting 50% of the water they need to survive, that's a problem that will literally kill townsfolk if it lasts for more than a day or so. Anything less than 100% is a failure state.
Or at least, that's the way water works in real life. It never occurred to me to treat overflow like a problem to be solved or a resource to be spent. I thought overflow meant nobody died this turn because we met quota and maybe went a little over. Sure, we could try bartering away some of the excess, but what if it makes us come up short? Too risky.
I feel like I'm starting to overstate the point, but if only 90% of the people have water, 10% of the people die of thirst. That's how water works. It's one of three core mechanics of IRL literally all of us learn during the tutorial level. The game's influence mechanic feels like a weird abstraction that doesn't make sense in the real world.
Influence and money are concepts in the real world, to be sure, but killing 10% of the population per day for money seems like the kind of thing that wouldn't be feasible for very long, even by medieval standards. If the peasants didn't revolt, at some point, you'd run out of peasants.
Did you ever use the "increase funding" card
I took "increase funding" literally every time it was offered, thinking "it's free money."
I really loved this game, Is there anyway you could make it downloadable(?) or at least able to save and load progress? This is such a unique game and not many are able to do what you do in both style and simplicity!
went in not knowing anything and had a "??!!!" moment when i saw the scriptwelder logo pop up. big fan of your old flash games, didn't know you had new(er) games and was not disappointed!
WOW, as both an engineer and someone who enjoys video games, I want to thank the creators for this game. This is an awesome way for students of engineering, and the general public at large, to learn more about the systems that created our modern world.
I've got to say, this game was very intriguing and unique. I like how satisfying it feels to complete a certain work- like filing up the requirements of the projects. In my first attempt, I managed to complete the game in 114 turns (it's pretty long). The gameplay is very unique and the art is just as amazing as ever. Keep up the good work!
Really great chilled card game
This game is so fun!
I really really loved this game! Great mechanics and it was a really fun environment with cool facts and cute sprites.
Really enjoyed the game
Wonderful little game! Well done!
I was over the moon to find this and with updates. Used to play original on Armour Games
Love that game (on "easy" at least). Wish there was some source or more settings. Font is too tiny for me at places.
Would be nice to skip intro (browser closed, cache cleared).
And would also be nice to be able to translate myself. I'm not so selfish to just ask "I want language XX_xx" - but any possibility here would be very welcome.
can u make Chinese???
I think that this game lacks proper deck manipulation, storing cards is fine, but it is very passive, actual pulling and redirecting of cards (slay-the-spire-like "put on top of draw pile") early on would be insanely good. Also some draw amount manipulation would be great (for example famine that makes you draw less cards each turn, huge celebration that makes you draw more each turn)
Overall I really enjoyed this game :)
Entertaining and educational! Love the pixel art, but wish it was somehow easier to move the water carts and wagons.
Awesome game! Finished on normal, 135 days. Bad well placement early on really mess up the overall plan later.
Overall great mix of fun, strategy, history, and engineering. I'd love to see this become a sub-system in a city sim! Maybe a mini-series where you focus on different systems within a city?
This game is awesome :D I actually don't feel like I'm needed, because the game plays itself, I just put into right places stuff that comes randomly, but still it's fun to observe how the city evolves and changes through ages. Nice idle clicker with "puzzle" and "collect right items" elements.
But for all who come from Grudziądz - this is a really nice gift to play a game that is dedicated to our lovely city! Thank you!
Recently I have received a notification about this particular issue, and I'm more than delighted with the release! The whole concept of the game, how long the gameplay can last (which is really something unordinary in this type of release), and how levels are becoming more complex is something that needs awe of itself for sure. I have worked hard to make the popular saying in my hometown pass, and the saying is "Bo cały Grudziądz to zajebana wieś", no longer it is.
Best game 10/10
A very good game, that also teaches you something
I've gotten worriedly addicted to this I'm worried about doing work for my job. Amazing concept and great gameplay. Sucks that I'm bad at it though lol.
Was looking for anything to play and found this. Thought it looked cool and decided to check it out for a few minutes and see if it was fun and I ended up playing for 2 hours. Surprisingly quite fun and challenging at times. Ended up beating it on turn 116.
One of my favorite games on itch.io! love it! Beat the game in 123 turns, just thought that was funny.