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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6 achievements in one run
beautiful game, very fun, I could feel the technological progression of no longer wanting for resources people or permits or no longer struggling to supply water, or having to move water carts around as the population grew.
Me encanto el juego, mande una partida en fácil y puedo decir que esta muy bueno el juego, fácil de entender y hermoso pixelart. Me llevo 119 turnos pero lo disfrute muchisimo!
Lots of fun and great pixel art!
This game is objectively bad, but it made a good job at tricking me that it isn't.
You just get cards, and you use them. If you have the right cards, you can progress, if not, you have to wait a turn or a few. No skill, just RNG and thoughtless clicking.
Also card storage and management is not very good, it's rather slow to use and annoying.
It does take thought and skill to manage your town's satisfaction levels though.
For someone who is decently smart, no it doesn't. You just see what's an issue and fix it. If you still can't you just move all water carriers into one corner and put them into positions again. It's pretty straightforward, literally takes no mental power.
Great game!
Was so addicting, didnt realize an hour or however long had passed until after I won. Easy to pick up, really interesting, and extremely addicting, 10/10.
On my first playthrough:
this was incredibly addicting i sat down until i finished, never thought medieval european waterworks could be so interesting
i like this game a lot.
I couldn't stop playing this game! I loved it, I never wanted it to end! Still, it was very satisfying when it did. :) Thank you for making something so fun, and so lovely to look at! The sounds were also so very satisfying.
100% it! Really high quality educational strategy game, it blends its gameplay and facts in a really satisfying way! I learned a lot about the history of the water supply system in Grudziądz from reading each completed projects' pop-up text! A few small critiques I have include:
(P.S. Bonus tip for anyone else reading this trying to get all the achievements, the construction of the well project is NOT mandatory, I just let the well schematic sit untouched in my deck for my whole normal mode playthrough while going for the well achievement!)
I knew the name ringed a bell. I loved the Deep Sleep series. This is yet another great game from a great developer. Engaging gameplay with an interesting historic and technical background.
Just a few minor visual bugs/typos:
this was so fun, did not expect to spend as much time on it as i did !!
Great game! I'm having a bug with one of the building projects though, is this known?
If you still need help, you need to have finished the Bucket-wheel and Water Wheel projects so you can get them as building materials to use for Water-work
I did not expect building the water supply to be this compelling.
Amazing game!
This was simply perfect. It great how smoothly was the educational purpose combined with playability.
10/10 super game
Played the game bc i was bored. The sentence "Nowadays we take water supply for granted" really caught me off guard and made me start thinking about the first 10-20 turns. Great game, 10/10
really fun
NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE YASSSSSSSSSS!! ALL ACHIEVEMENT DONE!
Tips on impossible is that you might want to change or consider changing water placement after a found round pass, and in last part of the game, you can sell all the sump, all pipes, all water carrier, all water wagon and all 3 wells for 112 coins(in this run I sell only 2 well so 107 coins instead, glad I have 3 coins before I start mass selling stuff to reach 110 coins)
Can you make the game work on mobile? The screen is too big for mobile and can’t click the end turn button
Should be playable on mobile as it supports touch input! However I understand that it might be tricky on some devices.
Try turning the phone horizontally and going full screen from the options in main menu, if it didn't happen automatically. Sorry if it doesn't help!
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.
true
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.
Remember the fact that the average human can live for 3 days without water. Use said days to amass scribes and craftsmen.
Did you ever use the "increase funding" card
I took "increase funding" literally every time it was offered, thinking "it's free money."
It is free money
UNLIKE certain blue cards
dude just build the sumps
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!