Fablewood Chronicles is half strategy game, half idler: a civilization of moveable regions that runs itself while you do something else. You decide where everything goes and who does what. They handle the rest, and the best part is coming back to find out what they did with it.

Where you put things is the game

Every region reaches a certain distance. Put two in reach of each other and a road opens between them.

Roads never level up with money. They level up because people walk them: twenty crossings for the second rank, two hundred and eighty for the fifth. A worn road is faster and kinder to the traveler on it. Wear enough in and the lines stop being lines: roads bundle into trunks, crossings collapse into junctions, and highways curve between the places your people actually go.

Drag two regions apart and the road between them is gone for good.

Everyone here has a name

Five races. Thirty trades. A 600-cell table deciding how good each trade is on each kind of place. They pick up quirks, master their craft, take apprentices, and make friends who pay their happiness back with interest.

Click one and they'll turn around and tell you how their feet are.

Crowns, faiths, and coups you did not order

The best-connected person on a region earns its crown, and the longer they wear it the harder people feel about them. In the provinces that curdles: a conspiracy forms around one name, gathers the friends who feel the same, and one day the flag comes down. Move that person to another region and it never happens.

Colors work each other out the same way. A road between two nations that gets used becomes an alliance; a border where people keep arguing becomes a war, fought one pair at a time until one side has nobody standing, and the loser is absorbed whole. Nobody dies for it: beaten fighters walk home tired and the conquered go back to work under a new color.

Meanwhile your people invent religions, and spread them as they share a conversation. A good faith is worth cultivating. A grim one is worth quarantining on an region far from the roads.

Come back to a world that moved on

No crops wither, no timers expire, no daily login. When somebody wants something they raise a small mark and wait; ignore it and they sort it out themselves, the slow way.

Then you come home, and the world hands you the Chronicle, written like a history rather than a log: who took a crown, which faith reached which shore, which road finally wore in. Every ten days it comes out as a paper, leading with the biggest thing that happened and filing the rest in columns; leave the game running and a week's worth stacks up on your desk to read down through. Checking it is the best moment of the day.

The depth keeps arriving

Supply chains: quarries cut ore, forges want it, and haulers carry it down the roads you shaped. A supplied region simply does better. Buffs stack: the hour of day, the weather overhead, the faith on the ground, who visited, what got delivered, the constellation you charted last night. Relics are bought and then placed, worth exactly what their position is worth.

And out between your regions, breaches open. Send a party down your own roads. Fighting spends the same energy working does, so the question is whether the nation you built can refill a crew faster than a fight drains it. Nobody dies; a losing party walks home tired. Peaceful mode removes all of it.

Most regions have a game inside them

Work the plot at the Garden. Strike a bargain at the Market. Hold court at the Capital. Sit the exam at the College. Chart a constellation at the Observatory, on a clear night, by dragging the lines between the stars yourself.

Each is a short campaign that ends in mastery: decisions, not reflexes, and missing a moment never costs you anything.

A strategy game that fits beside your work

Run it transparent, always on top, and genuinely click-through, so the nation lives over your desktop while you work. Or in an ordinary window. Or on a Steam Deck with a controller.

Look away and it drops to ten frames a second; minimize it and it stops drawing entirely and credits the time when you return. There's a live frame counter in the top bar so you don't have to take our word for it.

In the box

• 20 kinds of region, and as many of each as you can afford

• 5 races and 30 trades across a 600-cell fitness table

• 100 achievements

• 6 relics, placed on the map rather than picked off a list

• Mini-game campaigns inside the regions, ending in mastery

• 14 quirks, 8 constellations, and 9 kinds of scenery, each drawn from its own seed so no two woods are the same wood

• Caravans: three to five people on a standing circuit, wearing in every road on the way

• Weather on a wind that never shifts, and a day that changes what each kind of place is worth

• A soundscape built place by place: an ambient bed per region type, wordless crowd talk that thickens where people gather, and music written as loops rather than songs