A new building can improve your hand as well as your city. Dawnmaker is a solo strategy game that combines a hexagonal settlement with a deck of resource cards, all gathered around a lighthouse holding back toxic Smog. Expanding that light gives you more land, but each expansion needs a working economy behind it.
Space matters. Play a card, spend its resources, then decide where a building will do the most good. Buildings produce resources and add cards to your deck; the next hand depends partly on what you chose to construct. Building placement affects the combinations you can make, and upgrading the lighthouse competes with spending on the industries that will fund it. The developer's description names Eclairium as the rare resource your production chain ultimately works toward.
Pocket Gamer's App Army agreed on the appeal of the card-and-building combinations but split on difficulty: one found limited replay value, while another kept losing settlements before the systems clicked. Its separate review also found the engineer choices underdeveloped. I'd approach Dawnmaker as a series of production puzzles, where improving a layout is the reward.
I'd put this in front of an iPhoner who enjoys tracing a bottleneck through a production line. Chasing a larger city before the deck can support it is the mistake to watch.
