Virtual Villagers is an offbeat sim/tycoon game in which you control a village of castaways on what seems to be a South Pacific island, helping them to build something like an adequate life for themselves. What's unique about it in comparison to other sim/tycoon games is that "time" progresses even when the game isn't running--in other words, if you don't come back to the game for several weeks, you may find that something fairly horrific has happened to your civilization.

Tycoon Games are Fun Again

Kaloki is a classic sim/tycoon game; here, instead of running a theme park or a railroad, you're running something like Babylon Five, a small trading station in space, with starships showing up and wanting to buy stuff. You build out from your space station core, balancing power and structural needs against the desire to have as many profit-making enterprises as possible.

Along the way, goofy alien characters talk to you, and you're faced with a progression of levels, each with their own challenge, in the classic tycoon-game fashion. But the dialog is fun, the tone light and entertaining, and you never get sunk into the tedium of some tycoon games, where meeting the demands of a particular level requires a lot of grinding labor.