Roots of Harmony

Roots of Harmony is a text-based 4X strategy game that strips away the graphics and doubles down on the systems. Developed by solo creator Guillaume Beaumel and released on October 25, 2024, this is a game that proudly advertises “100% gameplay, ASCII graphics only”. It’s a turn-based strategy experience that feels like a board game, where you lead a fledgling colony on a procedurally generated island, managing resources, doctrines, and disciples while navigating a web of tribal politics and tactical battles. If you’ve ever wanted a 4X game that focuses entirely on the “4X” partexplore, expand, exploit, exterminatewithout the distraction of 3D graphics, this is exactly that.

The Core Gameplay

You begin with a single settlement and one of twelve doctrines, which define your colony’s moral and philosophical outlook. Will you be altruistic or despotic? Rational or mystic? Collectivist or individualist? These choices aren’t just flavorthey determine which units you can recruit, what perks you unlock, which events will shape your fortune, and, most importantly, which of the game’s twelve resources you’ll focus on. Resources are the heart of the game. They serve a dual purpose: they reflect your moral decisions, and they determine your ability to construct buildings and start production chains. You’ll need to balance your economy carefully, because every building converts one resource into others, and letting any resource drop into the negatives can unravel your entire operation.

Exploration is a major part of the experience. The island is full of special locations to discoveraltars that summon powerful units, mines and plantations that generate resources, creepy places that grant traits to your disciples, trading posts, shipyards, and dungeons. Every map is different, and the encounters are meticulously designed by a human brain. But the island isn’t yours. Every land is owned by a tribe, and those tribes have alliances, procedural units, and a willingness to send waves of invaders your way if you don’t treat them with respect. Expanding too fast makes you a target; expanding too slowly means the great empires will eventually notice your insignificant settlement and crush it.

Combat and Victory

Combat is an auto-battler system. You position your disciples on a six-line battlefield and choose which blessings to cast, but once the battle begins, you cannot interact with your units. The composition of your squads is what truly matters, though the few choices you do havepositioning and blessingscan change everything. Battles are limited to 6v6, meaning the fight for a single land can take multiple turns. To achieve victory, you must complete a set of six milestones that are randomly picked for each new playthrough, ensuring that no two runs are the same. The final milestone offers a choice: become “King of the Hills” by controlling specific lands, or “Boss of the Island” by eradicating a specific faction.

Replayability and Updates

The game heavily emphasizes replayability, with procedural islands, random victory conditions, and a difficulty that varies from one playthrough to the next. The choices you make determine the challenges you’ll faceprovoking a tribe with numerous allies, adopting a hedonistic lifestyle when your neighbors are all ascetics, or making moonshine in holy sites will all increase the overall difficulty. It’s humorous and philosophical, and it does not hold your hand, but the mechanics are introduced gradually, keeping the learning curve gentle. The game has been through four major updates, including the massive Version 4.0 “Map Update”, which replaced the list of locations with a grid map, introduced territories for tribes, overhauled the combat system, and redesigned the UI. The latest Version 4.1 added game modifiers for New Game+, new events, and the Pawnshop building, among other changes.

Reception and Community

The game has been met with a “Very Positive” reception on Steam, holding a 100% positive rating based on 22–27 user reviews. A detailed review from Medium praised it for capturing many familiar 4X elements in a text-based package, noting that “the overall focus is around delivering a more bite-sized 4X experience akin to a survival colony sim… and a difficult one at that”. A Steam curator from Turn-based games recommended it, saying “it’s also just interesting to see more titles popping up in this space”. The game has been described as deep, highly replayable, and capable of entertaining you for hours. The community is small but engaged, and the developer is active in responding to feedback and releasing regular updates.

System Requirements

The system requirements are mercifully low. Minimum: Windows 10, a 2.4 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, and any DirectX 10 compatible GPU. You’ll need 500 MB of storage space. It’s a lightweight game that will run on virtually any computer made in the last decade. A free demo is also available on Steam if you want to try before you buy.

Who Is This Game For?

If you love 4X strategy games like Civilization or Endless Legend but want something with a stronger focus on resource management, ideology, and survivalwhere every decision has weight and the difficulty is determined by your own choicesthis is exactly your kind of game. If you enjoy text-based experiences and appreciate deep systems over flashy graphics, the ASCII presentation and complex production chains will keep you engaged for hours. It’s also for players who appreciate solo-developed passion projects and want to support a developer who is actively evolving the game with major updates. And if you just want a cheap, deep, endlessly replayable strategy game that you can sink dozens of hours into while listening to a podcast, this one has your name on it.
If the game succeeds in catching your interest, good luck winning!