Overview: My Tribe is a village simulation game where you take charge of a small island and direct the activities of your tribespeople. The art direction is interesting – the environments and items are richly colored and in a realistic style, and the people and critters are black-outline cartoons. It’s not without its charm, but it is a little jarring.

The activities you’re in charge of range from resource gathering (fishing, chopping wood, mining stone) to “summoning the stork” to increase your tribe’s membership. There are a number of buildings to construct that take various resources, farm plots to plant and tend, and random treasures to gather.

The random treasure system is interesting. Seashells will appear on your island’s beaches, waiting for you to collect and use them in most recipes from clothing to buildings. Periodically rarer treasures will appear, heralded by a countdown timer on the screen. Stardust and Moondust periodically fall from the sky – these are special items that cause a variety of effects, depending on what they’re sprinkled on. Crates wash up on shore, containing any of a multitude of surprises. This system ensures that you always have something to do, even if it’s just scanning the beaches for seashells.

There is a Science system that enables you to do research to unlock new items, buildings, and crops. You can make clothing for your tribespeople, which is purely cosmetic, but then you can enhance it with gems which give boosts to various skills. And eventually, you’ll be able to make the Great Ark and set sail for new islands. This appears to be the current endgame, as it requires a tremendous amount of resources.

My biggest gripe with My Tribe is the interface. It’s a little too tall to fit on a 1024×768 screen without scrolling – while that won’t affect everyone, it’s definitely aggravating for those of us with older monitors. Moving around the island can either be done with the keyboard, which is slow, or the mouse, which is jerky and frankly nausea-inducing. You can move around with the map, but that does you no good when you’re looking for seashells. The other minor irritation is that the smaller random resources often appear behind trees, where they’re entirely unreachable.

While these are problems, My Tribe is as a whole a fairly deep game and worth looking into. Watching your villagers go about their daily lives is strangely soothing, and there are enough little things to click on that it’s entirely possible to lose hours to simple beachcombing. If you’re a fan of simulation games in general, My Tribe is worth taking a look at.