The people behind Oakhollowarcade

Oakhollowarcade began as a shared notebook. A few of us had been playing browser city builders for years, swapping tips over messages and comparing towns over coffee. We kept noticing that most writing about these games covered the first hour, when every builder is at its most generous, and ignored the weeks that follow.

So we started keeping diaries. Each game was played across weeks, on schedules that fitted ordinary British working lives, with notes on what was built, what was researched and when the pace changed. Those diaries became the reviews you read here, and the scores grew out of the patterns they revealed.

We focus on one niche on purpose: city builders and civilisation games that run in a browser. Covering six games well felt more useful than skimming dozens. Every title on the shelf earned its place, and each review is revisited when an update changes the way the game plays.

Our guide Hollis, a patient owl with strong views on road layouts, appears throughout the site to point readers in the right direction. We are a small desk, and we write the way we talk: warmly, plainly and with opinions we are prepared to defend.