Turmoil (v3.2.9 & ALL DLC)

A dusty frontier town turns oil prospecting into a sharp, surprisingly playful management contest. Set during North America’s 19th-century petroleum boom, Turmoil follows a rags-to-riches campaign in which every plot of land might contain a fortune—or drain your cash before the season ends. Its cheerful cartoon presentation and dry humor keep the mood light, but the economic pressure is real as rival entrepreneurs chase the same path to becoming mayor. The result feels like a compact business strategy game built around greed, timing, and cleverly managed chaos.

Each year begins at a land auction, where players bid for a parcel and hunt underground reserves with dowsers, scanners, or moles. After finding oil, the work becomes a balancing act of placing derricks, linking pipe networks, expanding storage silos, and deciding when to sell to competing buyers whose prices constantly rise and fall. Profits fund upgrades that tackle deeper deposits and hazards such as rock, ice, and gas, while gas can also be used to manipulate the market for a lucrative final sale. Between drilling seasons, the growing town offers equipment improvements, questionable saloon deals, and a stock auction where buying more shares than opponents advances the larger campaign.

Turmoil stands out because it makes an intimidating subject immediately readable: oil flows visibly through the ground, pipelines show bottlenecks at a glance, and each decision has an understandable financial consequence. The campaign steadily adds tools without burying players in spreadsheets, while single-game mode generates fresh maps for score-chasing runs that can be completed in a short sitting. Its tension resembles a lighter, more accessible take on resource-management games such as Offworld Trading Company, with a little of the quick optimization appeal found in classic tycoon sims. Strategy newcomers can learn it quickly, while experienced efficiency fans will enjoy squeezing every last dollar out of a lease before the year closes.