Best Sandbox Games on Steam
Unlike generic lists, our strategy game recommendations use a rigorous analysis of Steam user reviews to identify and feature only the best, community-validated sandbox games.
Filters & Lists
The Tenants
Become a landlord and deal with problematic tenants as you build your rental property empire. Decide how to react to annoyed neighbors or police interventions. Will you design your apartment for a group of gamer friends or an aspiring musician looking for a new home?
SuchArt: Genius Artist Simulator
A unique artist sim game with realistic paint mixing, physics and numerous painting tools. Upgrade and customize your studio, complete tasks, sell and expose art, buy instruments and get famous!
LEGO® Bricktales
In this puzzle-adventure, use an intuitive brick-by-brick building mechanic to solve puzzles and bring your creations to life! Experience a charming story as you explore beautiful LEGO® dioramas and help the people inhabiting them.
Craft Hero
Gather resources by day, build and recruit by noon, defend your village by night! A new minimalism sandbox survival with countless new ideas – Craft Hero
Bakso Simulator
Create the most successful bakso business in this world!
Oxygen: First Breath
This is a free version of Oxygen, featuring the first 50 game-days. Build your city around the Oxygen Center and ensure your people's survival in a post-apocalyptic future, threatened by crack explosions, deadly winds, droughts and frosts. Lead your people and keep the Oxygen Center running!
Marble World
Marble World is a physics sandbox simulator with marbles. Create your own marble races, runs and machines. Customize a variety of tracks, decorations and marbles to create a beautiful world.
Brewmaster: Beer Brewing Simulator
Brew your perfect beer in this relaxing home brewing sim. Use a realistic chemistry simulation to brew hoppy IPAs to creamy stouts. Customise your brewing space, create recipes and label your beer, unlock new equipment and enter competitions. Learn to brew, refine your craft and become a Brewmaster!
Foxhole
Foxhole is a massively multiplayer game where thousands of players shape the outcome of a persistent online war. Every individual soldier is a player that contributes to the war effort through logistics, base building, reconnaissance, combat, and more.
Regular Human Workshop
Regular Human Workshop is a 2D physics simulation sandbox. There are no predefined goals or objectives. Simply throw objects into the world and interact with them in various ways.
Idle Skilling
Idle Skilling is the ultimate Idle Game with years of content! Meant to be played for 5-10 minutes a day, you gradually unlock new skills like mining, fishing, pet breeding, crusading, potion-making, lab-research, construction, and more! With new updates coming, you'll never run out of stuff to do!
Food Truck Simulator
Renovate, equip and restore the shine of the food truck that belonged to your father. Create recipes, cook the food and serve customers across an entire city. Customize and upgrade your food truck to reach more customers and expand your menu.
King of Retail
The store is your kingdom! Expand your humble boutique into a thriving business: hire the right staff, decorate your displays, and lure in customers. Even your wildest ideas can turn a profit. Why not start a business that sells only white T-shirts and ketchup? PCs and beans? Your rule, your rules!
Garden Simulator
PLANT - DESIGN - HARVEST - With Garden Simulator you’ll get your own allotment, place deco elements and cultivate plants to harvest and sell them. Get ready for a beautiful time in nature. Always remember: A garden is a delight to the eye and a solace for the soul.
MicroWorks
MicroWorks is a competitively lighthearted party game where you and up to 16 other players compete through a series of microgames and boss stages to reach the top of the scoreboard and unleash chaos!
One-armed cook
One-armed cook is a chaotic co-op cooking game for up to 4 people. Work as a team or cook on your own, set your own pace, and don't let the stress of a full restaurant catch up to you. The goofy physics-based aspect of the game gives this cooking game a new twist.
MergeCrafter
Welcome to the magical world of Runaria! Explore dungeons, chop trees, mine rocks, and discover hidden treasure! Merge identical items to create valuable resources, Craft new tools and upgrade them with powerful enchantments! Setup passive mining drills and tree farms to rebuild your camp!
Spirit of the Island
A beautiful Life Sim Sandbox RPG with Cross-Platform Online COOP set on a tropical Archipelago. Build your farm, grow crops and animals, craft various items, cook dishes, gather resources, build shops and museum to attract visitors, and turn a desolate Island into a prosperous tourist destination!
Stranded Deep
Take the role of a plane crash survivor stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Come face to face with some of the most life threatening scenarios that will result in a different experience each time you play. Scavenge. Discover. Survive.
Two Point Campus
Build the university of your dreams with Two Point Campus, the sim with a twist from the makers of Two Point Hospital. Build, hire staff and run an academic institution packed with wild courses.
Recipe for Disaster
Recipe for Disaster is a management sim that captures the fast-paced, drama-filled environment of a professional kitchen and dining room. Build your dream restaurant, create recipes, design menus and manage your staff, all while contending with demanding customers and disastrous situations!
Last Call BBS
Boot up your Z5 Powerlance and dial into Last Call BBS, the last game from Zachtronics! The Barkeep’s loaded up his retro computer with a full set of puzzle games for you to download and play. No need to worry about copy protection, they’re all fully cracked and ready to enjoy!
Star Valor
Choose your own destiny as you explore an open-world procedurally generated galaxy where anything is possible. Become a miner, a trader, a bounty hunter, a pirate, or perhaps a jack of all trades. Start off small and build your way to the top but remember with every action, comes consequences.
Retreat To Enen
Base building simulator 1500 years in the future. Journey to the Island of Enen to forage, craft, build, hunt, meditate, and explore across three vast biomes. Discover secrets and create the retreat of your dreams. With over 160 unique items to gather, craft, and build, every home will be unique.
Solace Crafting
Embark on an adventure set in a fantasy survival RPG. Visit a borderless, open world where you manage resources to construct your base and new types of equipment to support your conquest.
Autonauts vs Piratebots
Create, automate and defend an impenetrable base. Assemble and command a Bot army to combat an entire Piratebot invasion. Build, program and battle your way through five different zones.
Cartel Tycoon
Cartel Tycoon is a survival business sim inspired by the ‘80s and '90s narco trade. Expand and conquer, fight off rival thugs and evade the authorities. Earn people's loyalty and strive to overcome the doomed fate of a power-hungry drug lord.
Sapiens
Create your own prehistoric civilization and lead your tribe in a world you shape. Start with nothing, build towns and industry, and advance through thousands of years of technological breakthroughs in this intimate yet expansive colony sim.
Ctrl Alt Ego
Innovative genre mashup (first-person immersive sim puzzler FPS RPG) with emphasis on problem-solving and creativity. Unique vibes and original mechanics that you won't have experienced before. One of the best games of 2022 according to various credible sources!
Rock Life: The Rock Simulator
Built from the ground up, Rock Life is the next generation of immersion and simulations. Live, do, and experience what it is like to truly become one with nature... as a rock!
Realms of Magic
Embark on a journey through the Old Kingdom in Realms of Magic - a sandbox RPG where you customize your character, choose your path, and immerse yourself in the fantasy world as a knight, wizard, miner, lumberjack, farmer, and more. After all, this is YOUR adventure.
The Final Earth 2
The Final Earth 2 is a vertical sci-fi city builder. Earth is unlivable, so you decide to create a space colony. Gather resources, then build and research your way to a better future! Grow your city from an exploration ship to a huge metropolis, full of advanced technology. What will you build?