You never just drop a brewery somewhere. No-no-no. Not at first, anyway. At first, you should take it for a walk.
Or rather, you should take it skating. I like to grab a brewery and sort of skim it over the landscape, like a skater describing dreamy arcs on the surface of a frozen pond. It’s capitalism – it’s potentially even empire-building – but at this stage it’s also speculative, a quiet thing of drooped eyelids and keen hearing. You are waiting for the land to speak to you. You are waiting for the land to tell you where the brewery should best be placed.
Ultimately, I like to think of these early stages of Islanders, a city-building game like no other, as if I am dowsing. But that thought journey seems important in itself. Walking, skating, listening, dowsing: this is one of those magical games that is broad enough to be absolutely about what it claims to be about – building civilisations on a series of lonely islands – but can also serve as an analogy for numerous other things. How best to store different teas in a cupboard. How to entertain fractious kids of a long holiday. How to formulate an argument with rigour and a certain kindness, a certain willingness to have your mind changed by something you subsequently learn. (Granted, I was having a pretty cosmic playthrough when this one occurred.) What could be nicer?
