• Price: $7.99 USD
• Developer: Studio Primitive
• Publisher: Flynn’s Arcade
• Release Date: September 24, 2026

A review code was kindly provided by Flynn’s Arcade on behalf of Studio Primitive. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

From the developer behind Attack of the Karens, Boardwalk Builders allows players to build and manage a boardwalk! Attract visitors to your boardwalk with amazing rides, restaurants, and shops. If you use the right marketing strategies, you can make a lot more money to pay for the construction of additional facilities.

You start off with a small section of empty boardwalk, and your job is to start building there. The game offers a tutorial, which I’d recommend taking advantage of so that you understand all the mechanics. This isn’t super complicated, but there are a few things that you might want explained.

There are only a few shop options available in the beginning. You can unlock additional attractions using “Fame Points,” which are mainly earned by combining buildings. I don’t recall combining facilities in any of the simulation games I’ve played before, so that’s kind of neat!

Besides earning you Fame Points, combined buildings earn more money – although they also cost more money to maintain. The building you select first determines the results of the combination. It’s fun to experiment with the different combinations, but sadly most combinations consist of each shop + any (of the same tier). I thought it would have been more interesting to have more specific combinations.

Building and combining become more and more expensive as you go along. Towards the end some facilities cost close to 4 million to combine! 😱 You can only combine buildings of the same tier (meaning it’s been upgraded the same number of times). Some combinations won’t work until you’ve unlocked the recipe by inviting VIPs. I liked being able to check which combination recipes I’d already unlocked.

You’re not allowed to have more than one of each building on the boardwalk at a time, which I suppose makes sense. However, I did wish we could place buildings on opposite sides of the boardwalk with space in between them; instead, you can only place them at the top. (Or blocking the ones at the top.) I think it would have been fun to have bonuses for having certain shops next to each other as well.

Once you’ve built the attractions on your boardwalk it’s important to manage them well so they’ll be profitable. You can reduce the number of employees and change the quality of the goods/services offered at each location; lower quality goods reduces the price and service time.

I thought this was an interesting feature, and it was unexpected yet cool to see how the appearance of the goods changed when moving the slider controls to either side (i.e. pizza with no toppings versus more, more or less details on shirts, etc.). You also have to manage the conditions of each building, making sure that maintenance workers come and fix them when their conditions have deteriorated.

Weather conditions must be taken into account as well; foggy or rainy days result in a decrease in visitors. If you want to increase visitors there are a variety of strategies you can use. For example, you can pay for media campaigns, with different kinds of advertising over a time period of your choosing.

You can also use Fame Points to unlock the VIP Outreach Center, and once you fulfill the conditions for each VIP you can pay them to visit the boardwalk, which increases the visitor rate in addition to unlocking new building recipes. And if you meet the conditions for holding a festival, customers may pay a lot more money during the event.

It seems like there are a decent amount of things to manage in this game. I liked the amount of unlockables. My biggest issues were that sometimes I felt like the game didn’t require much active participation on my part, and I wanted decor (benches, banners, flowers, etc.) to enhance the environment around each building.

That being said, there are some nice details such as the ride animations, and the planes, seagulls, and paragliders in the sky in the background. The graphics are charming, and the music is pleasant enough and suits the theme well. I also appreciated being able to speed up the game by up to 3x.

Boardwalk Builders could use a little more customization for my tastes, but overall I still had fun with it. Unlocking everything will probably take you close to 10 hours (or more if you play at a slower speed), and I think the game is reasonably priced.