The moment has arrived to construct a historic Roman town next to an active volcano.

City-building can be an exhausting affair, once you’ve evolved beyond the initial joy of cottage windows lighting up at night, and start having to deal with things like traffic congestion and rubbish collectors going on strike. As such, it’s nice to play a city builder in which you can rest easy in the knowledge that any urban sprawl you engineer will soon be obliterated. It’s even nicer that said city builder is free.

Before The Ash is a hexagonal browser-based strategy sim created for the Godot Wild Jam 79 by Aviv Levy. Said game jam’s theme is “growing”. Another developer might have read the entry requirements and knocked out a game about watering daffodils or inflating kittens, but Levy’s thoughts gravitated instead to one of the most famous natural disasters in history. The city you are building in Before The Ash is Pompeii, the Roman burg that was destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Vesuvius is kind of your co-mayor in Before The Ash. It periodically spews flaming boulders that set terrain tiles alight, with blazes spreading until they encounter water. You can extinguish these with your mouse cursor to extract Faith from your populace, which is spent to acquire building cards. The deployment of said building cards, meanwhile, requires resources generated by existing buildings, such as stone and food.

The flaming boulders may also double as a means of clearing away structures you’d like to replace. After a few minutes of this, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without a neighbouring volcano. Still, there’s only so long you can cosy up to ole Mister Vesuv. It’ll eventually blow its top and annihilate the map. Your job is to rack up the highest score possible before it does.

If I were Pompeii’s ruler, and I had clear evidence of impending apocalypse, I would probably think about organising evacuations before I started making plans for new aqueducts. Still, I can’t deny that I enjoy the concept of collaborating with a volcano to tidy away some offensive fishing huts and gentrify the riverside. I’d love the developer to flesh out this idea some more. For a similar-but-different take on the idea of living with anti-social mountains, check out Laysara: Summit Kingdom.