Drawing nations onto the map
Doodle Empires is an alternate history sandbox where you draw your own nations and watch them change over time. You pick a border color, type a name, and draw the borders onto the map. Each nation has a limited amount of drawing power shown at the top, and once it runs out you open the nation inspector, select that nation, and draw a new card from the top right to keep altering it. The cards drive what happens next: expand cards grow a nation's borders in small, medium, or large steps, split cards carve a new nation out of an existing one, and the union card lets a selected nation fully annex another. Other cards let you create a new nation with its own origin group, swap in a new leader with different traits that affect how the nation expands, place and name a castle that protects the surrounding tiles, found or adopt a faith, diverge an origin from a nation, and shift the age of conquest, division, or unity to make certain cards more common over a period of time. Expanding into unclaimed land is much cheaper than taking land from another nation.
Playing together
The Steam features list includes Remote Play Together, so a group can join in through that. The store text lists Singleplayer among the tags, so the core experience is one person running the sandbox. Four map modes help you read what is going on: Political Mode shows all nation borders, Origin Mode shows which original nation each nation split off from, Faith Mode shows which tiles belong to which faith, and Fort Mode shows which tiles are protected by castles and therefore harder to expand into.
Before you start
Doodle Empires is in Early Access and still early in development. Planned additions include migrating tribes that eventually settle, disaster cards that cost nations land to the wilderness, and quality of life work such as map sizes, a list of dead nations, UI design, and music and sound. The developer, Tanner/TanTan, works on the project alone, and the list of future features is expected to change as development continues.