At the beginning of the game, there are a small number of buildings available for you to build, reckoned in terms of available resources and worker hours. You can build dwellings that let your people sleep and mate (more on this later), resource depots that let you accumulate a greater number of items, and most important of all, the Science Lab.

Building the Science Lab takes quite a bit of resources and time, but it's the only way to truly advance your fledgling society. Once built, it offers a number of technologies to research, such as Agriculture, Art, and Construction. Completing research in any of these fields (among others) gives you new buildings to create, with their concomitant benefits. Research is conducted by putting one of your people on the Science Lab, just like any other resource. This will start to build up Science Points, which you use to purchase new technologies.

All of these elements add up to some fun, if slightly slow gameplay. You do have the option to raise the speed of the sim, but even at its highest level, things aren't quite fast enough, leaving you with little to do other than to watch your people go about their chores. If this were all there was to the game, it wouldn't be quite enough to be interesting, but fortunately there are other things at play.

First, you can drop a female or male on top of another member of the opposite sex, and they'll go into one of your dwellings, close the door, and emerge a few seconds later with a new baby. This baby is its own entity and spends its time toddling around the island with no supervision and no attention from its parents. Presumably it will grow up at some point and become a useful member of society, but it's kind of strange until that point.

Something else to consider is the arrival of Stardust and Moondust. These special resources fall from the sky and land somewhere on your island. You collect them by dropping a person on them. These items act as a sort of magical random happenstance tool. You use them by clicking on either Stardust or Moondust icon in the interface, then clicking on the thing you want to affect. If you use them on a building-in-progress, for example, your building will gain a lot of construction points, making it get that much nearer to completion without the intervening time. You can experiment dropping Dust on any number of things, and get different effects depending on what you drop it on, even people.

There are also Mysterious Objects scattered around your island, and figuring out what they are will take your tribe working in unison to effect. You can create potions with the smaller items you discover around the island, like mushrooms, flowers, etc. Eventually, you'll plant more trees, collect trophies for achievements, and travel to other islands. My Tribe is a game that definitely rewards those of us who revel in that sense of completion that only comes with putting in the time. You can grab the Mac and PC demos right here on Big Download.