There's a little backstory to begin the game, but the gist is that you're in charge of helping a small group of shipwreck survivors survive. The first thing you're asked to do is to find your starting island. While it may seem okay to just pick one at random (out of over a billion possible choices, apparently -- see the screenshot above), choosing an island where the "landing zone" is close to important resources is key.

These resources are few in number. Your tribe requires food, gained by fishing; wood, gained by chopping down trees; and stone, gained by chipping away at boulders. (Sure, there's a little bit of Gilligan's Island going on with this set up, given the number of items you can make with just rocks and wood, but hey, it's a game.) Assigning one of your castaways (who, by the way, look like a cross between the denizens of Puzzle Pirates and Lego Minifigs) to one of these tasks is as simple as picking them up with your cursor/hand and dropping them on top of whichever resource you want harvested.

One of the interesting things about My Tribe is that your little people grow, for lack of a better term. Clicking on a person displays their picture in a side window of the interface, along with their name, their title, and what they're currently doing. At the bottom of that window is the Details button, which, when clicked, provides more stats about that particular person, including a series of fields with activity names assigned to them. This is basically an Experience system -- your people can essentially level up their stats by keeping at a task. So, for instance, if you set Colin to gathering wood, his title, or Skill, will show as "Trainee Wood Gatherer". The more you let him gather wood, the better he'll get at it, which means with each trip he'll bring back greater amounts of wood.

Speaking of gathering resources, your people's "camp" at first consists of three tarps with icons drawn on them, and a bonfire. The tarps are the dumping areas for the three resources, and it's to these tarps that your gatherers must travel, so it's a good idea to find a starting island that doesn't make your people travel too far. Building anything in My Tribe takes a long time, and you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot right off the bat.

Building is another interesting element of the game, and here's how it plays out: