A golf simulation game with a bit of Simcity/Sims formula, here players act as both a golf course designer and a golf resort manager. The game allows you to design your own golf courses, managing aspects like terrain, hazards, and amenities. Basically to create an interesting golf course and to keep your golfers happy. You’ve just inherited 100,000 simoleons! The only catch is, you’ve got to spend it building a golf resort empire. Thankfully you’ll love every minute of it, even if you don’t know the difference between a bunker and a ball washer.

The user interface is pretty similar to what was seen in The Sims, where you can select different modes that relate to the gameplay. Course design has its own selection, as do building and then the golfers themselves. At the start of the game you choose one of six pieces of real estate. (There are 16 total. Six choices are chosen at random with each new game.) Each piece has its own unique climate, features, and terrain.

Next you have to start building your resort. That means budgeting your money to build holes, add paths, bridges, and decorations, hire workers, and buy buildings and amenities. You’re managing a golf resort and the golf itself is only part of the equation. From the moment you open your first hole, little people, sims, will visit, play, and begin commenting on your handiwork. Open a few holes and soon you’ll be inundated with critique and with praise, especially if you’ve designed things well.

The main mechanic with the game is the course design, you have to create and design your own golf course using the tools that have been provided, whilst making up challenging yet enjoyable. You will need to keep the difficulty fair, as golfers will start to rage and quit if the hole is too difficult to complete. This can be a bit of a challenge, as golfers will dislike it when they get stuck in tough terrain, or if the ball rolls down the hill that they have to climb up. When designing a hole, you first place the tee and then the green (the place with the flag and the hole). Between them you can place bunkers, rough, sand, rocks, trees, and even water. Somewhere you’re going to want to lay the fairway (closely cropped grass that’s easy to hit from). There are two types of fairway with slightly different characteristics, and their locations determine how golfers approach each shot.

For example, you can place the tee low among the trees and the hole up on the other side of a hill (you control the terrain elevation as well), and lay a sand trap to the right and fairway to the left (this is called a dog leg left, by the way). Golfers can choose to power hit over the hill and onto the green, or they can play more conservatively and aim for the fairway to get there in two shots. Golfers are rated for accuracy, power, luck, skill at various shots, and imagination. Golfers better at certain skills will appreciate holes that cater to those skills, so, to keep everyone happy, you need a wide range of holes on your course.

Also golfers will try to take the most direct path to the end, which will mean they might end up shooting the ball within the tress if they are in the way which makes course design difficult since you cannot account for where the sims will shoot the ball. The game will try to help you by bringing up a while line to help guess where the sims will be tempted to shoot the ball, but this isn’t always accurate.

Staff can also be hired to help keep your golfers happy. These consist of a groundskeeper to help maintain your golf courses, Greeters who help keep golfers happy and engaged, drink vendors who will provide drinks to satisfy the thirst need and Marshals who will speed up play. There are two tiers of staff, which the more expensive tier having larger range that can cover more of a surface area.

In this way SimGolf captures the great and intangible design challenge inherent in golf: Nobody likes a hole that’s too easy, and nobody likes one that’s too hard. The easiest way to make sullen golfers happy is to let them succeed by making sure the next hole is a cakewalk. That way, when they nail a birdie on hole 6, their day is made. But on the next hole, if they hit the water trap three times in a row, their clubs will soon follow the ball into the drink and you’ll lose a customer. The challenge here is making courses that’ll make both Tiger Woods and the guy next door happy. You can mitigate this by improving on the scenery around the hole to bring up their happiness.

Golfers can also apply to become members, which help to increase your greens fees. They can upgrade their membership to silver and gold, which will allow them to purchase property and gives you an alternative revenue stream. Golfers can resign their membership if they are unhappy with the golf course as a whole.

There are various locations available to play within the game, many of these are set around the world and provide alternative terrain and building options that are suited to that location. Different locations can be purchased as you progress the game.

Building’s can also be brought and placed, some of which can help increase your golfers’ skills to help with the more difficult courses. The putting Green, Driving range and pro Shop will help your golfers improve their skills to play some of the longer or complex courses. A cart garage will help speed up movement between different holes.
There is also a café where golfers can purchase refreshments to keep them happy. Like The Sims, golfers will have motives that will deplete as they play the game, these will have to be replenished in order to keep them happy, otherwise they will get angry and leave. Hunger and thirst can be replenished with the café’s mentioned previously, whilst tiredness can be kept at bay by placing benches along the path to the next golf hole.

SimGolf is a pretty quirky game, and there’s a lot of little facets of charm from the golfers dialog, to the tine that plays when building the terrain. The only major downside to the game s the lack of speed control, unlike other Sims or SimCity games you cannot control the speed of the simulation, so you will need to wait until your sims complete. There’s a wide range of difficulty modes, and the game never really ends. You can always play a tournament on your finished courses, and once finished you can buy another plot and start a new course. Or you can take money out of the equation and use the Sandbox mode to create the course of your dreams or re-create the one next door. 

The game was never released digitally, so its not available on Steam GoG, or EA’s Origin Play.