The ten most beautiful towns in Acadia

Acadia has 79 towns, 553 residents and 7,413 chunks between them. This is our attempt to rank ten of them on looks alone.

The criteria, stated up front so you can argue with them: how much town there is, how many builds and how good they are, how much of it is still going up — and personal bias, which we are not going to pretend is absent. Counting down from ten.

10. Newport — 137 chunks, 7 residents, mayor morezucchini. A New England town built almost entirely around cherry blossom. Lanterns on stone posts, timber shopfronts, and a cobbled square with a tree the size of a building growing out of the middle of it. Newport is small and picked one idea to commit to. At sunset it is one of the prettiest places in the nation.

9. Avelin — 74 chunks, 1 resident, mayor Smurfv_. Acadia's northern frontier and the newest name on this list. One resident, and already a proper boulevard: red-and-white townhouses with carved cornices, street trees down both sides, lamps between them. Smurfv_ was one of the five entrants in Montreal's Citywide Build Battle in July, and it shows. Avelin is here on what is coming as much as on what is standing.

8. Manitouana — 80 chunks, 2 residents, mayor taeljesin. Most of Manitouana is underground, and that is the whole point. A cavern hollowed out and lit end to end with hanging lanterns, chains dropping from the stone ceiling, water pooled at the bottom and a beacon running the full height of it. Building this way is far more work than building on grass — you have to dig out the sky before you can build under it.

7. Charlottetown and St. John's Island — 326 chunks, 19 residents across four towns. Charlottetown (168 chunks) anchors an island it shares with Saint Peter, Malpeque and Saint Paul, and the four of them are close enough that the app tracks them as one card. The builds are large and civic — white stone, flag rows, wide approaches — and the island reads as one place rather than four towns that happened to land near each other.

6. Cadeau — 371 chunks, 9 residents, mayor IronicDays. The second-largest town in Acadia by land, behind only Montreal, and the fastest-improving thing on this list. Formerly Keystone, renamed in August. What stands out is placement: brick and plaster blocks along the water, a flag row, a tricolour beacon over the square. Every building looks like it is where it is for a reason rather than wherever there was room.

5. The Canseau metro — 630 chunks, 31 residents across three towns. Canseau itself is small and dense — 133 chunks of halls and arches around a monument square, mayor Ahea, who holds the Acadia nation. What lifts it is the company it keeps: Havaiki (251 chunks, mayor FieryMatter) next door, and Capstick (246 chunks, mayor Deids) away to the north. Together the three are the third-largest built-up area in the nation, behind Montreal and Micoua. Canseau is also the most-visited ground in Acadia, because every player who has business with the government ends up there: Bergenline is Prime Minister, Katie is President.

Capstick is the bigger half of that number and the part of it most readers will never have stood in. At 246 chunks it is very nearly the size of Havaiki and almost twice Canseau proper, and it looks like neither: a wide green square ringed by buildings that agree on nothing — a pale stone tower at one end, a dark arch hung with blue banners, timber shopfronts and a painted shop sign, a white colonnaded hall on the far side — with a beacon going straight up out of the middle of it. Deids has built a town that reads as a collection rather than a scheme, and at that size a collection is the harder thing to pull off.

One correction, and it is ours: Capstick is not actually connected to Canseau. We had it down as a remote link while the list was being compiled, and found out otherwise too late to redraw the ranking. It stays inside the metro for this piece — the 630 includes it — but it is its own place, 246 chunks of it, and we will rank it as one next time.

4. Saint John — 239 chunks, 12 residents, mayor NetherMite13. The classicist of the group. Brick and stone terraces face each other across the water with a beacon down the middle of the reflection, and a colonnaded portico closes the far end of the view. Nothing in Saint John is trying to be futuristic or clever — it is a proud, old-fashioned town, built well, and it holds up against places three times its size.

3. Augusta — 284 chunks, 19 residents, mayor mikesworldus. Formerly Brunswick, renamed in August, and one of the few towns here with real streets rather than a collection of good buildings: brick five-storey blocks with balconies and shopfronts, a cherry avenue that runs straight into the sunset, lamps the whole length of it. Augusta also holds Acadia's first art museum — a long hall under a glass roof with framed paintings down both walls and a staircase at the end. It is the single best interior in the nation.

2. The Micoua metro — 850 chunks, 51 residents across four towns. Micoua (232 chunks), Stormhaven (310), Thunderdome (112) and Quail (196) sit close enough together to be read as one built-up area, and that area is nineteen chunks short of the Montreal metro. It does not look like Montreal at all: a green pergola on stone piers stretching out over open water, a globe suspended under it, shops and cherry trees around a square, watchtowers and lantern-lit decks at the waterline. Four mayors, one built-up area, and the closest thing Acadia has to a second city.

1. The Montreal metro — 869 chunks, 108 residents across four towns. Yes, this is the paper's home town. We said bias was in the criteria.

Montreal proper is 758 chunks and 101 residents, which makes it the largest town in Acadia by land and by population by a distance — 758 chunks to Cadeau's 371, 101 residents to Fennurthern's 95. Around it sit Sorel-Tracy (70 chunks, mayor GOATfromNEPAL), Axolotl_Paradise (30, mayor toutef) and Vaudreuil (11), all inside about twenty-five chunks of Montreal's homeblock, and together the four come to 869 — nineteen ahead of Micoua's.

None of which is why it wins. Montreal is the only place in the nation with an actual skyline: glass towers and apartment blocks stacked along a central river, a green-tiled tower rising between beacon columns, a cathedral-scale civic building on the far bank, cafés and shops at street level, and cherry blossom filling in every gap between them. There is more to look at here than anywhere else on the server, and that is what takes it.

Honourable mentions. Five that missed the ten, and the reasons they are worth your time anyway.

Fredericton — 96 chunks, 11 residents, mayor Jordin4057. Red brick, a copper roofline, glass at street level — and a mall inside it that is the reason the town is on this page at all.

Sterling — 148 chunks, 6 residents, mayor 404aka. Barely started and already reads as a real modern city: asphalt roads, painted lane markings, dark-glass mid-rises. Give it a month.

Burlington — 66 chunks, 2 residents, mayor KellyIsANiceLady. The most build per chunk anywhere in Acadia — a lantern-lit street cut into a hillside, sixty-six chunks doing the work of two hundred. It is also where the nation's first wedding was held.

Halifax — 217 chunks, 10 residents, mayor Farosh_. The tenth-largest town in the nation and, from what we could see of it, one of the best-looking: stone terraces stepping down a street, flower beds, open sky at the end of it. We say from what we could see of it because the town spawn is locked, so the only photograph we came away with is the view out of a doorway. Someone let us in.

Fennurthern — 175 chunks, mayor Micro_Slop. 95 residents, second only to Montreal in all of Acadia, which is remarkable for a town most people have never walked through. Right now it is mostly one thing: a fort built out on top of a lake, with an oculus open to the sky above a stone hall. It is a good fort. With ninety-five people behind it, it could be a great deal more.

Disagree, and you will, in the Discord: https://discord.gg/XwGmYPcUPH

— The Montreal Morning