House of Reeds is another world building game that I like. It’s a smaller scale; you create a place, like a house, and tell the history of the generations who live there.
Also, the previous 200 Word RPG collection has a surprising number of world building games for places, cosmologies, events and artifact.
I think all the games that fall under the “Belonging Outside Belonging” umbrella would fit the bill, including:
In these GM-less games, everyone plays two roles: an individual character, and a faction, force in play, or community aspect. The details of the world and communities are created as you play.
There was also, just recently, a map-making game game-jam on Itch.io, but I can’t find the link.
Recently, I wrote a post on my blog about how I do collaborative worldbuilding in the RPGs that I run. It’s not a standalone game, but I think it may be tangentially relevant to this discussion.
This is also not a game per se BUT it is my favorite worldbuilding tool. Further Afield for Beyond the Wall and Other Adventures This book is really an EXCELLENT worldbuilding tool for any OSR or trad style rpg. The idea is players decide a possible Truth like in Yochaigal’s example but for a specific location. Then, the player rolls against whatever skill / attribute allowed them to learn this.
E.g. in a typical OSR game, where the player says they learned the truth through persuading a local, then you would roll against Charisma. If the roll is well below the Charisma score (like 5+ below), the truth is confirmed as is.
If the player passes but just barely, then the general point is correct but something is not quite right with the info. Perhaps, the player says there are castle ruins full of kobalds and magical items in Hex 2 but really the castle ruins are full of lizard men instead or only when the PCs get to where they though the castle ruins lie, do they finally see the castle ruins in the distance.
Continuing the same example, if the player barely fails (by less than 5 or so), then the player is seriously wrong or the info is seriously out of date about a major detail but otherwise correct. Like the castle ruins are in Hex 2 but the ruins are now partly flooded and contains kua toa and magic items instead.
Then, a major fail means only 1 point is correct. Like the castle ruins were already ransacked for the magic items. Now there is just a bit of gold, the ruins are unstable, and trolls have been spotted nearby.
Eden by Marc Hobbs has players drawing a garden of eden populated by talking animals who teach lessons to the humans (both roles played by the players).
We’ve had some good worldbuilding sessions using Everest Pipkin’s The Ground Itself - you play over a huge range of timescales, so it’s sort of about building a history into a place, changing it over time and seeing what remains and what gets remembered