other games I've played lately

[quarrel]

Utopia Engine. A solitaire board game about locating and assembling an ancient artifact to prevent doomsday. It features several variations on the general mechanic of rolling dice two at a time to fill in multi-digit numbers piecemeal, then getting either good or bad outcomes based on how high or low the difference is.

Seven Grand Steps demo. An indie video board game (which is a real term as of right now) about advancing a family line through civilization. At its core, you have a single or two married adult pawns on a constantly-advancing track. You must spend tokens to move forward and stay ahead of death. If you move wisely, you collect tokens that advance civilization and grant powerful bonuses. The complications are twofold: your only way of getting more tokens moves you backward, and you need to ration your tokens between advancing the parents and training the children so they survive to adulthood and carry on the family line. Every now and then, you break for a choose-your-own-ending-style episode where you answer a single roleplaying question to determine a piece of family history and, perhaps, gain some mechanical benefit as well.

Gratuitous Space Battles demo. It’s a spaceship construction and combat simulator. There is no campaign and no storyline — in fact, it bills those as selling points. The main conceit is that you only prepare for the fight. You design your ships, arrange your fleet, and set some preferred behavior for each ship’s AI, but the battle itself is fully automated. Ultimately I found the game too shallow to be worth buying. There isn’t enough qualitative difference between different weapons or equipment. There are no complexities like firing arcs. Neither maneuverability nor orders matter much since the AI generally just drives your ships straight toward the enemy’s until one’s in range, then stops and shoots until it’s dead and repeats the process with the next one.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Another capital ship space combat game, though this one does have a story to it and a bit of an RPG progression aspect. I did buy the whole game. It’s…unexceptional. There’s a bit of a fleet feel to the fights, but the game gives you very little clue what each battle will be against, so equipping your fleet properly requires going in blind, probably failing, then retrying the mission from the beginning once you know what to expect. Ship reconfiguring itself is cumbersome as well, as you cannot undo single changes and you cannot rearrange components once you put them on a ship.

Androminion. A free, open-source implementation of the Dominion card game for Android devices. It supports one human player against up to five AIs. The UI is spartan but everything important is there. I’ve been spending a lot of time with this one, trying out various strategies to see whether they work and, if not, why not and what beats them. (Answer: Big Money.) It’s unlicensed and will eventually cease-and-desist, so if you want it, get it now.

Card Hunter. A web-based free-to-play tactical game that’s still in invite-only beta. Imagine a D&D tactical board game crossed with RoboRally. You control a small fantasy RPG team delving dungeons. Each can perform only five actions per round, determined randomly based on their equipment. It’s challenging, interesting, quite polished, and they’ve given the art a strong nostalgic bend based on oldschool Basic D&D modules. If they can avoid making the PvP part of it pay-to-win, this’ll be a good one.

System Shock 2. A classic title from 1999. I played it in pirated form years ago but never finished. Now that it’s on Steam, I decided to play it “for real”.