4X

A Student Showcase nominee at the '08 Independent Games Festival, Mayhem Intergalatic is a fast-playing space conquest game. My first thought was "Risk clone," but it isn't actually; although combat seems to be per the Risk combat algorithm, there's no concept of adjacency (any ship can move anywhere on the map, though trips to distant stars can take multiple turns), there are no cards, and a fleet can only make one attack per turn.

What it really is, is "4X lite"; your only real actions are dispatching ships to target systems, and upgrading your shipyards. Basically, upgrading a system's shipyards increases the number of ships it produces each turn, but doing so forgoes one turn of production.

2003 Independent Games Festival Finalist

Here's how a typical game works: You spend 20 hours or more pounding through a series of pre-planned linear obstacles, very often hurling your controller across the room or banging on your desk in frustration as you meet a boss that seems well nigh impossible until you go read a walk-through... And when you are done, you are done, because you've finished, and why would you ever want to play it again?

Here's how Strange Adventures in Infinite Space works: You spend twenty minutes or less, you have a satisfying game experience, and there is never a moment of frustration... if you fail it doesn't really matter because you can always start another game. And when it's done, you find yourself saying "damn, it's over already? I want to play again."

Starships Unlimited 3 has all the usual tropes of the 4X genre--a galaxy to explore, a deep tech tree, diplomacy with alien races--but with a major difference. The emphasis is, as the name suggests, on your starships. They're highly customizable, and the construction system makes each one you (or your opponents) build considerably more expensive than the last, so that even the largest civilization rarely has more than a dozen in play. This actually works to the game's advantage, because the starships become your protagonists, each individually interesting, and the missions they embark on have something of the feel of Star Trek to them, rather than being another mundane task in the long and (often) tedious grind of a typical 4X game.

From Apezone, developers of the excellent games Starships Unlimited and Battleship Chess comes this new title--an interesting combination of the tropes of the "4X" genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and the mechanics of Risk.

Risk is, of course, a fine game, and has been the basis of some well-conceived computer games (notably Lux Delux); but it is so familiar a style as to be somewhat jejune. Starship Kingdoms adds a high degree of interest by incorporating technology development, putting production more directly under the players' control, and pitching the game as a struggle between two "major houses," with much of the galaxy controlled by neutrals who may join the weaker side in the mid-game.

Imagine playing Risk in real time, with new armies showing up continually and attacks occurring as fast as you and your opponents can order them. Or imagine a 4X space conquest game stripped down to the barebones essentials. With graphics that look like they come from a minimalist shmup. With games typically taking 5 minutes, and playable online against up to 11 other players...

Sounds wild? It is, and you've just imagined Galcon.

Cosmic Encounter!

Cosmic Encounter! For those of us who encountered the game in our youth, the words have something of the ring of "Oklahoma!" The ebullient American spirit! The vast vistas of, um, outer space. The late nights in dorm rooms or at science fiction conventions studying cards and back-stabbing allies... A brilliant game then, and in its Internet version, a brilliant game still.