Axes and Acres

Right now, Axes and Acres is half off for the Winter Sale, and I think that $4.99 is a fair price for what this is: a digital version of a typical European board-game. It's not an American board-game, so it plays more like "Settlers of Catan" than "Candyland." That means it's complicated at first, though it's very easy to learn if you watch TomChick's video of him playing it. For what it is, it had the potential to be a great game: you build up your little hamlet from scratch each game, building houses, farms, guardhouses, town halls and so forth, and your peasants farm, chop trees, mine stone and reproduce, a game mechanic that requires two pawns instead of one for some inexplicable reason. (Because your pawns aren't people, they are tiny dice-shaped figurines, so maybe they have one gender, or six. I don't know.) Anyway, the game is a lot of fun when you're playing it. You only have so many dice each turn and only so much food, so you have to decide whether to build or farm and so forth. Each game has random goals, such as "Build 5 roads" or "Kill 3 barbarians" and you have to work towards those goals in a set amount of turns. And here is where the game goes from being great to being a near miss. For some inexplicable reason, the game designers decided that foisting a super-complicated European-style digital board-game that has no real-world board game equivalent to it on an unsuspecting American teenage Steam populace would make these people go "Oh, this is too complicated! Make it harder!" and so they decided that every time you win, the game would keep track, for every victory you would gain a Level, and the game would roughly subtract one turn for each victory. So, if you are given 25 turns to win at Level 1, you only get 24 turns at Level 2, and 23 turns at Level 3. Now if you're great you may get to Level 50, if you're terrible you may get to Level 4, but at some point, every single person who plays will reach a maximum level where they can't go any higher, and so for them the game becomes an exercise in futility. If you lose two games in a row, you lose a Level and gain back a turn, so you might rise to Level 50, lose 10 games and end up at Level 45. I don't see this as a good thing, as you gain nothing. In various rogue-like and tower-defense games, you have a meta-game, where even if you lose terribly each game, you are still gaining gold, cards, skills or whatever, and so there is compensation for the game getting tougher. "Solar Settlers" by the same company is a good example: you get cards permanently every time you play, and thus the entire game makes more sense and is always fun to play. So, I do recommend this game on sale. It's worth playing for the 10 or 20 hours you'll get out of it before you find it frustrating and futile.

[h1] Appears to be some sort of board game. I have no idea how to play it though. [/h1]

玩法非常新颖的一款游戏，集建造、策略、掷骰于一体，上手与其说是难不如说是信息量冗杂，需要大概一个小时梳理入脑才能掌握游戏玩法，可以说是这个游戏最好玩的一个小时。这游戏致命的缺点就是要素过少，内核很空，唯一延长游戏寿命的方法就是逐步缩短过关步数，仅此而已，重复度极高。所以简而言之就是值得一玩，不值得一直玩。

This is a lightweight strategy game. It's not for building up a town; it's for completing objectives in a set number of turns. Despite this limitation, it is a fun entry to its specific niche. The main drawback: There's no difficulty adjuster. If you win at a level, it increases the difficulty. If you loose twice in a row, it decreases. There's no sandbox mode, either. You will always have to play the same game mode, so there's not much room for exploration.

This is a great game to pop in and play for an hour or so. Pretty simple to learn, but the changing objectives each game, along with the automatically changing difficulty level keeps things fresh and challenging. Balancing how to use your dice to meet objectives and keeping enough resources on hand is a fun way to exercise the ol' brain.

i dont know why this game is so addictive. but you we will get hooked . fast enough and deep enough to keep me going for ages, huge replay ability

I wanted to like this game. I really did. But there are some major fundamental problems with how it's played that make it not fun for me. 1. There's supposedly an "undo" with right-click, but more than half the types of actions, primarily the ones where you realllllllly want an undo if you do one by accident, the undo simply doesn't work at all. The game is open-knowledge. Nothing is random except between phases. There is no reason any action shouldn't be able to be undone unless it reveals random information, and really the game should have a complete undo "stack" where you can undo back to the beginning of a turn. 2. When you abandon or fail, it (sometimes?!?) decreases the difficulty ("rank"). There is no way to turn this off. You can manually set the value, but only to 5 or 10, not to anything else. Since a "bad" starting position makes the game basically unwinnable at higher ranks, the fact that you can't retry on a new map and have to replay an earlier difficulty sucks. There are some other, less fatal issues as well, such as the "help" being insufficient and you having to basically guess what some things do until you try them, but the two above issues made me stop playing and uninstall the game.

I am the #1 ranked player in the world. This is a small and perfect game. I love it. It has both strategic depth and randomness, and the trial and error each time is a great experience.

I love this game and Militia 2 too. This two are pure tactics and strategy, without any distraction. And much less time consuming, than classic tactical or strategic turn based games.

A really nice 4X style computer-boardgame. Is does the "difficult decisions" bit of a boardgame well, as well as being a very well defined space. It's not so good a computer game, however, as it's a bit janky and it isn't all that compelling to play, outside of the solitaire boardgame aspect. The game design is sound, but the biggest problems are in the UI: 1. The learning videos don't match the current game 2. The tutorial is pretty buggy, though the main tutorial and the in-game prompts do a good job of explaining everything. You don't need to watch the official video or Tom Chick's one any more, though they might add some context. 3. Undo is really weird / often doesn't undo what you expect. It's also bound to RMB which is odd. I'd like the entire game to just be one giant undo stack so we can undo right to start if we want (with perhaps a penalty to league table). 4. The controls are not intuitive. I was continually getting muddled up, e.g. I want to activate a dice but I'd end up placing one. They should invert the system, so rather than the current system of selecting a dice from the rolled pool and then "contextually" using it somewhere I'd prefer to just point at the place I want to use it, and then select the dice to consume. Some parts of the game already work in that fashion, e.g. reproduction. The smartest part of the game design is the guidance goals along the top. They really shake the game up each time and give you different things to prioritise.