Took a chance on this one since it had been out for almost four months and had no reviews, but looked really interesting.
The game IS actually very interesting, but I am refunding it because it's not quite ready for prime time AND it hasn't been updated since mid February so I'm afraid it's abandoned. If it's not abandoned, and continues to be worked on, I do plan to re-purchase it because I think it will be a fun and reliable little time-waster.
Play is turn based in the way that a game like Civ is turn-based. You start a turn by choosing what to do to your various tiles--your tiles are the ones that are showing, the top tiles on the cube. You can work the tiles, meaning you extract resources from them, or scout them for enemies, or improve them so that each turn will reap more resources. Resources at the beginning of the game seem to be food, gold, wood, and iron. If there are more resources later, I don't know. Could be?
You can also choose to build your army, build your population, or train someone, in addition to working and/or improving your tiles.
Additionally, you have a god or goddess that you have to keep happy--a little like in the old Pharaoh/Cleopatra game, in that if the god feels too neglected it will grow angry and do mean things to you. Here though, you can simply appease it with gold. I did not play long enough to find out what the other options were.
Finally, before you end your turn, you spin either the top, bottom, left, or right, section of the cube, which will give you a somewhat different batch of tiles to work with on your next round, and end your turn.
There are seasons and in winter you depend on water tiles for food--I guess everyone goes ice fishing?
So, with some additions and smoothing out of issues, it could be a fun little strategy game.
What I didn't like/Issues
Not an issue but the tutorial (hey, at least it had one!) required me to "press enter" a lot. I'm annoyed by games that make me use both keyboard and mouse. That's just me though: I realize that many people prefer to play kb+m even when they could use a controller. Not me. I'm a controller girl, all the way. Anyway, this tiny issue could be solved by changing "press enter" to "click here or press enter." Poof.
There was nothing in the tutorial to prepare me for whatever happened with my center square, the castle, but something was going wrong. I think it said "Improve relations," but it didn't tell me how to improve relations, nor with whom I should improve them. I clicked on it and it said something about prestige and after a couple of rounds of this the problem seemed to go away.
I did not have enough gold to keep my god happy, which, I think that just starting out a person should have enough, or access to enough, to get going at least. If they mismanage their funds later and their god gets mad, that's on them, but give them a fighting chance in the early game.
There were a few too many events and honestly my entire reign lasted like 3 years, if that. It could have been because the god was mad, I don't know, but... yeah. That was harsh. Also I got messages that my land was.... I forget the word; I don't think it was "contaminated," but it meant about the same thing, but it didn't give me any clue whether there was anything I could do about it, if it was permanent, etc.
When my reign ended, and I chose to exit the game, it did not exit gracefully, but instead apparently crashed with a new window with something about an error and I had to click "abort" to make it go away. So that needs fixing, obvs.
Again, this feels like it could become an interesting little game with some work. It would also, however, be easy to not add enough variety to it and wind up with a very repetitive game, and there's no way to know which way this one will go. But if it looks like it's going to be interesting, I definitely will re-purchase it, because I love little time-waster games like that, and wind up with hundreds of hours in them because I play them while I think about things, mull things over in my mind... and while I'm waiting for things like the dryer to finish or the oven timer to go off.
I'm giving it a thumbs up solely based on its potential at this point: I don't recommend you buy it UNLESS you want to help the dev. If the game had been updated recently I would not be seeking a refund for mine, so check to see if it's getting regular updates and if it is, then yes, I recommend it. If it's still stuck at last update in mid February, then no, I do not recommend it.
