Crown and Council

Like Risk, but with a more interesting and varied design. There are only a few options for what you can do each turn with your gold, but learning to use them to their best advantage will take a little time. There's also a certain amount of luck in the game; a better strategy will help you to prevail against an equally-lucky or slightly-luckier AI, but at certain key points bad luck can just overwhelm you. At the price, this is a good game. A few more complicating elements might have been enough to lift it to being a great one, but it meets its limited ambitions admirably.

This game is absolutely fantastic, until it isn't. Bad news first. The game makes no attempt to grab your attention. There's little penalty for failure, which made me remarkably apathetic about a map's outcome. The skill ceiling is low and quickly reached, so no satisfaction in overcoming a challenge. There's not a lot to discover; any new elements that come into play usually don't have enough impact to make much of a difference, and you rarely need to change your tactics because of the map. There's no story to reach the end of. The art suffers from a serious case of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V, so no eye candy incentive. The RNG influence made me feel like I wasn't too involved (a particularly bad example was an aquatic map I had to play, made almost entirely of island territories. Due to the limited income and the expense needed for fleets, I had only one attack per turn until I was the dominant player. If the game decided a territory wanted to rebel, too bad for me; I justed wasted a turn, nothing I could do about it). The music, while not unpleasent, is repeditive, unimaginative, and forgetable. I'm not saying these are all problems. Rather, it's them in combination. There's a lack of something interesting, something motivating, or just SOMETHING. All that said, this is a wonderful timewaster. I was able to get into a game literally within seconds of booting up. Within a few minutes, I was devising basic strategies. Everything is intuitive; what needs labels has labels, what doesn't, doesn't. The AI is smart, yet fallible. For instance, a very simple system that makes AI more likely to attack you if you attack them also leads to them ganging up on the most aggressive player. And since the most aggresive player tends to be in first place, the AI prioritizes very well. If the game needs to explicitly explain something to you, it can do so in a brief sentence before each map. There's also plenty of room for experimentation during gameplay; a defensive strategy tends work, until someone finds (or makes) a hole in your plan. And since the AI tends to concentrate on strong players, there's plenty of wiggle room to go from 4th place to 1st. The difficulty scales perfectly, with advanced mechanics and strategies possible in early levels but not required, all without obstructive UIs or crypticly secret mechanics. There's a lot more, but since the game is free, you should play it yourself. You'll enjoy the surprise. There's a few minor, quality-of-life things that need addressing. The apparent lack of fullscreen support leaves me with a box-shaped window with minor clipping at the bottom edge. It doesn't cut off anything, but it's still annoying. While I like how the tip about keyboard shortcuts comes up after you're familiar with the basics, I'm a bit dissapointed some very basic controls are hidden there. Until I learned of the menu about an hour into play, I was closing and relaunching the game to restart the map. In short, the game is a skeleton. It's well put together, but there's no meat on those bones. What type of meat doesn't matter, it just needs some good meat. As is, you'll probably find it fun in short bursts, but not engaging enough to keep your attention to completion.