The Political Machine 2020
I played a few rounds of this game, some multiplayer, some singleplayer. Overall, I really enjoyed this game for what it was worth. The game is charming, in a humorous way. I really enjoyed the ideology system, and how it influences and reshapes the race depending on candidates are in on the race. My friend and I made some custom candidates, did stupid matchups, and we had a lot of fun just pushing the ideologies to their limit. Some of the ideologies, like fascism or giant meteorism, just end up shooting you in the foot, and its amusing to see races devolve into stupid fights between two godawful candidates.
– Real player with 25.8 hrs in game
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This game needs a LOT of work, and with it now being over six months from launch I doubt that’s happening. It seems more time and resources were put into releasing the “Founding Fathers DLC” then going back and finishing their original broken product.
Perhaps the most glaring issue is that this product seems to have been made purely off some designers intuitive bias rather than any actual polling data. Universal healthcare and universal basic income are unpopular with “independents” but “Build the Wall” is. It also lists Trump’s intelligence as “smart” while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s intelligence as dim, despite placing second in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair while in High School, being bilingual, and graduating cum laude from Boston University with a bachelors in both international relations and economics. Meanwhile the geniuses that built the game have the same issue “farm subsidies” listed twice in the policy management tab, as well as a few spelling errors.
– Real player with 17.7 hrs in game
Gremlins, Inc.
I saw adverts of this game while it was still in beta stage. The peculiar character of the graphics made the whole intriguing but I suspended with the purchase till Gremlins, Inc. left pre-release state. Watched some gameplay videos but without sufficient knowledge of the rules I could only tell that the game has really strong influence on the players. In fact only the description of available achievements made me realize the depth of the Gremlins, Inc. and convinced me to add it to my Winter Sale basket.
– Real player with 3910.4 hrs in game
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This is a virtual board game with a strong focus on strategy in a non-deterministic setting, requiring probabilistic reasoning (think of poker).
The game is set in a steampunk society of (genderless) gremlins that see the purpose of their existance in grabbing power and profit by tricking and cheating each other. The design of the game material is in a hand-drawn cartoonesque style and visually appealing. Also the available music kits (to be won as prices in free-to-open chests) are a nice feature.
– Real player with 1076.9 hrs in game
Through the Ages
Through the Ages : 2nd edition is a fantastic port of a physical board game to the digital space. A hit board game created by Vladimír Chvátil (Vlaada Chvátil) in 2006. The rules have changed slightly from the original version mainly with tactics cards being shared.
Gamelay-wise, a turn-based action point game. Each turn, you start with a political phase where you play an aggression card, event card or war card. Then, you have your action phase, where you get to use your civil actions (white) to build civil units, draw cards and place leaders. With military actions (red), you get to build military units and play tactic cards.
– Real player with 710.8 hrs in game
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I’ve been holding off making a review for this game. Reason being, the developers had some server issues until recently. Something to do with the providers of the multiplatform system they used pulling out from supporting it. This happened at the same time they were upgrading compatibility from IPv5 from IPv6. With them being a small development team, this pulled all their resources to get stability back. For some months there was some frustrating server moments.
Now I won’t profess to understand exactly what was going on behind the scenes, BUT… they fixed it!! Through the Ages is now fully stable!!
– Real player with 489.1 hrs in game