![]() ![]() Stiffened and supported by the specialist troops from within the division, the battalions are the cutting edge of your force. Less preo… twitter.Welcome to ‘Hell in Microcosm.’ This set of rules has the battalion as the manoeuvre unit. It's less grounded, a little more far-fetched. Turns out, it's a sleepy pick-up-and-deliver game… /i/web/status/1… MildaGames Good question. Review: /2/alo… 1 day agoĪfter enjoying €uro Crisis, I was looking forward to Plutocracy. I was delighted to chat with PuppyShogun about My Father's Work from PlayRenegade, a game of inter-generational t… /i/web/status/1… 1 day agoĪloha Earth is a humorous but overly familiar party game. Conversely, taking a planet through Warfare turns it into a “spoil,” useful for points at the end of the game and completely untouchable - but never contributing its icons for future actions. Colonizing a planet makes its icons available for future use, but also means it’s vulnerable to being stolen via an opponent’s Warfare action. What makes this compelling is that Colonize and Warfare might seem similar at first, but both offer unique benefits. ![]() Research, for instance, can be done twice if you reveal enough lightbulb icons, while Warfare is only possible if you reveal enough attacks. In general, this process of revealing icons lets you improve most of your actions. The Colonize card lets you take those planets for yourself, and revealing certain icons, whether from your hand or your colonized worlds, lets you take better planets. Two of the main card types are Colonize and Warfare, both of which let you take control of the planets sitting in the center of the table. ![]() There are plenty of subtleties at play, but I’ll just give one example. In reality, this is an even trickier decision than the card selection. At its simplest, you can either play a card to take its action or pick up your discard pile to replenish your hand. What’s more, since every card provides both a new action and a means of picking up points at the end of the game, rewarding colonies or techs or spoils or whatever else, every single card pick is about more than just choosing the most immediately useful action. But since there are only 18 cards in total, and since most of them are the same three types, and since picking a card blind means your opponent is blind to what you’ve just acquired, this becomes an important (and often informed) choice that can limit your opponent’s knowledge of what you’re holding. Every turn opens with a player either selecting one of three face-up cards or gambling by picking blind from the top of the deck. By way of example, let’s take a look at those two rules. I recommend this video for anyone floundering with the rules.īut what makes Microcosm so impressive is that it’s simple without ever really becoming simplistic. ![]() Even the box’s rules sheet strives to reduce it too much, resulting in a hole-filled mess that almost kills Microcosm before it even gets a chance at life - a terrible oversight for a game that’s otherwise so easy to learn and play. Sure, it’s easy enough to reduce any game to a couple soundbites. It might be lean, but there’s still enough meat on its bones to get a stew on. Where too many microgames are so obsessed with being svelte that they end up burning all the calories that would have given them some flavor, this one understands that good gameplay arises from a healthy decision space. The thing that makes Microcosm stand out is that it doesn’t feel like your run-of-the-mill microgame. It takes two players maybe ten minutes to play (barring severe cases of overanalysis), requires only nine turns per player, operates under the most basic of rules, and it looks pretty nice too. This is a microgame in the truest sense of the word, everything packed into a card box so slim that you could feasibly lose it on that cluttered desk of yours. For fear of spending more time writing about Eminent Domain: Microcosm than it actually takes to play a game of Eminent Domain: Microcosm, I’ll stick to the basics. ![]()
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