Thursday Review: Endless Space (+ Disharmony)

Endless Space is a turn-based strategy game of space conquest. It’s somewhat interesting; I tend to like games with a lot of crunch, and it delivers both on high crunch and a high degree of abstraction. Endless Space delivers just enough intellectual stimulation to provide an engaging experience and provide a game that can be mastered, rather than just played. However, more importantly, Endless Space is also a game that is not particularly intimidating, falling somewhere more in the Civilization area of difficulty despite having a more emergent experience than most of the entries in that venerable series have.

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Thursday Review: 13th Age

13th Age isn’t super innovative. Let’s get that out of the way ahead of time. In terms of mechanics, there’s nothing that hasn’t been seen before. The setting is good, but not really anything that we haven’t seen. Where 13th Age succeeds, however, is in its balance of elements. 13th Age is the sort of thing that I love; it takes a game and tears it down to its basics, then reconstructs it. I’m not sure that the d20 system was the best place to apply that, but it’s certainly an interesting take.
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Thursday Review: Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is a traditional western RPG, in so much as such a thing can be said to exist, that actually provides a satisfying experience through the lens of a substandard execution. It is set in the same universe as the television show, books, and later strategy game that have been so dramatically successful, and in this respect it provides a pretty good game, but it fails on the things that make it up.

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