Recent reviews by gnatbuoy

- it's another programming puzzler
- though there's a spatial element to it, e.g. position of boards, there are no puzzles built around that. Most of your decisions will be how to achieve solutions with sets of boards. The space itself serves a general upper bound on the number of boards you can use.
- in the chronology of Zach games, this one had more personality than the others before it (subjective)
- puzzles are not "tight" similar to TIS-100 but rather how can you efficiently achieve solutions to which, you find self-imposed constraints that make the puzzles feel "tight".
- there are sometimes animations of the device you're implementing. No impact to the puzzles but very fun eye candy.
- Solitaire is addicting, I don't know why.

Anecdotal:
- My favorite part of this game is the personality, feeling like a newcomer to a country and company and learning about the culture of both.
- My 2014 Macbook Pro 13" huffs and puffs like crazy for some reason playing this.

Simple mechanics that surprisingly builds a challenging puzzle and complements a user-driven narrative. 'Elegant' would be the best one-word description.

Nothing as satisfying at making your long-range, no-scope (literally), trick-shots. Go ahead, blow out your finger pistols after.

Through the Ages (TtA) remains the gold standard for a digital board game implementation:
- no-fuss UI
- good AI
- efficient "digital" mode to streamline multiplayer games

TtA is essentially a card game. Players take turns playing cards or taking from the card row to build their civilization engine where the most culture points win.
In the physical game, there's lots of bookkeeping. Some wonders and leaders have out-of-turn effects. Also it's very fiddly because tracking values is tracked by little cubes. But that's why it is a great candidate for a digital version.
With complex games like TtA, I believe a UI should be able to present me with an overall game state to evaluate. I don't want to click to see each's player's tableau. This is true for TtA but not immediately. You only see your civ and have to click to see other civs but you can easily choose to expand a tabular view to get an overview of everybody's state. Some people value UI's with animations and other creative expression. That's not for me.
The AI is actually difficult and challenging. They also emphasize that it doesn't cheat. Couldn't ask for more given the complexity of the game.
Lastly, there are modifications, should one choose, to some rules that allow for better streamlined, online play. The best example is colony bidding: traditionally it is an auction in rounds giving everyone a chance to bid. In the digital version, the bidding is just one blind round.

I highly suggest players check out this game. It's fun, it's challenging, and it's polished.

One of the most beautiful games ever made but suffers from a toxic community. It's a fantastic combination of clever basebuilding mixed with classic FPS action. However, the community somehow interprets the brutality of game's survival aspects to also include racial slurs, etc. etc. etc.

I will give it a recommendation if you can stomach the community. I couldn't.

Me: "This road looks a little crooked. Let me just straighten it out..."
10 hours later...
Me: "The Southern highway cloverstack interchange is feeding into the downtown district too heavily on late afternoons when the shipments from the farming and mining districts make their trips to the harbor. I can invoke 'Heavy Traffic Ban' but I have other no other routes, only forcing the industries out of my city. However, I can demolish the elementary school...."

I love this game for the following reason:
You set up for 10 minutes the ultimate jump assassination where you soar from a Church bell tower, land on your victim, and deliver that final blow. Then it jumps to a cutscene where the victim is very much alive and you whisper some Latin in his ear and gently lay him down, I stark contrast to they gruesome aerobics you've just witnessed earlier.

Recommended +. Throne of Lies (ToL) is the digital evolution of Mafia/Werewolf games and really shines with emergent "strategies" that are engaging and hilarious.

When I was introduced to Mafia games in college, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hated them. I always got villager so I felt like I had little skin in the game. Fast forward many years later when I saw this game play on Twitch (from you-know-who), it looked really funny and I gave it a try.

It'll take several playthroughs for you to get the hang of all the classes. At first, you'll constantly be referencing the class list while your peers feel like they can read your mind. I would say this period was about 15 games. Then things get interesting.

ToL is a social deduction game so where does the deducing come in if everyone is playing over the internet and not in-person? There's 2 sources of information in ToL: logs and results of your class's actions. Log are records of your activities that you must keep! Other players may request them or you can provide them as proof of your identity. Discrepancies will lead to suspicious. Having no logs at all leads to similar conclusions. Your class may have day and/or night actions that provide some sort of feedback. You may be able to kill another person, jail another person (for interrogation or protection), heal, investigate (determine their class), and many others.

The log makes the game more of a logical deduction exercise than Werewolf/Mafia where it's purely based on bluffing. Everyone gets a class so everybody feels like they have a motive. And with all the classes, there are many ways to play and not everything is obvious.

The best moments in ToL are when social interactions change the tide of the game. A neutral class, one not belonging to the 2 competing factions each game, strikes up a deal with one side only to betray them at the end. Or a bad guy poses as one of the good only to reveal later, when it's too late, his true alignment. Or (the best in my opinion), the fool gets himself killed.

The community is passionate and really love the game. This can sometimes result in a tendency for people to "report" another player for what may really just be poor play due to being new to the game or simply just an oversight. I would say that this occurs very rarely. Also the game has very active and devoted devs who review such "reviews" and will subsequently dismiss any reports that could be explain by simple mistakes or being "a noob". So don't worry about being banned after your first game.

Another comment regarding the development is that ToL is actively patched and reworked. That's why I love the emergent gameplay because classes are mostly balanced and trending, hot "metas" (strategies that the community adopt in mass) soon stale and people must fullback on pure deduction.

Games are ~30 minutes in duration. ToL is fairly priced and a great mental circus.