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Bjorn

Morphblade

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This game hardly seems big enough to justify a thread, but I've been playing a few rounds of it each of the last few evenings and I'm simultaneously digging the hell out of it, but also super frustrated.  See it here if you don't know what it is.

 

It apparently draws heavily from Imbroglio, which I've never played because the last I knew it didn't have an Android release.  The gameplay is really simple, there is a hex map you build over time with 6 symbols, and each symbol gives you a different power when you are on it.  Hexes can be upgraded over time, with upgrades tied to the symbols that surround the hex. 

 

I've made it to...I think it was Wave 47, and I'm pretty confident I could extend that way out as there is a bit of a game breaking combination of hexes you can build, but the fun is getting that engine built without making a dumb mistake. 

 

It's really addictive and just a super smart game.  Where I'm frustrated is that I want more from this!  I want a campaign, or goals, or some kind of artisanal hand crafted experience.  I know he built this to take a break from his bigger game, and that's one of the reasons it's so simple, but it feels so much like a proof-of-concept that's begging to get more built around it. 

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I got it with the Uurnog bundle. I'll check it out so I can share my opinion!

 

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Yeah, this feels like a publishable prototype more than something that held the author's interest. The mechanics feel interesting for reasons that you stated, but there are no audio-visual rewards that encourage or embellish those discoveries. For instance if the game was themed as mechanical traps (which doesn't take much of a jump) then adjacent tiles could develop more complex geometry and animations that look like death-machinations that I would want to discover and that would give me hints at what I had created within that theme. Maybe just a zoo of some sort where the animals gain visual traits based on their upgrades and how many enemies they have eaten on their tile. If this was a mobile game based on Endless Legends for instance, I would be enjoying adding the acid-attribute to a repair-tile to see what the building turns into or whatever. As it is, this doesn't even use color.

I'm glad they published the prototype though, it is interesting mechanically including the looseness of it.

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Yeah, you can definitely see how theming it around any number of things could give it a much stronger gameplay loop than just the score chase that it's got now. 

 

Kind of the same way that PuzzleQuest and its clones eventually took the Bejeweled mechanics and built a much larger game around it, I really hope someone takes this and does something similar. 

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