Hexes from heaven.
You have never played an empire-building game that takes its genre quite as literally as SettleForge does. This game is Carcassonne as played by the Olympian gods: it’s a solitaire digital board game where you create a kingdom one tile at a time, trying to place tiles that synergize to win the trust of your people.
Developer Andreas Mank told me last week that this is his first original design, but he’s worked in the games industry for some time; his portfolio includes work on Jowood’s PC fantasy RPG Spellforce 2. I played a preview build over the weekend and the game is still pretty rough and full of placeholders (plus the in-game text is a mix of English and German and my Deutsch is nicht so gut) but it already sports what is quite possibly the most beautiful art I’ve seen this year.
At the start of each game, you’re given three missions from your populace (pretty presumptuous of them to drop a to-do list on the guy who’s busy creating the bloody universe) which you fulfill by placing tiles in the right places — hunters need forests to stalk around in, miners need mountains, and so on. Not all tiles can live happily together and some more advanced tiles require prerequisite links to be present — you can’t have a jeweller without working diamond mines and metal smiths. Most of all, you have to be strategic about your placements so as to not paint yourself into a celestial corner.
SettleForge has been in development for three years and will ship this winter for iPad, the devs hope, and it’s going to be a proper game. “We hate in app purchases and we decided to create a game that we love to play ourselves,” Mank told me. Righteous.
Watch a gameplay video after the jump, and remember — this is a work in progress. You can follow SettleForge on Facebook for more frequent updates.
Crank up the quality on this one — it’s a little blurry by default.
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