Xin-krek have mercy.
Rocco Bowling got in touch over the weekend with good news: Starbase Annex has been submitted to the App Store for certification, so barring any Apple objections over the way Director Paramecium reproduces or the game’s depiction of the Vass and Cyban as “enemies“, we should be able to buy it in the next week or two.
You might remember Starbase Annex from when Rocco revealed it to us back in July — it’s a single-player digital board game set in the same universe as his sci-fi 4X game Starbase Orion, which no doubt saved Rocco a bundle on artists’ fees. I’ve played a beta build of Annex and it’s really very clever; a little bit of Hearthstone and a dash of Eclipse that you play against one of Bowling’s characteristically brutal AIs.
You’ve got a face-up deck of cards with different point values, and every turn you get points to put those cards on the board based on how many stars you control. Once per turn you can move those cards around to capture enemy cards of equal or lesser value, and in certain circumstances you can combine two of your cards to make a more powerful one. It’s an outwardly simple thing whose complexity you only start to grasp once you’ve spent an hour with it, like an IKEA couch I tried to assemble once.
There’s no multiplayer in here but there’s a big ‘ol single-player campaign that I suspect will provide at least a week or two of entertainment for most, though if you’re as hopeless at beating Bowling’s AIs as I am, you’ll be able to beat your head against this thing for years.
I’ll be sure to let you know when Starbase Annex drops, and there’s a couple of screenshots below.
Pretty chauvinistic about humans, this game.
Beat one opponent to unlock the next — there’s eighteen total in the campaign.
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