Axes and Acres Reviews

I love this game and Militia 2 too. This two are pure tactics and strategy, without any distraction. And much less time consuming, than classic tactical or strategic turn based games.

I wanted to like this game. I really did. But there are some major fundamental problems with how it's played that make it not fun for me. 1. There's supposedly an "undo" with right-click, but more than half the types of actions, primarily the ones where you realllllllly want an undo if you do one by accident, the undo simply doesn't work at all. The game is open-knowledge. Nothing is random except between phases. There is no reason any action shouldn't be able to be undone unless it reveals random information, and really the game should have a complete undo "stack" where you can undo back to the beginning of a turn. 2. When you abandon or fail, it (sometimes?!?) decreases the difficulty ("rank"). There is no way to turn this off. You can manually set the value, but only to 5 or 10, not to anything else. Since a "bad" starting position makes the game basically unwinnable at higher ranks, the fact that you can't retry on a new map and have to replay an earlier difficulty sucks. There are some other, less fatal issues as well, such as the "help" being insufficient and you having to basically guess what some things do until you try them, but the two above issues made me stop playing and uninstall the game.

A really nice 4X style computer-boardgame. Is does the "difficult decisions" bit of a boardgame well, as well as being a very well defined space. It's not so good a computer game, however, as it's a bit janky and it isn't all that compelling to play, outside of the solitaire boardgame aspect. The game design is sound, but the biggest problems are in the UI: 1. The learning videos don't match the current game 2. The tutorial is pretty buggy, though the main tutorial and the in-game prompts do a good job of explaining everything. You don't need to watch the official video or Tom Chick's one any more, though they might add some context. 3. Undo is really weird / often doesn't undo what you expect. It's also bound to RMB which is odd. I'd like the entire game to just be one giant undo stack so we can undo right to start if we want (with perhaps a penalty to league table). 4. The controls are not intuitive. I was continually getting muddled up, e.g. I want to activate a dice but I'd end up placing one. They should invert the system, so rather than the current system of selecting a dice from the rolled pool and then "contextually" using it somewhere I'd prefer to just point at the place I want to use it, and then select the dice to consume. Some parts of the game already work in that fashion, e.g. reproduction. The smartest part of the game design is the guidance goals along the top. They really shake the game up each time and give you different things to prioritise.

I like the intense strategies that really make me think, weigh my options and optimize my turns. It's a game that rewards planning and creativity, with a sandbox feel of freedom to do what you want and many paths to victory. Although your start is pretty much the same each game, every game feels completely different. I really love this game and I expect it will only get better as development continues.

This is a lightweight strategy game. It's not for building up a town; it's for completing objectives in a set number of turns. Despite this limitation, it is a fun entry to its specific niche. The main drawback: There's no difficulty adjuster. If you win at a level, it increases the difficulty. If you loose twice in a row, it decreases. There's no sandbox mode, either. You will always have to play the same game mode, so there's not much room for exploration.

These days it's extremely rare to see an original game design within the realm of video games. It's also hard to find elegant strategy games that are easy to learn and unfold their depth by the combination of relatively straight-forward rules. Axes and Acres delivers on both fronts! The game resembles an economic solitaire board game, but uses the digital format to take full advantage of randomization (map, cards, goals, dice) to keep every playthrough fresh. All of the randomness happens before the player is making decisions though and can be mitigated in various ways, so it never feels unfair but more like a set of conditions you have to make the best out of every turn. On top of that, the game uses a ranking system to dynamically adjust the difficulty to the player's skill every match. It's a feature far too few single-player games use. All in all this is, so far, probably the most interesting game I've played this year.

Fun single player board game that gets slightly more difficult each time you win. Elements of Worker Placement, Dice Rolling, Victory Point engine building, Light deckbuilding. Would recommend for fans of Agricola, Empire, or even Civilisation.

My favourite game of 2016. Plays like a town building worker placement board game with some deck building on the side. You are racing to meet your Victory Point target before you run out of turns. If you are successful you move on to the next phase where you keep all the infrastructure you have built, but the actions which give you Victory Points change. After you beat all three phases you win the map and increase one rank. Each rank you go up increases the number of Victory Points required to beat the next map, however if you lose two maps in a row your rank decreases by one. This does a really good job of making sure things never get too hard or too easy for you.

Right now, Axes and Acres is half off for the Winter Sale, and I think that $4.99 is a fair price for what this is: a digital version of a typical European board-game. It's not an American board-game, so it plays more like "Settlers of Catan" than "Candyland." That means it's complicated at first, though it's very easy to learn if you watch TomChick's video of him playing it. For what it is, it had the potential to be a great game: you build up your little hamlet from scratch each game, building houses, farms, guardhouses, town halls and so forth, and your peasants farm, chop trees, mine stone and reproduce, a game mechanic that requires two pawns instead of one for some inexplicable reason. (Because your pawns aren't people, they are tiny dice-shaped figurines, so maybe they have one gender, or six. I don't know.) Anyway, the game is a lot of fun when you're playing it. You only have so many dice each turn and only so much food, so you have to decide whether to build or farm and so forth. Each game has random goals, such as "Build 5 roads" or "Kill 3 barbarians" and you have to work towards those goals in a set amount of turns. And here is where the game goes from being great to being a near miss. For some inexplicable reason, the game designers decided that foisting a super-complicated European-style digital board-game that has no real-world board game equivalent to it on an unsuspecting American teenage Steam populace would make these people go "Oh, this is too complicated! Make it harder!" and so they decided that every time you win, the game would keep track, for every victory you would gain a Level, and the game would roughly subtract one turn for each victory. So, if you are given 25 turns to win at Level 1, you only get 24 turns at Level 2, and 23 turns at Level 3. Now if you're great you may get to Level 50, if you're terrible you may get to Level 4, but at some point, every single person who plays will reach a maximum level where they can't go any higher, and so for them the game becomes an exercise in futility. If you lose two games in a row, you lose a Level and gain back a turn, so you might rise to Level 50, lose 10 games and end up at Level 45. I don't see this as a good thing, as you gain nothing. In various rogue-like and tower-defense games, you have a meta-game, where even if you lose terribly each game, you are still gaining gold, cards, skills or whatever, and so there is compensation for the game getting tougher. "Solar Settlers" by the same company is a good example: you get cards permanently every time you play, and thus the entire game makes more sense and is always fun to play. So, I do recommend this game on sale. It's worth playing for the 10 or 20 hours you'll get out of it before you find it frustrating and futile.

Absolutely fantastic game if you are a fan of building games (Civ etc.) and the elegance of chess. You build a little town, making your build choices differently based on variations in the layout of the terrain and the victory point conditions that vary in each play-through. It is consistent enough to appeal to (former) chess player in me, but random enough to be exciting and new each time. Random cards and "dice" (types of "people" you can use each turn to take various actions) keep it exciting, forcing tactical adjustments every turn, but largely without upsetting your larger strategy. It has its limits. Once you have really mastered it (I am 5th on the leaderboards) it is pretty much done. You cannot play it 20 totally different ways for 10 years like the best Civ-type games of all time. But the subtleties of tactics and strategy are absolutely fantastic to figure out along the way despite what look like incredibly simple mechanics. So it is an wonderful puzzle game wrapped in a tactical game that is wrapped in a builder game. While I am pretty much done with it, it will stay in my memory as one of the best games I have ever played.