Axes and Acres

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 d

A quaintly Medieval exercise in chucking dice, flipping cards, and taming a pastoral landscape. BrainGood Games has done a fantastic job capturing boardgame elegance in a tidy videogame package, complete with a gently punishing metagame. Warning: NSFR (not safe for rabbits). Although Axes and Acres includes tutorials and a link to a helpful video, here's something with a bit more (too much?) detail and a few critical observations. https://youtu.be/-nslipmdYkU

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 s

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.

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 mos