Game Week 6 - Galcon

Man, I haven't played a game for blogs in a while... World of Goo was too amusing. Anyway, this week's game is Galcon, which is basically a speedy conquer-the-galaxy style game. Right up my alley! Along with almost every Star Wars game imaginable (almost) but that's besides the point.

The basic premise of the game is you have fleets that you need to send around the galaxy to take over planets. Large planets generate your ships faster, and you need to send a number of ships equal to the number of the planet before it becomes yours. Enemy planets generate additional ships while neutral planets (denoted in black) have a static number. You can change the size of the fleet you wish to send and also the number of planets that ships are to leave from. And there's lot of triangles.

There's a few reasons why I like this simple game. The first is that it has the potential to be a very fast-paced game, much like games of Speed or Spoons. I've been able to win a map in as early as 15 seconds and this is my first time playing it. I guess most of it owes to the feedback loops in the gameplay. The first is that the more planets you own, the more ships you can generate and thus the more ships you have to take over more planets. Conversely, the less planets or the smaller planets you have, the slower your fleet generation is and so it is harder for the loser to catch up in the round. This means all players have to work quickly to build their fleets as efficiently as possible and take over as many planets as they can early on in order to succeed early.

The game needs a small amount of quick thinking and calculation as the player determines the best order to take over planets. Large planets are favourable over smaller planets but planets with a large number of fleets take more ships to conquer. Thus the players are forced to determine the order in which planets should be taken over so that they still have ships for future conquests. The higher the number of ships a player has, the higher the numbers they are able to conquer, thus the more planets they have access to, and in turn the player can generate more ships.

The game also has some negative feedback on the player in terms of the level of managing and ease of play. The more planets a player has, the more attention they must pay to each planet, thus the less chance there is of protecting some of their planets. This stabilises the game somewhat as the player who has more planets has to micro manage to a high degree, whereas the player with only a few planets can easily move to take over the opponent's planets with smaller numbers.

Some of my friends enjoyed the hoarding nature of the game, where you just stockpile the resources and then send them out all at once. I preferred micromanaging in small groups and create a constant barrage.

The tutorial at the start of the game? Ha, I wasn't even aware it was even a tutorial! The game's pretty simple enough; the tutorial provided basic instructions on how it works but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. It simply got the player immersed in the game early on, getting them used to the mechanics. However, the game is really easy to pick up and in the end I don't think a tutorial is needed for a game with simple rules and mechanics.