Games to play while waiting for this one to come out (or for the beta if you are lucky enough)

Just found out about Tales of Maj'Eyal (http://te4.org/) from being a fan of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/). Both are fantastic, near-endless rogue-like games. Both free. I would recommend going with Tales of Maj'Eyal first as there's an actual "story" going on and a sort of world map. Dungeon Crawl is still a great classic and can absorb hours of your life

 

Man, I love me some roguelikes... Part of the reason I'm so looking forward to CH. I know it's not a roguelike or anything, although a random dungeon would be awesome in this game. But it's the randomness that comes from using cards that is one of the great things about this game, imo.

 

I just bought War of the Human Tanks ( http://fruitbatfactory.com/humantanks/ ) on impulse, 25% downloaded atm. Will report back if it's good. Trailer/demo seemed catchy enough for grid-based tactics/RPG fanatics.

 

Certainly looks interesting. I think I've seen it before, but I always thought it looked a little too low budget, I guess.

 

It's... pretty niche. It's a little like real-time-turn-based Battleships with storytelling that'll probably either really intrigue you or bore you to death, depending on your taste.

 

DCSS was amazing, it sucked up so much of my time a year or so ago. I look back fondly on all of those Chaos Knight servants of Xom that met their tragic ends.

I think I'm going to give Tales of Maj'Eyal a try. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Well, not sure if anyone is interested about such games, but there is a game named Codelink v2
http://codelinkv2.com/
It's a f2p multiplayer hacking simulation game You can play alone or with others to get harder things hacked. It's frequently updated, so it's worth trying as it's free to play. I've spend some time in it, got little bored when I was made to grind some similar quests again and again just to lvl up, but it may have been changed at this point It involves your PC resources managing (memory etc..) and you can upgrade your hardware, get better programs and this kind of stuff

Another one is Desktop Dungeons (not sure if it wasn't mentioned earlier) http://www.desktopdungeons.net/
You can get free to play version, it's a quick rpg which involves killing stuff in specific order, and your main resource to manage is.. your map discovery. It involves quite much classes/races combinations + spell effects + basic stats. Game lasts for 10 to 20 minutes long, so it's quite quick play, but with each run you unlock new stuff, so it doesn't get borring quickly

 

I love hacking sim games. I played alot of Uplink back when it first came out.

 

Try Codelink then, its waaaaaay better! Trust me, I'm (almost) an engineer

 

Desktop Dungeons

Or, if you're really bored - Gyromancer lol

 

Me again. Sank in five hours so far, so here goes. In a nutshell, the game starts off pretty basic, but the upgrade paths in the game are massive (the first few cost a hundred 'scrap points', the currency with which you build/research, and now there's one that's 1,000,000 to research and I'm not sure I'm anywhere near the end of a playthrough not to mention New Game+)

Essentially combat is on a square-based grid. Each unit has a varying array of core stats:
- speed (how often a unit can take action),
- movement (how many squares a unit can move)
- sight (how many squares a unit can see away from itself, doesn't use an action)
- scan range (how many squares away a unit can use a recon action)
- scan aoe (how big the AOE of scan is)
- attack range (how many squares away a unit can fire)
- attack aoe (how big the aoe is)

The catch is you can't see the entire map, only squares that are close to you and/or that you recon. The other catch is, units die in one hit. Hence, although you can blindly fire into unseen squares and score kills Battleships style, recon is really, really important. The combat, other than the fact that units die in a single hit, is very similar to what you'd expect out of a tactical JRPG - when it's a unit's turn (determined by speed) it can move, then take an action. The game starts you off with some core unit types like scouts (high scan range/aoe), cannon fodder assault troops, cannon fodder suicide troops (literally 0 attack range but an aoe of 1 so it takes itself plus adjacent units out), artillery with high range and aoe but low speed, and most importantly, command units. Typically the map/battle ends when you lose your command units or destroy the enemy's command units.

The first few levels are pretty basic when the best units you have are peashooters that target a single square, 2 squares away, but like I said the tech tree is massive and things get way more interesting once you (and the enemy) get your hands on 2x2 square behemoths (all 4 squares need to be hit for the unit to die) that can lay down a gigantic 13-square star shaped aoe of doom, and you beef it up with speed-increasing upgrades.

It's a familiar concept yet refreshingly different, so if you can put up with the Japanese visual novel-style writing (or, if you dig visual novels to begin with) you should definitely give the demo a go.

For what it's worth, I originally thought it was a bunch of western devs trying to make a game with a Japanese aesthetic, but it turns out that it actually -is- a japanese indie/VN game that was license/translated.

 

Don't Starve looks like a great little crafting game. I've played Salem for a while and the concept is vary similar. Wish I had a key for it. I'm wondering about how the progression of the world goes.

 

I doubt anyone mentioned it because it really isn't that popular, but there's a F2P CCG I play off and on again called Kingdoms CCG. There's a couple places to play, but you can find the main site via a Google search if you happen to be interested. It'll sound like I'm some sort of spokesperson if I go on with explaining it, but I suppose I can try to list a few key points. Inspired by MtG, sizeable collections of cards so far, Deck Leaders/"Heroes" that affect a deck's play-style, yada yada.

It's a rather entertaining game for what it is (imo), nice artwork, workable game mechanics, etc. There's only two real problems with it. One would be that Single-Players aspects die off very quickly, in which case you mostly just play PVP. In fact, you'll find yourself doing PVP a lot, as it's effectively the best way to earn in-game currency, and because of the somewhat small community currently, it might be a little dull. The second is that there is definitely a "Payer's Curve". I wouldn't say Pay-to-Win, but... to be competitive without money requires you to play a lot. And of course, you'll have a collection of guys who buy entire playsets of the best cards as soon as they are released. So without some investment, you'll probably never be the "best". If such a thing matters to you

But that's just my personal opinion. Might be something worth checking out if you guys are curious. I lurk over this board a couple of times when I come to the site for updates and such, and since it's a CCG, figured someone might care. Apologies if I'm wrong, hahaha.

 

I forgot about this one until i read the last post for some reason. Its a ccg very much like world of warcraft tcg and i liked it for a bit but stopped playing for this and that reason. Its a very good game if you do enjoy games like it tho. http://www.shadowera.com/

 

I just found my email again with an order for a game called Six Gun Saga, by Vic Davis of Cryptic Comet. He is also the guy that made Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum. AE and SI are both what could be considered "digital board games", while SGS is more like a digital version of a "living card game" (minus the "living" part, lol, since I'm sure there won't be any more expansions for it.)

Six Gun Saga is a western themed card game where you hire "Dudes" and send them out to conquer various "Story Cards". When you and an opponent are on the same Story Card, a gun battle ensues, which are played out with a hand of Texas Hold'Em. The winner of the hand adds the score for that hand to their total Posse (groups of Dudes that you create) gun battle value, and then whoever has the lower value takes the difference in wounds. Then the winner of the POKER HAND stays on the story card, and the loser has to retreat if they were the defender. So its possible to win the poker hand but still take wounds at the same time. Another cool thing is that each card also has a poker card associated with it, and you can store them in your "hole" to bring them out later to increase the odds of winning a gun battle. It's a very unique and intriguing game that has a lot of strategy to it, but also the right amount (imo) of luck to keep things interesting.

Their other games, Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum, are even more complicated, tking place on hex map boards that are generated for each game session. AE is a post apocalyptic military strategy game, where SI is political intrigue game that takes place in Hell.

The only downside to these games is that they are not at all user friendly to newcomers. You WILL need to read the manual (probably over and over) to get a handle on how to play them. But once you do, you will have hours and hours of rich strategic gameplay ahead of you.

http://www.crypticcomet.com/

 

I got that game and fully intend to gm if people are interested pm me d as a bonus any party that beats me get one day each on my beta account

If itson hard or higher *sinister laughter*

 

I am evil!