Tinysasters is a short city management simulation from the most recent Ludum Dare competition. The theme was "tiny world," and this little gem by Volute certainly fits the bill.
Ecological disasters spawn randomly, destroying precious arable land and mineral deposits until you build a city and a shrine to stabilize the situation. Each tile except desert can be improved by building a workplace to gather resources. Wooded tiles give you wood, grassy tiles food, mountain tiles minerals, and sea tiles water. Cities also generate electricity and crafts, while shrines collect mana and help stabilize nearby land. Got that? Good, because to beat the game you will need to build a level 4 shrine and a level 3 city. Easier said than done, as each disaster will destroy or rearrange tiles, and erase whatever you've built there.
For such a small game, Tinysasters manages to feature some complex gameplay and even a pleasant soundtrack to boot. Taken together it feels like a rough draft of a more fleshed out title. Here's hoping for Tinysasters 2.0.
I like this game, although it's a bit complex at first. Hard mode was an intense challenge – the natural disasters came quick and strong.
Not enough of a challenge. Even hard mode was a cinch. All I needed to do was build workplaces everywhere, and then make a few city tiles and upgrade them. You only need to upgrade one shrine tile. Piece of cake.
Just by the description, this looks like an implementation of Pocket Civ: the Civ-like board game that can be played with a paper and pencil. I was obsessed with the paper version for a couple weeks last year. I think I got it out of my system, though.
Here is a link: http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/28044/pocket-civ
This is very cute, but I can't seem to get very far.. .when a disaster strikes, it has a 50% of freezing the game. (Chrome, on Win 7)
Yeah, I found even hard mode a bit too hard. Very interesting game though - I like it a lot.
Odd bug: often I'd find myself with a negative iron total. I had to wait for my mountain workplaces to work their way up from -5 or -10 up to positive 5 before I could build more stuff. I couldn't quite tell what circumstances it happened in.
Nifty game; I'd like to see more like it.
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