Civilization Revolution Comes to the iPhone

When it launched last year, I was quick to download and play Civilization Revolution on the Xbox 360. Civilization has always been a favorite series of mine, and it was no surprise that Civilization Revolution quickly became one of my favorite games to play. A simplified and stripped-down version of the Civilization franchise, Civilization Revolution is best described as a gorgeous, easy-to-understand distillation of the best elements of the Civ franchise.

Naturally, then, when I saw that Civilization Revolution, or CivRev, was launched for the iPhone I was ecstatic. I suppose that I'm a bit late to the party, but an August 7th interview on Gamasutra is worth reading if you are at all interested in the game. It appears to be quite the value, as the application is priced at $10 (until the end of the day, you can snag it for $5), but contains all of the game code from the PS3, DS, and Xbox 360 versions of the game.

Civilization Revolution features 16 different civilizations, a number of different starting scenarios, and a whole lot of replayability. While I don't know that they will carry over the "scenario of the week" to the iPhone, I tend to play a game or two of CivRev a week (usually I will at least find time for the scenario of the week).

In my opinion, CivRev is, in a word, elegant. Among other things, the economy is wonderfully simple, the unit tree is quick to grasp, the graphics are great, and the gameplay is fast, making this perhaps the best entry in the Civilization franchise. While there is something to be said for the soup to nuts designs of previous Civilization entries, I really enjoyed this game's emphasis on the different countries (the starting techs, unique units, and special attributes are much more relevant than in previous games), and fast paced play of CivRev. If you've been holding off purchasing the game for some time, or don't have a current-gen console, the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Civilization Revolution is definitely something worth checking out.

If for some reason I find out I'm going to be travelling a lot during the next few months, I'll probably buy the game for the iTouch, but if you end up buying the game, definitely leave your thoughts in this post's comments thread.

Elegance in the Free Realms TCG

So last week I got my first comment on my blog in my Elegant Game Design article. In it, I was discussing elegant games and game systems, and I included the destiny/gem system from the Free Realms TCG in my list.

Now, this inclusion hardly compares to some of the other systems I listed, as my commentor duly noted. The gem system is certainly not as complex as most of the other games that I've included. Yet, I feel it is worth including simply because how the gem system plays into every aspect of the game, is a key consideration in deck construction, and presents interesting design space for future releases of the game, should Topps and SOE ever wish to release additional expansions.

The basic gist of the Free Realms TCG is as follows. Skip the next two paragraphs if you just want to read about the destiny/gem system. The Free Realms TCG is played on a normal game field like Magic: the Gathering but there are only spaces for each player to control three creatures at a time. Players play cards from their hand to their "inventory", which is basically land in Magic, except that it has no color. Any card can be played as a land, but most players play "resources", which are similar to quests in World of Warcraft. These can be played face up as land, and there is generally some benefit which can be harvested from turning them face down. In addition, resource cards generally have good "destiny", which I will get to in a bit.

The cards in your inventory, give you coins every turn that allow you to play more powerful creatures. When you play a creature, you put it in one of the three slots on your side of the board. Once you have spent all of your coins for the turn, or wish to spend no more, the remainder is lost. Then you can attack with your creatures. Creatures either battle the creature in front of them or attack the opponent directly if there is no creature in front of them (so in the above picture, if the red player was attacking, if he chose to attack with the Mauthe Dog it would battle the Chicken Bomber, and if he chose to attack with the Forest Troll Archer it would "hunt", which basically means hit the opponent). When a creature hunts or wins a battle, it scores a card. When a player has scored 12 cards, he or she wins the game.

Destiny draws come into play whenever two creatures are battling. In battles, the attacking creature's attack is compared to the defending creatures defense. Tricks, the game's equivalent of instants, can be used to augment a creature's abilities in battle temporarily, but the attack/defense values are also temporarily increased by destiny draws. In its simplest form, players simply reveal a card from the top of the deck and add the number of gems on the revealed card to the relevant combat stat of their creature. However, the color of the gems also commonly matters, as creatures frequently have text in the form of : Effect; where G is a gem color. In this case, if a required gem is green, and the player reveals a green gem, the effect will trigger. In many cases (such as on the above troll and chicken cards), a proper revealed gem will further increase the attack or defense of the creature. However, there are many creatures who cannot be destroyed if a combination of gems are revealed, who draw a card if the correct gem types are revealed, or untap if the appropriate gem types are revealed.

Therefore, destiny does a number of things for Free Realms:

• It makes battles more exciting and random.
• It enables the designers to put exciting abilities on creatures while simultaneously reinforcing the need to battle with those creatures.
• It allows the designers to add color restrictions to the game without making it difficult for decks that are "off-color" to actually play their cards, since gem color is (at least for now) strictly affiliated with a color in the game.
• It unlocks a great deal of design space without significantly adding to the game's complexity.
  

And, like any other elegant system, it is very easy to understand.

If you haven't tried the Free Realms TCG, and you enjoy examining well-designed game systems, you owe it to yourself to visit the Free Realms virtual world and participate in its Trading Card Game. I do not need to qualify the statement 'The Free Realms TCG is a very well-designed game.'

-Jon

Elegant Game Design

One of the terms we throw around in my office when referring to games is the term "elegant". Now none of us are really game design theorists in the traditional sense, and the word isn't really used much in game reviews, but it is a very fitting description of some games. One of the blogs that I follow is PlayThisThing!. One of the writers there is Greg Costikyan, who contributed a chapter on Europa Universalis (one of my favorite games) to a book entitled Well Played 1.0, edited by Drew Davidson. You can read the book online here, although I recommend you go out and buy a copy for yourself if you really liked it (I did).

One of the other chapters is written on the well-known Advance Wars series of games for Nintendo's mobile Gameboy and DS platforms. Advance Wars is one of the best examples of elegant game design I can think of, and seeing that the chapter on elegant game design in Well Played 1.0 was writted on this game was quite reassuring.

First, let me define my terms. To me, an elegant game or system is one in which there is a great deal of complexity which is slowly introduced to the player or is immediately very understandable. Basically, elegant game designs will almost always be fairly complex but very easy for the player to parse, or are at least structured in such a way that players learn how to use the system fairly easily and are never frustrated by it. Occasionally, I might call an overly complex but not that hard to understand system elegant, but that would be pretty rare. (This might be the case with my Final Fantasy Tactics nomination below.) These systems should also be fairly intuitive to the player, and to some extent, make sense in the real world, or at least in the game world.

Elegant game systems should also be the aspects of games that stand out to the player as being truly interesting and entertaining. By their very nature, they are the most polished aspects of the game.

Of course, the next thing that came to my mind was a mental list of other "elegant" games that I have played over the past few years. I spent most of last week thinking about it, and came up with a pretty good list. I'm actually thinking about taking some of the ideas I've been tossing around and throwing them into a white paper, which would probably help to distill my thoughts even more, but in the mean time I can use this post as a bit of a rough draft. I also did some thinking on some of the mechanics that might fall into the category, so those are also on the list.

Generating the list was surprisingly difficult. It was also a little more eclectic than I imagined. My list of elegant games/game systems, in no particular order:

Advance Wars
Civilization: Revolutions
Braid
Portal
Soul Calibur (I've heard that Street Fighter IV should go here but haven't played it)
Vegas Showdown
Sim City 2000
Item System in Diablo II
Ability/Job System in Final Fantasy Tactics
Final Fantasy VII's Materia Systems
Gem System in the Free Realms TCG (No, really, I'm dead serious)
Mana in Magic: the Gathering
World of Warcraft's Talent System

I'm sure I missed a ton of stuff. Please flame me in the forums.

-Jon