Castle Vox, by indie developer Silly Soft, is a uniquely simplistic strategy game that is entirely customizable, yet offers deep strategic gameplay. The game follows the simple mantra: “easy to learn, difficult to master.” After playing my preview build for the last hour or so, I can definitely attest to that.
When you first start up your game, you’ll notice that this game doesn’t really require a tutorial. After a couple turns you’ll be well versed in the functions of everything. This is, partly, what makes the game so good. Not needing a tutorial is great, I can’t tell you how many times I lament having to sit through a 45 minute lecture just to understand the game I’m supposed to be enjoying. Castle Vox provides you with the strategy you may be craving, but in a package that’s not too complicated.
Now, I can’t speak for every map — I’ll explain this more in depth later — but on the two that I was able to play, the game starts out with you and your castle along with a few troops. From there you simply expand your territory by moving troops into other hexagons, or provincial areas (depending on the map). Once your troops have been there for a turn you’ll secure that territory for yourself and the amount of gold you have for reinforcements increases ever so slightly.
At the end of each turn you are able to requisition more troops depending on how much gold you have from the turn prior, which is based on how many territories you have in general.
Overall there are only two types of units I was able to purchase (again, this may not hold true across different maps): the pawn and the knight. The pawns are slightly weaker and can only move a single space, but cost significantly less than the knight who is stronger and can move across two territories.
The point of the game — on my map — is to dominate the entire map by taking over each other player’s castle. In this respects, I’d liken the game to Risk, but without the need for useless dice rolling. You simply move onto another territory and, based on the amount of troops and varying types of troops whoever has the strongest army wins. No need to rely on the luck of a dice roll to win the battle.
The map I played that was included in my preview version was called Hex Lords which featured a pretty standard hex-based map with pawns and knights. However, The game clearly has ambitions far beyond my simple preview map. I don’t know how they play exactly but I’ve seen maps featuring the Napoleonic wars, Native American tribal conflicts, Godzilla type monster warfare, and even a space-based conflict. This is why I can’t say, explicitly, that each map plays like my own in this preview because the game seemingly has a wide variety of types of gameplay.
Castle Vox is showcasing at IndieCade next month where we plan to get more time with it. Until then you can pre-order the game and gain access to the beta right now (my preview version). Pre-ordering the game costs $14 which promises to be a lower price than the retail version which is getting a release later this year.
[Castle Vox]
Screenshots
This indie bundle comes from Cliff Harris’s side project ShowMeTheGames website, and so it is aptly named the “Show Me the Games Bundle.” The five games included are on sale for $28.50, which is a savings of $81.33. The games seem to mostly be centered around a space or sci-fi theme. If any of that’s of interest, here are a video preview and list of the games included:
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