Recent reviews by Bretton

There is a reputation this game has of not being a good adaptation of the board game and that might be true (or may not, it is better than Tabletop Simulator) but what it is is very good if you want to learn this game up to a standard where you can play someone at the board game.

It is a great teaching tool to get you into a place where you can play one of the best board games made.

I've always thought that one of the problems with modern games is that they are a bit too obvious in thier attempt to make you feel good by - in essence - letting you win which is why the demanding difficulty of Offworld Trading Company is so very enjoyable.

As I pass the twenty five hour mark on Offworld I'm also playing The Witcher 3 which allows me to perform some very heroic slashes that seem far beyond the mashing of left mouse I am doing. It is very pretty but it seems to remove me from the mix. The Witcher 3 is great but sometimes I feel like I'm a distraction to it, rather than the other way around.

Offworld Trading Company is the opposite. Go disengaged in a minute of playing Offworld and you lose. Make bad decision in Offworld and you lose. Play well but not as well as someone else (including the impressive AI) and you lose. Every defeat one can imagine a cause for an consider how to fix it. The moment I realised that not mining a resource because it could be bought dirty cheap was a viable strategy was a revelation made better because it was not hinted at, or revealed in a tutorial, or given to me in any way other than through experience.

The result is a game where one feels an authorship over victory (or defeat) that creates a more compelling narrative than many a game that sell themselves on their narratives. An irony of sorts there.

Playing Civ V is coloured by the thought that it would be so much better were it closer to Civ IV. It has some nice touches, and some interesting innovations in the Civ games but a lot of the time it misses the swet spots Civ IV seemingly because it wanted to be different to its predecessor. So while Civ V is very good, Civ IV is superb.

If you played a lot of Talisman in the late 80s and early 90s - and you loved - you will love this. It has that Talisman feeling which if mixed witha Godzilla movie, Argentina struggling in the World Cup to a minnow and some Vic Reeves, would be 1990 (or maybe is)