Amberspire

an interesting, relaxing and contemplative take on a city-builder. Like watching a city grow from your balcony as buildings rise and fall and the skyline shifts and the weather changes day to day. You balance hard interlocking resource chains with the organic ebb and flow of your city, like how a city planner might - but at a sort of poetic remove.

Neat

Way too high price for what you get, you're paying for the author's pretentions.

An interesting, contemplative experiment that struggles to get out of its own way. You may love this game; you may be indifferent to it; that probably depends on how well you click with its vibes. A slow-paced, melancholic world where you're fitting a city in around the whims of your residents and enigmatic alien visitors and the land itself. But not only are the land and its residents and visitors uncaring of your wants as a player, so are the UI and controls and the manual. It's unclear to me how much of this is intentional, thematic friction, and how much is inexperience from the devs. What follows is a whole bunch of nitpicking. I'm still enjoying the game; I still recommend it if you like the vibes of the trailer; each of these is individually a small annoyance but there are a lot of them and I half wish this was an open-source game so I could go re-work things and make the game get out of its own way and stop trying to flatten my enjoyment of it. It has the classic pointing/selection problem of isometric/oblique perspective games where you think you're pointing at a building but the game thinks you're pointing through the building at the ground behind, so it takes practice to learn which terrain tile you're actually pointing at. It exacerbates this with helpful pop-ups which you ABSOLUTELY want a lot of the time, but also often obscure the thing that you're trying to point at: this is especially bad when you're trying to drop a resource die to one of two adjacent buildings. It doesn't understand mouse dragging: any click picks up a die and holds it. And then you can't just click on an invalid location (or on the dice pool) to drop it, you have to use a SEPARATE button to drop. Similarly, the in-game manual (and I assume the printed version), while pretty, is arranged so it feels like a dead reference manual rather than, say, an administrator's living working notes. It works great when reading in order but it's a major drag to find the bit you've forgotten. "How do story events work?" Hmm, that's probably in... overview? No, probably Game Concepts. But selecting Game Concepts from the ToC takes you to the first page of that section: the page AFTER the ToC for that section, so you may not remember that there even IS a list of what's in that section. And if you DO find the section listing, it helpfully has page numbers but they're not clickable so you have to page through manually until you get to the right page. The buildings and their resource requirements are listed alphabetically and the information about when they unlock is in a whole separate place, so questions like "when am I going to be able to do something about this encroaching grass?" are not simple questions but require a bunch of flipping back and forth through the manual. I want to compare this game to Paolo Pedercini's game Lichenia, which has a similar decentering of the player. But where Lichenia's inscrutability invites you to play and observe and theorize, Amberspire gives you everything and asks, "how much time are you willing to take AWAY from playing to cross-reference information you already have?" - which is a far less interesting question. Similarly, the events offer you a bit of intriguing story and a choice - but the real choice is "do you want to lose a major chunk of progress toward unlocking more building types, or do you want to abdicate your story choice (with mechanical buff/debuffs) to the dice?" Which again, feels like a less interesting choice than it could be. Although to be clear, so far this game is far less mechanically grim than it could be, so playing by vibes and making mistakes, but the city goes on - that's probably just fine. And while I kinda like the contemplative pace, combining that with the pacing of the interface made it too slow for my taste. Each turn has relatively little effect: you might have a one-in-six chance to roll the resource you need to construct one-sixth of a building, but you still have to select which buildings to pull dice from, roll the dice, choose whether to re-roll some dice, allocate the useful rolls to the appropriate other buildings, then choose End Turn and twiddle your thumbs while you watch all the results play out, too slowly to be quick and painless but too fast and with inadequate animations to really tell exactly what's going on. If the turns are going to be this inconsequential, I want to be able to skip over the animations, but then if I go "wait a minute, where did that rust come from?" I want to be able to go back and see a weather report. As it is, it's surprisingly difficult to tell the difference between "Flood Move" and "Flood Grow" - did these tiles teleport across the map from elsewhere, or did they just materialize? And I wish Amberspire would roll the weather dice itself and then give me a chance to interfere with fate: after a couple hours it's still jarring to me every time that the weather dice feel like MY turn and not Amberspire's. The art is cool and individual bits are evocative up close - but there's not enough attention to overall contrast allocation, and you're going to spend most of your time zoomed all the way out (and wishing the camera would zoom out further) and at that level it just merges into brown blobs. It took me way too long to realize that the animation on one of your starting buildings was a spaceship and not a rolled-up carpet mysteriously levitating above some sort of display pedestal. Dunno. I like this game. I'm probably going to play through at least twice. But I had higher hopes for it.

The short version: Recommended, I enjoyed it a lot, but I think full price might be a bit much for most gamers. Pros Fun, tactile, and meaningful dice rolling Enjoyable game mechanics that are fun to get into Graphics, sound, and soundtrack all have a cohesive, unique, and compelling style Excellent soundtrack A helpful set of UI tooltips that make play easy and fun Cons Shallow lore A few easily fixed UI foibles: Jerky camera, insufficient zoom-out, map recenters at end of turn The long version: Amberspire plays like a board game that would probably be too complex to play on a tabletop. This game is a lot of fun and definitely does something that I have not seen in other city builders - It bases all your progress on rolling dice. Buildings produce dice and you use those dice to build more buildings or increase your influence - influence is what makes you progress through the game. The main challenge in the game is that dice can only be used within a certain range of your buildings, so you have to create a cleverly overlapping pattern of buildings that can support each other. Sometimes you will roll a resource that you don't need, so to avoid wasting it, you will build structures that you weren't planning on. This creates a fun generativity to the game. There is a very helpful set of UI tips that helps you tell which kind of buildings influence each other and where resources can be used. Getting things right feels good because you can actually lock buildings out of the resources they need. A set of "weather dice" at the end of each cycle create adverse effects that you have to contend with. In the later game, fog can descend on your city and actually deactivate structures. Battling these effects can become challenging and feels good when you manage to overcome them. A few UI issues, all of which could be easily corrected and didn't stop me from enjoying the game: First, the map panning seems to snap to the city's grid which makes it feel jerky. Second, I wish you could zoom out more. Finally, at the end of each turn, the game pans back to the center of the map. This is unnecessary and makes you lose your place on the map. The game is fairly bug free, but I encountered a couple of bugs. In one bug, the tooltip that shows you where a dice can be used does not light up until you deselect and re-select the dice. A more serious bug prevented me from activating my hazard removal buildings when I got very close to the edge of the map. This only occurred in very late-game, so I can see why it was missed. The atmosphere of the game is quite unique, embellished by a great soundtrack. The art, city architecture, and factions in the game give you a vague sense of an enormously ancient universe where humans have been inhabiting space for eons. The map looks really nice with a drab adobe color scheme that gives off an archaic vibe - you can't quite tell if you are looking at an ancient ruin or a sci-fi futuristic city. This is a very compelling theme that I have not seen before. Unfortunately, despite this setup, the lore does not feel very deep. I can't recall any moment when a citizen of my city actually talks to me directly. This is yet another game that could have kicked-up its immersion by 300% with just a few hours-worth of voice acting. Random events are generated by certain dice rolls, which makes those dice more risky - a cool dynamic to be sure. But, the events themselves are simply a mathematical risk-reward proposition; they don't feel like real happenings in a real city. I don't even read the flavor text and merely opt for the most favorable effect. This feels like a missed opportunity to immerse the player in the world. Some factions may come to live in your city; if you treat them well their influence and happiness will improve. If you get them to the highest influence and happiness, the factions give you some seriously desirable bonuses like getting more dice or nullifying negative weather effects. The progress towards this bonus could be a bit better represented in the UI, but I was able to get these bonuses without too much trouble. The game is very fun and more-ish, I have spent some long hours not wanting to walk away from my next turn. If you want a nice, involved, but ultimately relaxed game to sink some hours into, this is one to check out!

90 minutes in, been yelling at the dice for 60 of those, they’ve captured the board game experience perfectly (Also note, had issues booting the game after installing, good ol reboot the pc fixed it)

I roll the dice and the city grows. Remember, instability only matters if you're a coward.