Sente

Easy to grasp rules and complex emerging puzzles dynamics. It has a toon of levels and a really charming aesthetic.

Answers the question "what if Khet were designed by Kris Burm, to be played by up to six players with self-actuated pieces?" This is a really special game. If you have any interest in abstract strategy, you should immediately download the demo and play the tutorial, all the included puzzles, and a few easy bot matches to see what the game has to offer. For the price, I would be perfectly satisfied with no more than a bare bones implementation of a solid tabletop game along these design parameters. But this surpassed my expectations, by miles. The presentation is wonderful and reminiscent of Shufflepuck Cantina Deluxe (a favorite from a completely different genre). It adds a lot of charm without being too distracting. As good as the game looks by default, there are apparently a bunch of unlockable cosmetics. Voice acting is completely unnecessary in a game like this, but it's better done here than in most narrative indie games where story and characters actually matter, and no, it is not generative AI. There is so much to do in the campaign mode that I honestly wouldn't fault the game if it excluded multiplayer modes entirely. But the opposite is true: there are plenty of options for online and offline multiplayer; I haven't tested this and don't take it into account in this review, since the game is new and there are few players. The developers say that this game was designed over a period of 20 years, so it's obviously a passion project, and that leads me to believe they have a personal stake in maintaining and promoting a healthy multiplayer environment, if for no other reason than to host their own games. Designing your game around simultaneous move submission/resolution is a very clever solution to a lot of practical problems that can plague multiplayer thinking games, which are traditionally based on sequential turns, and which did not originally have the benefit of modern technology to provide a neutral automaton which could execute and adjudicate Rube Goldberg board states. Waiting for five other people to think for several minutes can quickly become both tiresome and unfair (because people in later turn order effectively have more thinking time relative to certain actions, and different information). Effectively designing a game around simultaneous turn resolution solves both of these problems elegantly while making the game feel fundamentally different from 99% of other board games. Yet it's still surprisingly rare to see it used even in software-native tabletop designs. Solium Infernum is the best recent example I can think of, and it's a very different kind of game. The result is both highly dynamic and extremely positional: not a common combination. There is no hidden information, but it can still feel chaotic as it's much more difficult to straightforwardly calculate sequences of forcing moves or even the outcome of complex chain reactions from a single move of your own! So it feels like a very heady mixture of the territorial and intuitive shaping of Go, combined with the explosive combinations and surprising reversals of Chess. As with those games, it can be difficult to get an initial sense of how much you may enjoy the game long term without devoting some serious study to understanding first. But I'm looking forward to it.