I love the social interaction between people sitting on the couch at home, playing a game together. Who hasn’t enjoyed the satisfaction of defeating your friends in Mario Kart, or receiving all your brother’s money in Monopoly, followed by a friendly grin? Although I like all the online possibilities of modern games, playing against online opponents is a different multiplayer experience than playing against someone sitting directly next to you. Not worse or better, just different. However, this does not mean that offline and online multiplayer modes should be strictly separated.

A human opponent remains a human opponent in the end, independent of his/her physical location. In Greed Corp we wanted to offer plenty of options to facilitate a decent “living room” experience, while making it very easy for online opponents to join as well. The flexibility in the Game Room is a direct result of this philosophy. Next to that, we didn’t want you to require more hardware than necessary. Why would you need four controllers if you are playing a turn-based game? So if you have one friend in another country and two on the couch next to you, you can all play together, even if you only have one controller per console.

Many strategy games are complex because a player has to master a lot of strategic options before they can figure out the best way to defeat an opponent. Often a lot of time needs to be invested before you can actually start making strategic decisions that really make sense. Although some players love this kind of complexity, it does not make a game very accessible for new players or players with limited time. We didn’t want Greed Corp to be complex because of the amount of options, it should be complex in finding a strategy that’s smarter than the one of your opponent. If a new player starts with Greed Corp, he should be able to start thinking about tactics right away, and not lose much time by learning all the options in the game first. We’ve kept the amount of possible actions you can perform very limited, while not sacrificing strategic depth, like in a chess game. We wanted to prevent players having to make complex calculations before they can decide if moving a walker is wise or not. The mechanics should be transparent, the winning strategy should not.

Six attacking walkers will always beat five defending walkers, leaving one walker alive for the attacker on his newly captured tile. But deciding whether or not it’s wise to attack in the first place, that’s the part where strategic thinking shows up. It’s all about using the right weapon at the right time at the right position. Because of the land collapsing mechanic, basically every turn is played on a “different” map, which makes thinking ahead very important. The longer you play, the more you will discover how much depth is hidden in this mechanic. After one and a half years of working on this game, I still haven’t found all possible strategies to win a game. My opponents during the playtests kept surprising me with new tactics, forcing me to adapt and come up with an even smarter tactic. I’m very curious about all the pro tactics that will emerge from the community!

I’m looking forward to seeing you all in-game soon! You are invited!