SkyBoats

These guys, BrainGoodGames, make some wonderful boardgame-like strategy games. Their newest one, Skyboats, is in the Euro game genre, and it is simply outstanding. The developers are very clever, and have obviously playtested the heck out of this design. I can easily see this as a multiplayer boardgame, where everyone is racing around trying to deliver goods and collect victory points. However, I digress. This is a single player PC strategy game, and it is brilliant. The tutorial explains everything very nicely, and you get into playing your first real game pretty quickly. Their leveling/ranking system keeps the games competitive, even though there is no A.I. to be found. You're basically trying to play as optimally as you can, in a limited amount of rounds, to collect enough victory points to win the game. Then, if you win, you move to the next rank, and it gets harder, either by requiring more VPs, less rounds, possibly some other conditions that I'm not aware of because...

After being excited about Axes & Acres (~120 hours) and Solar Settlers (~50 hours and still going), I really wanted to support this developer more. I also already had Minos Strategos but that's not really my thing although it's a good game. So I bought all of his games that I didn't already have, just to support him. I didn't really expect much from this game. But I was wrong. This game is really good! I agree that the concept is a little bit weird and it takes some time to understand how it works, but it has a fun and challenging concept. In short: you are a captain of several sky ships/boats and the sky has cities that buy stuff that can be found everywhere if you look closely enough. By looking closely enough, I mean that things spawn there on specific occasions. You can sell goods for a specific price (changes every turn) or sell three of the same goods for a fixed contract price. The hard part is getting around this map: you only have little fuel, not at all enough to just fly ...

As always with BrainGoodGames, this game is lots of fun and very challenging. It takes a while to grasp the rules but once you understand them you will appreciate the complex strategies you can use. The tutorial will get you started but I recommend turning on practise mode to really learn the rules and not lose ranks. The support from BrainGoodGames is great as always.

It hurts to give this game a negative review. I kinda like the game, but the question is whether I [b]recommend[/b] the game, not whether I like it. The BrainGoodGames games I have played so far (in order from recommended to not-so-recommended) are Axes & Acres, Militia, Minos Strategos, and SkyBoats. They are all good games, but, unfortunately, the other three are simply better than this one. If you've played them all and like them, then by all means get this one, but even then you might like to wait until it's on sale. The game has two modes, the Breezy mode (the main mode) and Classic mode. Breezy mode is simple and straightforward -- too much so. I reached rank 22 without losing a single game, though I've had one or two close shaves. That put me at #8 on the leaderboard (both Current and All Time). I kept playing long enough to get this far mostly to see if the game would ever challenge me. It's getting challenging, but it's taken so long to get to this point that I'm kinda tired ...

Even the tutorial does not work!

Bought this game because this company also made Solar Settlers, which is an excellent game. This is close to unplayable though. Bad UI, hard to read text, some UI bugs, and overall poor feel. OOPS, turns out it starts out at lowest resolution. Once I fixed that, it looked much better. However, I didn't like the gameplay very much. Seems a bit too simple and boring. (Unlike Solar Settlers.)

So so game. Developer doesn't support his games (won't fix bugs), so I won't be supporting his future games.

Love this game. The puzzle of figuring out teh right supply routs to maximize profits = Win!

2nd Worst of Braingoodgames

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