![I don't belong here. [-Ed.]](https://statelyplay.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CreeperWorld01-360x270.jpg)
Are you a creep? Put away the Coke Babies import, you don’t need to show the severity of your creepdom. I’m talking of Knuckle Cracker‘s magnificent little RTS trilogy, a twist of tower defense and supply chain optimisation. Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal has been on Steam since 2014, but it has finally been joined by its elder siblings from 2009 and 2011.
You probably haven’t heard of Nyx Hydra. Their biggest success to date has been Egg!, a FTP Tamagotchi game in roughly the same vein as Neko Atsume. Egg! isn’t Stately Play material, but it is cute and doesn’t push the IAP too hard. But I’m not here to talk about Egg!, a game I would never even have discovered it it weren’t for The Arcana, a passion project they’re currently seeking Kickstarter funding for.
While the mac daddy of Commands & Colors games, Memoir ’44, is stubbornly staying away from our tablets, it looks like we’ll have plenty of other options using Richard Borg’s iconic war game system soon. We already have Battlelore from Fantasy Flight and, recently, GMT Games announced that they’re moving forward with C&C: Ancients and C&C: Napoleonics. We had heard last year that HexWar was going to be working on the World War I themed title, The Great War, but yesterday we learned that it’s going into closed beta.
Much like my patience, Pathfinder Adventures is slowly coming to an end. Not the end, just an end. Last week saw the release of Deck 5 of the Rise of the Runelords campaign meaning that we only have one deck remaining before the adventure path wraps up. Will a new adventure path follow? We can hope, but for now let’s revel in the fact that there’s new stuff to do in one of 2016’s greatest ports.
Describing Atlas Reactor (and why it’s all sorts of fantastic) is a tall order. It leads to a tumult of clumsy ‘…like x, but with a twist of y‘ equations that are never as helpful as they are clever, and lead to some pretty average approximations. The best I’ve managed is a supercilious ‘multiplayer turn-based strategy for the Overwatch generation‘. Thing is, it totally is. Now released, I can emphatically suggest it as strategy front runner for any serious GOTY discussion. Here WEGO.
Earlier in the week I managed to track down the latest winner of the coveted Spiel des Jahres award, Vlaada Chvátil from Czech Games Edition. You might remember him as the prolific designer of board games such as Through the Ages and Galaxy Trucker. You might also remember that Through the Ages has been in the works at CGE for some time with an expected 2016 release. As 2016 nears its end, where do digital versions of TtA and other CGE games (such as the much awaited Codenames port) stand? Lucky for us, Vlaada was happy to fill us in on the details.
1775: Rebellion is a simulation of the American revolutionary war against the British. It’s a subject tackled many times in gaming, but rarely with such startling simplicity as this. Originally a board game, it wowed players with its rare mixture of approachability and depth. Now it’s come to your iPad and Android tablet via a PC version.
Of all the game genres to come to touchscreens, real-time strategy has probably been the least well served. There’s too little controllability when you’re dealing with your stubby finger as opposed to the fine maneuverings of a mouse and keyboard. To compensate, many iPad RTS games lower the amount of units available so the game becomes more manageable for your finger. That’s not how Rome: Total War is going to handle things. Out today for iPad, Rome: Total War is a port of the PC title that includes everything the desktop version has, even the thousands of units clashing on screen at any given time.
Thanks to our intrepid undercover reporter, [redacted -ed.], we knew that Image & Form was close to releasing their super-popular 2D shooter, SteamWorld Heist on iOS very soon. What we didn’t realize is that “very soon” meant “now”. That’s right, the much anticipated SteamWorld Heist is now available for iOS Universal.
I’ve always defended mobile games as more than mere distractions. But today… Today I need some distractions from this newfound sense of overwhelming dread I woke up with, and you might, too. Here are three quality “distractions” you can play today and into the coming months. (And if you’re not feeling particularly down today, here are some good games that are worth playing.)