Game Alert - Desperate Gods

If you've been living under a rock lately (or just don't visit sites related to indie gaming or are reading this several months/years in the future, those work too), you've probably never heard of Desperate Gods. Otherwise, you've likely have at least heard the name and, hopefully, have played it. Regardless of if you have or have not in fact heard of this game, let's take a look at it and why it works:

Desperate Gods is a board game simulator for up to four players either locally or online and it was made in about a week for a game jam. The goal is to move around the board between four sections, each section has a unique deck filled almost entirely with monsters, and the goal is to defeat every monster in the game. Combat is simply a matter of rolling equal to or higher than a number on a monster's card and each monster is worth some money for buying items and victory points; once all the monsters have been defeated the players tally up the victory points of the monsters they have defeated and the player with the most wins. Many spaces do something other than letting the player draw a card and there's a bit more to it than that, but it's simple enough.

A typical game of Desperate Gods

Now, as a game in the traditional sense, Desperate Gods is not all that good. It can take over half the duration of a game to clear the hardest of the four decks, the decks for the larger, easier areas have barely any cards, items are unbalanced, and much of the wording in the game is horribly vague. Absolutely none of this matters though as the key word in the paragraph above is 'simulation'.

Desperate Gods is very clever in that, other than limiting room capacity to four players, it makes use of none of the 'additional restrictions/features' video game versions of boardgames usually have. Players don't simply click on dice to roll them, they must be picked up and shaken. Likewise, cards must be physically picked up from a deck, flipped over, and rotated and decks themselves can be combined and tossed around. There is no message which pops up to inform a player that it is their turn because there is no system in place to prevent players from doing stuff when it is not their turn and players themselves must decide when their turn begins and when it ends. Nothing pops up to say the game is over once the monsters are all defeated and players must manually count their victory points. You can accidentally move another player's piece, miscount spaces moved, forget to drag some silver coins over to your inventory card when you've defeated a monster and, in short, do just about anything other than move the board itself and throw stuff off the table. The game gives you a board and all its pieces along with a brief set of rules in a separate Read-Me file and then lets you interact with it however you want.

Another typical game of Desperate Gods

And that's all there is to it. It's a painfully, brilliantly simply concept, a virtual board game where players are able to freely interact with it, but all the bells and whistles which usually come with video game boardgames are things which I think many of us have simply taken to be natural and mandatory in video game adaptations and I really can't think of any game which does something even remotely similar to this (and I bet you'll have trouble thinking of such a game too, though feel free to note one in the comments section if one comes to mind). Even the vague wording on many spaces and cards works in favor of Desperate Gods as it encourages discussion and debate between players on how to interpret it, something which would never occur in other video game board games as the game would inevitably automatically do whatever it's trying to tell you it does. If you're looking for a masterpiece of game design and balance, this isn't it, but Desperate Gods brings some great innovation to the genre which I hope we'll see more of in the future and it's extremely fun to play with friends, especially with voice chat.

Of course, if all this still isn't enough reason to go try out this game-simulation-thing, I should mention that not only is it still being worked on and updated, but that it is also fully open source. At the time of this writing, there are already mods to expand the amount of players to 6, to make  the game fully mouse controlled, and a few other things along with many mods in the works to add in new cards or even to easily let players make their own cards. So, go give Desperate Gods a try - at the very least you're likely to have fun throwing cards and coins all over the place.

The game and a video can be found here: http://www.wolfire.com/desperate-gods