Playing Every Game in the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality
PEGBRJE: Time Stone and Feud
Strategically deciding narrative nonsense and medieval abstraction
Time Stone is a point-and-click adventure created by Scared Square Games. It’s the solo indie project of Stuart Lilford out of the UK, the one who brought us the Splodey Vaders earlier. This time, nothing so explodey will be occurring. Instead, players will be following a young apprentice as she attempts to break out of her Professor’s house.
Time Stone involves Elle as she discovers that her wizard professor has been kidnapped by a warlock and going on about a Time Stone. Now locked within the house, she will need to rummage through his belongings to discover anything and everything usable that can break her out so she can rescue him — or at least warn everyone else. Following this, players will be trying to discover what interacts with what and what gives a simple prompt of dialogue. Traditional point-and-click stuff.
Thanks to the setting, it allows for some fantastical aspects, although the narrative style is more tongue in cheek about the entire thing. After all, this is a game in which the warlock is suspected to be in to S&M (most definitely) and the magic word for fire is Weiner. It’s not trying to take itself seriously in the slightest, and it helps to alleviate some of the point and click woes by making sure that players have a laugh or two while they try to figure out the next puzzle.
Time Stone knows what it wants to be; a short adventure of silliness mixed with a bit of cheeky puzzles. You’ll only get a glimpse of this world, with the game only taking ~30 minutes to complete, but that is enough time for players to immerse themselves in the silly humour and whimsical nonsense. If you want a short narrative adventure that makes you ask questions to things you didn’t want answers to, this is perfect for you.
Feud is a tactical strategy game created by Bearwaves, an indie studio based out of the UK. Players will take on the role of a grand strategist in a war against another, vying to become the greatest feudalist known around the world — wait that sounds wrong.
How Feud works takes a bit of explaining to fully understand, so I’ll try my best to compartmentalize it. Players are given 8 pieces on a 4x4 board that vaguely resembles a chess-like set up. There’s a King that needs protecting, along with 7 other units who have the specific goal of protecting their king and destroying all the other pieces. The first divergence (of a few) from chess is the Shield token, which stops the archers from using ranged attacks on whatever is behind the shield.
The King’s destruction is the primary goal of both players. This is achieved by removing all the hit points (indicated as dots), but there is a secondary objective; isolate every enemy piece to disable them.
Each turn, players will have two phases that they will cycle through. First comes the ‘switch’ phase in which the player needs to swap one of their tokens with another adjacent token. This keeps the game flowing so that players cannot turtle forever.
The second phase is Action, in which a piece can be selected and its special ability can be utilized. This can come in many different forms, from the attacks of the archers and knights to the wizard’s switcheroo or healer’s heal. The Action phase can be skipped if there isn’t a specific action that the player wishes to perform, which will switch it over to the other player.
The catch that ties in to that terrifying ‘isolate’ objective is that the only way a token can be interacted with is if it is connected to another token owned by the player. In the picture above, the white wizard token has his eyes closed as if asleep, because it is only touching black tokens. That means that it is unable to be utilized. This is where the terrifying strategy begins, for tokens that become isolated can be reawakened if another token is switched over beside it. A poorly swapped token with the enemy can lead to them having an active piece deep within your territory.
The tradeoff is that it goes both ways, meaning that both players will be attempting to switch their tokens throughout the board to get an edge on each other, while also not putting too much stock in attempting to isolate for fear of allowing pieces to split up one’s own team. Trust me, it happens.
And boy is it hard — I played on easy against the AI and I still haven’t won a single game. A switch can look super advantageous at one time, and then suddenly the opponent isolates three of the pieces because I didn’t think that far ahead. It’s super challenging to get a hang of, especially since destroyed pieces through combat leave empty spaces which cannot be traversed. A destroyed token can ruin an entire strategy by disallowing easy switches.
There’s so many little things going on, yet it comes off as such a deceptively easy game. There are only eight tiles to worry about, and even with the expected limited combinations it feels as if the possibilities are endless. But that’s what makes it fun; this constant struggle that takes so long just to get the hang of even if there doesn’t appear to be much to ‘get’. Granted, you can stall the game out infinitely if both you and the AI cut each other off but don’t isolate, which I unfortunately discovered. Try to avoid that if possible.
Regardless, it’s a strategy game that can fit anywhere and go anywhere, and I guarantee that it will stump you for at least 5 rounds. Try Feud now.
