Slipways

One of those games that is so much like a puzzle game. It takes a few tries before it starts to click and your people stop hating you. Once it clicks and you finish that first game and find out you only got 3 stars, you're blown away and you have to go back to try for 4 stars. Then you get only 3 stars again, but now your empire was a lot bigger and you can plan it out so well. So you go back for another, then it's 3am in the morning. Loads of fun. Nice casual turn based game. 5 stars all the way. Been waiting months for this to come out and buy it first day.

Slipways brings you 4x interstellar strategy with one of the Xs missing (exterminate). If you are looking for a space empire trade, exploration management game but do not feel like micromanaging a sprawling civilization or do not want to deal with tedious real-time combat (at all), then this may be for you. Slipways is very straight forward in what it requires you to do, but also allows for many choices on how to approach developing your planetary colonies through technology unlocking, colony production choices, as well as giving you a list of missions to accomplish from time to time from your alien benefactors. The game is somewhat of a puzzle as you choose which planets to connect to each other and what they will produce for their neighbors, but I'm finding this to be very satisfying and not frustrating. The graphics and sound are pleasant and undistracting. The interface and options are adequate, keeping in line with being a game that is unencumbered with too many features. Truly a surprise release.

I'm going to agree with another review, this is a puzzle game with an RNG. It gets billed as a 4X with everything but the eXtermination. That is a bad billing. TL;DR: If you're a min maxer or hate RNG, avoid this game like the plague. If you don't mind the game punishing you for not seeing over the horizon, and like just trying to put things together, I think it's a good fit for you. I love it, and I loathe it. Thus the middle road review; hopefully this will let those of you who will love it find it and those of you who will hate it, do something else. The game play is this; there is an area of "explored" space that opens up around the starting wormhole and any settled planets. You launch probes at these "signal" spheres that remain to reveal them for what type of planet they are. Then you start settling planets and connecting them to form trade routes and (hopefully) satisfy their needs. If it doesn't work for you, there is a rewind button that restores time and puts it back to before things. So far, so good, I love it. But the rewind kicker? You can't have revealed new information. Forgot to check your council and belatedly do so? Half a second later, you'll be kicking yourself for not rewinding to when they offered their tasks. This throws me out of the flow so hard I get whiplash. Settle a planet at the edge of known space just so that you can expand? Better hope you guessed what the RNG is going to throw at you or that planet may suffer from no resources that it can import. Seen those fancy tech bypass tricks and things? I hope you're not waiting on them at the start of your empire, because by the time you unlock, you'll be working on an entirely different area and racing the clock. This game pulls hard on the desire to min-max, and then cuffs you upside the head when you try. Play for the zen, for the fun, for the novel.

I bought Slipways on a whim after reading some reviews, and ended up spending half the long weekend playing it. The game design is superb - some other reviewers have mentioned that euro-board-game vibe which I agree with. It's got a great mix of bite-size decision making, where you want to plan your moves ahead and try to maximise the best links between the planets. I'm a big fan of Stellaris and Civ, and Slipways is definitely scratching that itch of 'one more turn' as well as satisfying the inner builder in me. If this is a puzzle game, it's the same sort of puzzle I enjoy when I plan out my cities and districts in Civ 6. In challenging difficulty, the economy also becomes a focus and I failed the first campaign map a few times, but it just made me hungry to improve, and keep trying new combo's of the aliens and their benefits and tech choices, and managed to succeed on the last turn of my latest run. I think I was helped by RNG as well but that's OK! Endless mode is also a chill way to experience the game. Time will tell if I'll keep coming back to Slipways, but so far I'm very impressed.