Fled Review

Game design is hard; one of the reasons it is rip-your-eyes out difficult is because people often don’t seem to be sure what games are. Some people think they’re products, and that you can somehow commodify fun. Some people are spiritual and believe in games having magic powers to stimulate collective imagination. For me, games are about the problem of winning—what do we have to do to win, what do we have to sacrifice, what social contract do we form so we can compete for the win, what the hell does winning even mean—I could go on forever.

It’s tough, is what I’m saying.

I’ve played Feudum a lot, it has many compelling ideas. Mark Swanson seems to be a guy who is creating games that are very ambitious in scope. Feudum presents you with a player-driven economy with a fascinating push-pull mechanism between various player-run guilds wrapped around a difficult grind-out-your points system that’s essentially fulfilling contracts. Fled, by the same tack, is extremely ambitious. It’s a tile laying game where the tiles become the board AND are used to move your pawn on that board AND you use to make into resources/points AND use those resources/points to make more points AND potentially use those tiles to trigger…

The post Fled Review appeared first on Meeple Mountain.