Your Once-A-Day 4X Fix

Galactic Emperor: Hegemony is a multiplayer "4X" (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) game played via a web interface, with one turn update per day. The basic rules behind the game are simple--each player starts with a single star-system surrounded by 'neutral' ones, and the early game is a matter of expansion until you contact your opponents (usually 12 players in a game). Systems produce resources, which you use to build factories (which produce ships), improve your technology, and purchase a few special units. Ultimately, the player who controls the most systems wins.

Real-Time.. Risk? Meets 4X??

Imagine playing Risk in real time, with new armies showing up continually and attacks occurring as fast as you and your opponents can order them. Or imagine a 4X space conquest game stripped down to the barebones essentials. With graphics that look like they come from a minimalist shmup. With games typically taking 5 minutes, and playable online against up to 11 other players...

Sounds wild? It is, and you've just imagined Galcon.

A Modern Elite

Like Flatspace II, Jack of All Trades owes a lot to Elite, the pioneering space trading-and-combat game. You control a single starship, and as the game goes on, you can upgrade it from a tiny little trading craft with minor weapons to a large, powerful warship, or a large, fast cargo craft. And you have many options for what you want to do: trade and make big bux, become a bouty hunter, commit piracy on other traders, or get involved (and perhaps win) the ongoing interstellar war that (not incidentally) poses a risk to you if you stick with peaceful trading.

Smugglers 3 hearkens back to an earlier generation of 4X space exploration and conquest games. In a way, it's the sort of game I might have played on my old Apple II--but of course much prettier graphics.

You're a starship captain during an interstellar civil war, belonging to one of four factions in the war. Your primary activities involve trading (including smuggling illegal goods, if you so choose); accepting combat missions in support of your faction; or becoming a pirate and attacking planets. As usual in games like this, you start off with a tiny ship, and progress is mainly in the form of earning enough money and rising in rank so that you can get bigger and better ships.

This optional add-on expands the basic full version of the most-popular space trading game Smugglers 3 by many exciting features making it a must-have for everyone.

Space Empires is a long-running 4X series that, over the years, has been expanded, improved, and brought to a high level of polish by a small team that works collaboratively with its many fans, enlisting their contributions in testing and refinement. In other words, it's among the best in its genre.

Tasty Risk-4X Hybrid

From Apezone, developers of the excellent games Starships Unlimited and Battleship Chess comes this new title--an interesting combination of the tropes of the "4X" genre (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) and the mechanics of Risk.

Risk is, of course, a fine game, and has been the basis of some well-conceived computer games (notably Lux Delux); but it is so familiar a style as to be somewhat jejune. Starship Kingdoms adds a high degree of interest by incorporating technology development, putting production more directly under the players' control, and pitching the game as a struggle between two "major houses," with much of the galaxy controlled by neutrals who may join the weaker side in the mid-game.

Technologies players can develop include beam and missile weapons, armor, and star drives. The outcome of a battle depends not only on the number of ships in the opposing forces, but also on their relative technologies. (Battles are played out in attractive 3D.) Each turn, players are faced with a choice between devoting resources to additional ship construction, or advancing their technology--trade-offs such as these often make for interesting gameplay.

One of the flaws of Risk as a game is that the strong get stronger; the more continents you control, the more quickly you can overwhelm your opponents. Thus, the end-game is often dull--the strongest mopping up the weaker. Starship Kingdom counters this by having the 'neutrals' join the weaker side in mid-game, thus rebalancing the game and ensuring that the remainder retains interest.

Starship Kingdom has a wide variety of starmaps, which ensures repeat playability, and is playable both as a single-player game (against an AI opponent), as well as online, against another live player.

Starship as Hero

Starships Unlimited 3 has all the usual tropes of the 4X genre--a galaxy to explore, a deep tech tree, diplomacy with alien races--but with a major difference. The emphasis is, as the name suggests, on your starships. They're highly customizable, and the construction system makes each one you (or your opponents) build considerably more expensive than the last, so that even the largest civilization rarely has more than a dozen in play. This actually works to the game's advantage, because the starships become your protagonists, each individually interesting, and the missions they embark on have something of the feel of Star Trek to them, rather than being another mundane task in the long and (often) tedious grind of a typical 4X game.

Space Trading Goes Gonzo

Take an Elite-style game like Flatspace II. Set it in a cartoony universe where Zombies and Ninjas are waging an interstellar war. Tool around in a "starship" that's more like a Buick with a stardrive and lasers. Wage space battles against, among other things, space-going galleons and pterodactyls, and trade goods like cheese, paper, and kittens--no "industrial goods" or other boring stuff here. All to a loud, frenetic neopunk score--that's Ninjastarmageddon!.

As far as the gameplay goes, Ninjastarmageddon is familiar: You control a single ship, and tool around the galaxy, trading goods, fighting battles, going after pirates as a bounty-hunter, going pirate yourself, and finding and looting derelict ships.