So I’ve spent the last ten columns or so trying to convince you to put down the gamepad or mouse and give some old fashioned, face-to-face boardgaming a shot—and now I’m going to completely reverse that agenda.

I want to try to convince some boardgamers out there to check out one of the most interesting PC games I’ve played in a long time. Alright, I confess, it’s kind of a cheat because the game is practically an electronic boardgame that could, in theory, be produced as a box of cardboard bits, cards, dice, and plastic figures and it would be essentially the same creation sans AI opponents. The game is ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES, designed by Vic Davis and published by his own independent Cryptic Comet imprint.

I noticed a banner ad for ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES on a boardgaming site and given my general interest in matters post apocalyptic I thought I’d have a look at the website for the game. Lo and behold, Mr. Davis chose “boardgame mechanics” as one of the bulleted sales points. Since I’m always interested in seeing how boardgame mechanics translate into computer games (and vice versa) I was sold, and before long I was immersed in Mr. Davis’s idea of after-the-bomb civilization and survival, with four factions (including a really unique race of Mythos-inspired aliens) vying for control of a wasteland comprised of hex-based terrain tiles and deploying everything from fuel-air explosives to gigantic mechs to gain control of resource production points and claim superiority amongst the titular empires of Armageddon.

Although it is definitely an example of the 4x-style computer game and its influences are obviously classic PC games like MASTER OF ORION and CIVILIZATION, ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES incorporates a comprehensive menu of tabletop gaming elements and as such it’s almost like an electronic version of a boardgame that never existed. If a “real world” version of the game did exist, it would likely be regarded as a classic piece of ‘Ameritrash’ mayhem complete with prodigious die rolling, mutant massacres, outposts overrun with cannibals and/or zombies, weapons of mass destruction (including my beloved fuel-air explosives), and plenty of dinosaur-on-tank action.

However, it would likely also be practically unplayable given the amount of recordkeeping and administration evident in handling five separate resources including action points, tracking persistent damage among units in any number of stacks, managing what amounts to two hands of cards, and performing potentially very long and very detailed tactical battles. Playable or not in a face-to-face setting, the fact of the matter is that ARMAGEDDON EMPIRES would likely be a very, very long game—and that’s before figuring in player interaction and diplomacy. Fortunately, since this is a computer game a lot of the hard work you’d have to do to have fun is contracted out to the CPU.

With turn-based mechanics emphasizing strategic movement and the capture of key resource points with army “stacks” similar in concept to those in the HEROES OF MIGHT AND MAGIC games, it isn’t hard to draw a very clear connection to a board-based war game. Further, you have to manage your base, make strategic decisions about what to deploy and where, and there’s an impetus to develop your empire through upgrades and increasing your ability to turn out higher powered units as your infrastructure becomes solvent.

Interestingly, the units in the game aren’t depicted as individual pieces but rather as cards similar to what you’d find in a booster pack of MAGIC: THE GATHERING or a similar collectible card game— complete with keyword abilities, deployment costs measured in the game’s five resources, all salient statistics, and top-quality genre artwork. So an army stack is really a set of cards that the player has deployed and grouped together including, possibly, a leader that imparts bonuses to the army. There are plenty of cards for each faction, and each faction features different strengths and weaknesses so there’s really a tremendous amount of replayability built into the game.

There are also building cards so you can expand your material holdings in the wasteland, air support cards that offer a unique way of depicting bombing runs and other death-from-above affairs, and special attachments representing special weapons and mutations that make hard-asses even harder. It’s really a neat system, and like any good CCG, deck building is part of the strategy; there’s a tool provided so you can try out different deck builds or you can download some good “starter decks” from the game’s website.

Combat in the game is practically a complete CCG-style card game in and of itself. It’s completely tactical with units taking turns dealing out the damage and taking advantage of special abilities. It is a dice-based system, so expect to see lots of digital dice flying in any given combat. The dice mechanic is based, it seems, on rolling big numbers of dice faced with faction symbols and blank sides. Faction symbols provide a hit on offense, a block on defense. Simple stuff. I like the simplicity of it all, but the binary setup results in some amazing odds-beating upsets—like rolling 10 dice and not getting a single hit.