by: Michael Barnes

Bronze is a new Euro-style tile laying PC strategy game from Shrapnel Games and developer Dreamspike Studios. You take the role of one of several Bronze Age Mesopotamian cultures and attempt to claim dominance over an 8x8 grid depicting a patch of Middle Eastern turf. Each civ has at its disposal several unique building types that generate money, claim territory, or take over another player’s holdings. Once all of the land is developed, the civilization that has the most of it wins the game.

Gameplay is simple. On each turn, you place a tile adjacent to a tile you control. The interface is just about as straightforward as it gets: left click cycles through your available tiles, right click places it. Build mines next to mountains to gain extra income, build cities to claim 3x3 swaths of unclaimed farmlands, and place bridges to cross water. Where it gets more interesting is in the attacking tiles that are available: army camps, ziggurats, and palaces can be placed to claim enemy territory for your own. Building citadels or taking advantage of terrain such as hills is critical to protect your holdings but if all else fails some civilizations can build an embassy to enforce a six turn armistice.

Bronze can be a nasty, ruthless game with tiles swapping ownership at the most inopportune times and well-laid offensive pieces leaving once-glorious civilizations in shambles. It’s hardly conflict on the scale of a more baroque conquest game, but it’s certainly more aggressive in nature than a standard game of Carcassonne. The AI is cold, methodical, and very challenging even on lower difficulties. This is an AI that knows how to play its own game; however over the course of several defeats it becomes fairly easy to puzzle out the decisions it’s going to make. Multiplayer is available, but unfortunately it’s strictly hotseat. I’m not sure that Bronze makes enough of an argument to convince the tabletop crowd to play it that way over a game of Tigris and Euphrates.

A full tutorial, one-off games, random maps, and a survival mode are available. The meat of the game is in its ten campaign modes that cover several Bronze Age periods and feature different civilizations rated for their overall level of challenge to play. Between each match, you choose an area to migrate your civilization. If the contested area is adjacent to more than previously conquered regions then there is an advantage by way of extra starting squares on the new map. It’s a nice “big picture” framework for the fairly simple game, and the requirement to beat the campaign in a certain amount of time lends urgency to each match—a couple of losses late in a campaign and your Hittites might go down for the count.

It’s a neat little game that would probably garner praise from the Eurogamer set for its luckless determinism and abstraction as well as its mix of casual gameplay and middleweight strategic depth. There is a good mix of elements on display; the abstraction and simple rules are balanced with small details that give the game more thematic heft than expected from the genre. In particular, I liked how each civilization’s tile mix is slightly different to reflect at least a minor degree of historicity. People that did more invading than cultivating may not get mines at all but will have the advantage of less expensive army camps and more peaceful nations might have access to the powerful embassy tiles. Notes that provide a little background for each group are appreciated. There is a history lesson wrapped inside the tile placing.

Other than providing a reasonable amount of content, it is a little disappointing that the game could just as easily have been represented by physical game. The production is minimal at best, although the graphics are simple and attractive. There is no animation or visual panache- it’s very dry and po-faced and not in a good way. The upshot of all of this is that system requirements are very low and it is an uncluttered, accessible product and for many Eurogamers, dry and po-faced are likely considered positives anyway.