Swamp Castle

This is the first and smallest of the Magincia games by Philip Kempton. From the other games I've played by him, I associated this author with stats-heavy, highly mechanics-driven gameplay in a relatively low-fantasy medieval world where you manage combat and troops.

This game was more of the same, or, rather, less of the same. I kind of spoiled myself by playing the big classics first and then playing the smaller, earlier prototype.

In this one, you're placed in charge of Swamp Castle, one of the worst castles around. You have to manage finances, troops, and scheming neighbors, as well as barbarian attacks and what may or may not be a dragon.

The game does punch above its 100K wordcount, as this author uses terse descriptions but a lot of actions, but it's still over pretty quickly. More importantly, I think it was less well-tuned than the author's other games. It's very easy to die if you don't know what's coming, requiring you to replay several times to make it to the end (unless you have a good strategy from the get-go). I even tried easy mode, which gave me tons of money, but still failed a few times. It's short enough that replay isn't that bad, though, so I didn't mind trying a few extra times.

But, I felt like the sequels were much stronger and didn't really depend on this one. I don't think anyone would be missing anything if they skipped out on this.

(After writing this, I looked around online and found quite a few fans of this game, so take everything I'm saying with a grain of salt! The main features that I didn't like as much, like easy deaths, short length, high replayability, etc. may be exactly the features someone is looking for in a game).