Dave Reviews: Old McDonald Had A Spear

Lords of Xidit

The fantasy land of Xidit cries out for a champion, a leader that will save it from the terrible monsters which traverse the realm! Someone noble, someone grand of vision, someone who will conscript farmers to the cause before actual trained warriors!

In Lords of Xidit, you play the role of an army commander who is identical to all other commanders except for how sweet they look (fuck yeah, ninja lady). It's a programming game in the vein of Robo Rally; you select six actions, your commander does each of them in turn, and if someone ninjas in to take whatever you wanted to get, well, fuck off. At least you can't drop into a bottomless pit.

The possible actions are few, but they're enough. Each location has three roads leading away from it: blue, red, and black. If you choose one of those roads as your action, you travel that road from whatever location you're in, whether you want to anymore or not. You can conscript the lowest-level unit type available in the location, assuming it's a city; once all the possible conscripts are gone, this action does nothing. You can also do battle with a monster in a location. Or pass the move, if you think a delay will get you what you want.

Each monster requires a specific set of unit types to defeat it. You cannot use higher-level unit types in place of whatever's necessary. Beating monsters earns you two of three possible rewards: lyre points, towers, or gold. There's a different balance of these rewards on each monster, such that most of them have a pretty obvious 'two best' rewards, but in some cases you can't choose those (most likely because someone has a tower built in that location, forcing you to take the other two rewards). One curious mechanic is that tiles have a monster on one side and a city in the other, which means when a city runs out of conscripts, it flips into the monster pile, to be drawn when you run low on monsters, and so on forever. (There are titans you can fight in any location, with any set of troops, if no monsters are available to be drawn.)

That's all of the mechanics. Your goal is to score the most points in... well... it changes. And it's not exactly the most points.

The win condition is intriguing but takes a bit of getting used to. There are three ways of scoring, based on the aforementioned monster-smash rewards: lyre points (gained from having the most lyre tokens in a territory), the most levels of towers (height is irrelevant; nine one-story towers is better than two four-stories), and straight cash. These scoring methods are chosen randomly at the start of the game into the first, second, and third scoring slots.

Scoring for each of these is straightforward—count the appropriate item. How they apply to winning, however, is pretty different from most games. For the first scoring metric, being first does not matter; you only need to be in the top three. (In a three player game, an NPC gains points in each metric slowly as the game progresses so there's someone to eliminate in the first round.) For the second metric, you need to be in the top two. Having the highest score only matters with regards to the final metric, and you only need to beat the other person who has made it that far.

Since gold is hidden, and lyre points in the center are as well (they go into a strongbox), each game plays different in part around how readily available information is on the first two metrics. A game that counts towers first, where all info is open, plays differently than one where gold is first and everyone's just taking their best guess.

So, there are two main aspects to the game outside of the theme that will determine if you like it: the programming gameplay and the shifting win conditions. Programming requires some forethought, but if everyone is experienced, the "I know what you know, but you know that I know what you know" shenanigans can run deep. If you're into that, it's great. Likewise, some people are more comfortable going into a game knowing what their goal will be, and even those who are fine with a shifting win condition may struggle with some setups (ie. gold -> lyres -> towers) while excelling with others (towers -> gold -> lyres). It's a real challenge to be good at the game no matter the set of win conditions.

Short version: Lords of Xidit a game that's hard to broadly recommend, as there are a lot of speed bumps any given player may not like, but it's very good for the people who would enjoy the game that it is.

Score: 8/10 (clever scoring past deadline is hard)