itch.io

Hmm, when right click > Open on the app, it tries to open it from the terminal, which then generates this error:

“Club” can’t be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.

This software needs to be updated. Contact the developer for more information.

I played this and now when I goto the New York Times, it's like I can see the indicators next to the screen.

That's how I was doing it when I got the error unfortunately. I'm able to run other itch games with the right click method, but not this one..

Love it! A great adaption from a great work..

Not loading on Apple m1 pro MacOS 14.5,  getting: 

The application “Club” can’t be opened.

Just want to say, I play this game about once a year, and recommend it all the time!

An awesome idea!

Cool idea! But I don't think that continuing to seek appeasement would result in the USSR launching nukes.. My understanding is that the positioning of nuclear weapons in Cuba was because of the US installing nuclear missiles in Turkey.. So I'd expect a negotiated peace route to result in Krushchev requesting their removal.. Which is essentially what happened anyways but with more brinkmanship in between. 
Nice - I see that the removal of the missiles from Turkey are included in the correct ending.. though in the game as in real life, it's unclear why all the other posturing was needed..

Nice - I like how this game changes over time, and remains tense up till the end.. Was really satisfying turning my meadows into farms and turning into a more self sustaining country - I really felt that dynamic! There's really a feel of holding off these forces, hoping to out last them. Great stuff!  

Refugees and Operation Dragoon seem to be critical cards (I see them in the Menu) but they never show up in the game - I tested this out by just discarding every turn and sure enough they didn't show. Without these it's impossible to hold back the Axis Allies or win.. Is there some hidden rule here, after which they'll be unlocked?

Having a hard time with this one! One thing that's challenging for me is that it's very hard to figure out what's going on. 

Right now, if a UAV is destroyed, we get very little information about what happened. If we at least got the location of the UAV that was destroyed that would be great, but would love to get more info on what actually destroyed it. Like I know I'm outside reach of an air strip, but it would be great to know 100% that my mental model matches what the game is doing.

Sometimes my habitats seemed to be killed by ships that were within one range, even when I had surrounded my habitat with UAVs and mines. If that's true, then I'm completely puzzled about how that's possible and what to do about that.

I gave up trying to defend my Heavy Lift Ships, since it seemed like no matter how I positioned UAVs and mines, there was no way to protect them from being destroyed (and this was after I made sure I was 7 hexes away from airstrips). So now I just move them along the top of the map. 

Something that could help is making the process for moving thing faster. So far, I'm moving all my ships together and it takes 12 clicks just to move 4 ships to one hex. Would love it if there was a shortcut to move all, or if the ship was autoselected when tapping the hex at least.

So I'd say here's my situation:

1. I don't know the cause of my habitats/ships dying.
2. So I don't get good information about what I'm doing wrong or how I can change up to do better next time.

3. Meaning I have to do a lot of random experiments to see try and find a strategy that doesn't obviously suck. 

4. It's slow to take actions, so this whole process takes a lot of time, and I end up playing "lets see what happens if" games where I, for instance, just leave the Cable Layer's and Heavy Lift Ships alone while I see if the UAVs can find any enemy ships. 

Hope this is helpful!

Love it - really communicates the theme! Would love to see some of the positions only completed if both the guy and girl were in specific places, rather than it being disconnected, that would cut down on times when I'm just pushing her around. 

But love this, great work!

Powerful work - just the dynamic itself, a child with a slingshot, trying to take down rockets, simply and sadly conveys so much. 

I keep coming back to this game.. It's due for a sequel.. The UAW Stand Up strike!

The sequence leading up to the evening is great, and feels like a real world.. 

Since I was already familiar with the story of the monkey's paw, I didn't much care for a an exact retelling, which didn't seem to fit the world you had built.. Maybe that could have worked if it integrated more into the world - perhaps an alien artifact and with a different sequence of events than the monkey's paw story. But is this thematically important to the father's life?  I'd be more interested in why the cats are doing bizarre things, is there something agitating them? Is there some mystery involving the company the son works at? 

Great voice acting and art, would definitely play another game that takes place in the same world.

Oh and it just occurred to me, the monkey's paw is definitely  a convenient way for the company to avoid blame for dangerous work conditions. Yeah they are totally liable. 

Pretty neat! Though it's pretty easy to reach a point where you have all the oil you need, and it wasn't clear what to do next.. I enjoyed struggling through the beginning learning the right balance of things..

Nice! I enjoyed the process as always - steep learning curve while figuring out a strategy that's not terrible, and then tweaking until I found the dominant strategy, with -0.6 degree change and -755 Co2 and 9 geo-engineering. Very satisfying! 

I've been playing Scythe lately, and I really love how there's negative feedback loops built into the game - like you can make more workers, but the cost of using the workers goes up dramatically as you expand your workforce, meaning there's an incentive to keeping your labor force smaller.

I wonder if there is some cost to having too many activists? My winning strategies at the moment were to get as many activists as possible into local government to base build, but I can imagine my ability to build a base could be limited if I'm focusing on recruitment at the expense of getting any wins. 

Anyways, good stuff, and I like that you're trying out this different configuration!

Hey I'm curious - do you have a process for researching historical events for these games?  Like do you read a book on the topic? Or watch documentaries? Or just via internet? How do you decide what goes in the game and what gets cut? What gets represented in the game play and what doesn't? Would love to hear the process for getting this level of understanding of the relationships between orgs and interest groups and the curation process!

As always, love the meaning yall built in, definitely felt that dynamic regarding time..

Sure enough, got a total victory in 27 turns.. This one is definitely fun to see how quickly it can be done.. It really is about making an efficient machine. Even though the gameplay is a bit on the mundane side once you've figured out the process and neutralized the enemy, there's a certain geeky fun in getting the timing right and switching your machine from a resource generating machine to a war machine. I could probably trim down a few turns by switching a bit earlier (stock piled 39 resources this time around before switching.. 35 probably would of been fine).. But probably not motivated to go through it again to do that.. 

Nice simulation! 

Total victory in 36 turns! That was a challenging one to adopt to.. Was losing a lot before I found my way..  Began to realize that the military and infiltration blockers always rose to the top and that it's not too hard to completely disable the enemy, just need to get rid of those cruise missiles.. Then I optimized my play by really getting into the deck building component - not being so quick to pick up cards, and thinning out cards that were not useful (or no longer useful) for my strategy with the EU..  When the time came to run through Donbas, I was a well oiled machine, making sure to stockpile resources before starting the combat.

There was really an aspect of optimizing the machine for different purposes - first I was just trying to survive and put up a solid defense, then I had to build resources, and finally go to war.. Probably could even do a bit better with those last 2 phases.. tempted to try again!

Liking this so far! Just a quick note as I play: Looks like you can play a sigint card, and then undo last move, and repeatedly play it to get all the intel for free! After undoing the  intel remains on the card. Same thing with Diplomacy - you can remove an enemy card, and then undo - the diplomacy card returns, but the enemy card is gone.  Sometimes with EU Support too.. I'll note this seems to be inconsistent - I just played sigint and it now won't let me undo it.. So maybe this only works under certain conditions.
K I guess this is a general problem - was just able to use it with Harpoon ARMs and completely take out the black sea..

That said, even with some of the advantage from the glitch, having a hard time besting the computer at this!

Clever idea! But I actually really did want to read the text of each question.. Wish it paused or went into slow motion.. Or maybe at least if you died it would keep the text box up so you can finish reading it? As is, it's futile but also frustrating to not read the lines I'm dying over..  

Really well thought out! Very targeted, strategic ideas around apply pressure to businesses, the court system, local government, and law enforcement in order to bring back and strengthen democratic systems..

Found myself using mass protests to fight back national guard defensives.. Found I only needed the slightest support from the general public and the courts, and usually only at strategic times.. 

I'm seeing a theme of applying targeted pressure towards the groups that advance the immediate goals rather than wasting time spreading around focus.. Accomplish one big push and the switch focus before devoting resources elsewhere..

Here I found an optimal strategy pretty quickly and found I could ignore just about everything else. This felt unfortunate given the interesting sounding dynamics between foreign and domestic actors, marxists and slave owners, etc. Also, I landed myself 2 ironclad producing cards which felt ridiculously overpowered, and allowed me to further focus my play.

It made it so when the card "abolish slavery" came around, I was like, "That sounds interesting, butttt right now I need to guns so I can fend off the confederacy and amass enough to do a series of surprise attacks." 

But maybe that's part of the lesson? When you've got a violent force that's constantly threatening to move in on your land and shut down your economy, and stop you from defending yourself (cotton -> legitimacy, legitimacy -> conscription -> guns), the push and pull of domestic and international interests is largely irrelevant. 

This is pretty interesting! But it's barely playable due to the fact that the controls are all backwards when you start playing.. I get the idea there, but I don't think it actually goes with your game's theme - it's not like people going in reverse in tenet actually had to walk themselves backwards to move forward.  So this concept doesn't actually pay off in any way, it's just frustrating and awkward.

Besides, I think you have something interesting here, walking around shooting the bullet in the gun is a concept I haven't seen before, and I suspect would be interesting and challenging with standard controls.

If the controls were changed, I'd be interested to explore what you've created here more - I am definitely curious about what normal time will be like..  I'm wondering if I'll see my character running around doing everything I did.. Sounds really cool!

Glad it's helpful!  I'll add that the challenge of decoding the abbreviations and separating the signal from the noise was definitely a part of the appeal to playing this.. Here are the notes that helped me develop the intuition to arrive at a solution:

Mi-14PL (Helicopter)     
  E     Electronic Warfare          Air + Surface     
  M     Magnetic Anomaly Detector   Undersea (50% if right on top of) 
Skinny Rocket    NASMS surface-to-air     
  P      Phased Array Radar         Air (r6) Surface (100, 100) 
Drone              TB2 UAV     
  O     Optical Sensors             Surface/Mobile (50, 25, 16)  
Air base     
  T     Na(T)o Intelligence         Undersea (15% all over)

Thanks for making these games! I really don't play a lot of games these days, but there's something particularly unique about what you're creating here.. Probably it's the degree of depth, and the way in which the games pull their details from reality - so learning about the game is also learning about details from the world, which feels more worthwhile than just learning best strategies for beating a normal game.

I'll also say, these are the first Hex based games dealing with this scale (zoomed out to the level of nationstate) I've played .. I'd be curious to hear about games that inspire you that you'd recommend. Thanks!

For this one I felt a bit like a new commander, just out of Commander school and thrown into combat, forced to evaluate everything taught in textbooks, to pick out what matters on the battle field. The real challenge here is separating what you need to know from what you don't need to know. There are so many different sensors with so many different affects on so many different units it can be overwhelming, but once you reduce the list just to the elements which are relevant for this scenario, it slowly becomes comprehendible. Not easy mind you.. I took me a few play throughs to eke out a minor victory, and many restarts before I figured out all the bad ideas, and finally developed a fairly solid strategy. I was pleased to find the AI of some of the units seemingly intelligent - the migs seem to behave a bit like a swarm of bees.. I could lead them alone, and they seemed happy to protect their objective, but as soon as I tried to eliminate them, they became unpredictable, costing me a couple wins even as I started feeling experienced.. 
This was the first naval hex game of this collection that I committed to completing, I imagine some of the skills I picked up will be transferable to the other naval games, so looking forward to trying those out too. 

Nice work!

Awesome - I actually caught that film at the time it came out, but I don't remember anything, it'll be cool to check it out with fresh eyes.. Thanks!

Damn... Thanks for that context, pretty fascinating and inspiring stuff! Any films you recommend on this topic?

My pleasure! I know it can be useful to see how people play the game in practice.. Oh and regarding Operation Savanah - it occurs to me that another way to address this is by giving the SADF one more square as their homebase which is not controllable by the player (like the last square in the new Ukraine / Russia game), so they could never be completely extinguished. With that kind of a change, then those Operation Savanah cards would remain relevant, and there would continue to be a need for weapons later on in the game.. Of course it's possible that might be out of alignment with the meta-narrative here.. Was it possible for the ANC to conquer the SADF once and for all? Or did it remain a persistent threat up until end?

Played this again and recorded it this time - I really like how this one has a lot of challenging decisions, the consequences of which you have to balance against each other. Choosing to keep support up by spending intelligence is a hard decision, and I like that there's a constant threat, and a limited ability to defend against it once the USSR falls. Watching a "U" change to a "S" has never felt so heavy! I also really enjoyed looking up all the terms, and that the game is teaching me about the relationships between all the different interests, which is what gameplay does best. It's fun untangling what you're communicating about the different groups given their response to events that occur. Big lesson this go around: If you don't have activist support, you simply can't even think about entering into formal negotiations, domestic support alone won't cut it... This is definitely one of my favorites of these card-like games.

Nice idea, unfortunately it's teaching the wrong way to think about password security.. For those actually interested, google Diceware

LOLWT = Laughing out loud while terrified
Wow really good! Some feedback: Spent 7 minutes or so running around the city before finding the building entrance, but maybe the entrance didn't read to me as anything important the first time, since we don't call them the same thing in the states. The audio of the monsters are great and terrifying! I couldn't finish it, because it freaked me out too much. 4/5 stars

Interesting! Restarted a couple times as I established my strategy of installing spies in victory point areas, and exfiltrating spies from any areas without them, to avoid having to spend too much time shoring up stealth points..  ended in a Major victory without doing much else.. The idea of embedding spies sounds exciting, but I don't really think I got the vibe of what was at stake.. Perhaps this is because I didn't take advantage of the cards that scored VP points.. I'll give it another shot sometime.. 

Intriguing! Feels like the first part of the first part of the opening scene of a movie.

Fair enough - your tactic worked, I did indeed look up some of these terms!

Loved this one! Living in Detroit, feeling grateful to see this focus on labor history in games.  I love how as I play I can tell a story about what is happening - at first I don't have enough worker support to fend off the racist workers who ruin my support with Black voters, but it's very satisfying later on when I've got the worker support to shut down those actions! Feedback: Some actions are unclear, like I would like to know that I'm converting my management spies into organized crime before I press the button to do that! And it seems like the only affect of this change is that management can no longer bully their spies? This sounds like something which would have some drawback.. The balance is a bit off, I used food very rarely and always had a big surplus so was constantly throwing away the opportunity to do blankets and food drives.. I'll also say it feels a bit weird to get cards that are no longer useful, like secret meetings, when I've already got all the workers on my side and there's no way to lose their support.. Also, when the enemy does actions that have no effect, sometimes that is cool, if I've taken some action to make their actions ineffective, but other times it just feels like they're just inept.. trying to take my movement away when I have none for example.. It would also be great to clarify terms like afl, cio, craft unionism etc.. I'm glad I can figure out what they learn from a gameplay standpoint, but it wouldn't be bad to have a few words of flavor text to describe what the implications are of those things.. Anyways, really enjoyed this one, the gameplay really conveyed the theme, and would love to play more games around organizing like this!

Great analysis, love that you're making games infused with this much meaning. 

Damn, I needed to make concessions in order to fend off a political foe, but I hadn't yet purged my activist leaders of extremists and replaced them with moderates, and now it's too late because the USSR was overthrown so I no longer could get the intelligence I would need to do so. Meanwhile I'm not on speaking terms with my one moderate activist after doing too many arms trades. So now we don't get free elections. Damn't Gorbachev, couldn't you just have kept things together a little while longer?