I’ve been so consumed by working on this cute little board game that I forgot to write horror this week!

Tiny Conflicts is a 4x game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) in the vein of Sid Meier’s Civilization series, but for the tabletop. The vision for the game is to take tiny, cute hoards of beings and smush them against each other in a black-and-white sketchbook landscape.

Using transparent playing cards, you can stack small groups of your units on top of each other by sliding the cards into sleeves, cobbling together a completed image of a mob by stacking the three layers.

The intention is to create an environment where you feel immersed on three levels. First, you have the godlike player perspective, seeing the entire board and making decisions on how to build and develop cities and capture territory. Second, by controlling a unique character avatar to perform actions on the table, you will take the individual perspective. And with these mobs of little guys appearing everywhere that you touch with your choices, you get a moblike perspective.

They found a berry bush!

Little seedlings working on a farm.

I think a lot of 4x games lean too far into history, stern tone, and realism. This game subverts those ideas while also staying simple enough to play with your hands instead of a keyboard and mouse.

One example of the simplicity is how resources and development are handled. To expand your city, you play down building cards. These cards have resources in each corner, and to build the next building you must overlap a corner. In doing so, you cover a resource, spending it to gain the new corners’ resources. To know what you have, just count the icons on all the corners that are showing. And to know your gold income, count the corners that are overlapping.

I think this concept shows great promise, and the art style is very endearing to me. I might update again in the future to tell you how it’s going.

Have a great week!
Alex