Amberspire

Amberspire is every bit a Lunar Division game, leaning into many of the same distinctive choices that were also made by their previous title, The Banished Vault. The most dramatic of these for the casual player is the game's manual, which is nearly 100 pages long and which you are strongly recommend to refer to when getting started. Fortunately, the manual is available as an in-game menu, but Lunar Division clearly trust that their players are not afraid of a little reading. You do not need to read the whole manual, but you should certainly read the front sections that describe the overall rules and objectives. Once you finish the tutorial and settle in, Amberspire feels like a game with board game sensibilities that couldn't possibly exist as a physical board game. Some buildings give you a die to roll, but you can only roll a handful of dice each turn. Depending on the resources those dice yield, you might be able to add to a construction project in progress, or might be able to trade the result away at a marketplace building for "influence," or feed them to yet other buildings to grow your city's population. The half-dozen buildings you start with exist in a simple rock-paper-s…

Amberspire is the story of a city that, like all cities, is subject to forces beyond any one persons control. Whether its a natural disaster or a booming tea trade, everything that happens to your city and its anonymous inhabitants is nothing but a roll of the dice. It can be a difficult game to wrap your head around: a series of bad rolls can seemingly doom your city. I found it helps to consider the dice as something else: fate, luck, the will of whatever gods inhabit the mausoleum's spire. All three possibilities have their precedent in human history. And once I accepted I had no control over my city, I found I could control an awful lot. The dice may be random, but which dice are rolled when is up to you. Equilibrium therefore is the name of the game. Example: a bad event can be followed by an intentional slowing of tea production, refocusing your economy on less profitable but less dangerous goods. But once you've understood the basics of managing your city (and the random chance that comes with it) you might start having questions. Is the tea die an event die because tea houses are meeting grounds for dissidents, or is it merely that more social spaces means more opportunit…

This one is weird as hell but I appreciate that having played so many city builders in the past. The sort of tile placement and the radius of the buildings is a cool and unique- albeit at times frustrating to learn- mechanic.

Amberspire feels like a board game, and very much plays like one, but with a complexity almost impossible to achieve on a table top. The writing is subtle but compelling, and the art is just spellbinding. Plus, I'm pretty sure I can hear the Rusting chime in my sleep now, probably nothing to worry about.

The short version: Recommended, I enjoyed it a lot, but I think full price might be a bit much for most gamers. Pros Fun, tactile, and meaningful dice rolling Enjoyable game mechanics that are fun to get into Graphics, sound, and soundtrack all have a cohesive, unique, and compelling style Excellent soundtrack A helpful set of UI tooltips that make play easy and fun Cons Shallow lore A few easily fixed UI foibles: Jerky camera, insufficient zoom-out, map recenters at end of turn The long version: Amberspire plays like a board game that would probably be too complex to play on a tabletop. This game is a lot of fun and definitely does something that I have not seen in other city builders - It bases all your progress on rolling dice. Buildings produce dice and you use those dice to build more buildings or increase your influence - influence is what makes you progress through the game. The main challenge in the game is that dice can only be used within a certain range of your buildings, so you have to create a cleverly overlapping pattern of buildings that can support each other. Sometimes you will roll a resource that you don't need, so to avoid wasting it, you will build stru…

Way too high price for what you get, you're paying for the author's pretentions.