7 Grand Steps

Not going to take a lot of time here, but I figured it would be a good thing to let people know and/or warn them about a little game called 7 Grand Steps (it's got a longer full name, but I'll worry about that if the makers ever come out with more games in the series).  Why do I say warn?  I hopped into it about 6pm last night, and finally dragged myself away from it about 1am, and I still hopped back on for a couple of hours this morning... it's not for everyone (as the Metacritic reviews will attest to), but, if you've got the right buttons to press, it'll press them non-stop.

As far as what it is... it's a computer game that plays like a combination of a boardgame, pachinko machine, and boardwalk fortune-telling machine, for lack of a better way to describe it.  The goal, starting with a lone laborer in copper-age... Egypt?  Mesopotamia?  Somewhere in that general region... anyways, start and grow a family, track them over multiple generations, work their way up the caste ladder, and try to survive whatever "challenge" brings the age to an end.  So far, I got my family up through the ranks to the ruling class in the copper age, where an additional layer of play similar to the old "Hammurabi" game from Apple II days is added on, met the copper age challenge head-on, tried to proclaim my current family head as sole king, got told to retire or be exiled... but that was good enough to have my family stick in the nobility for the start of the bronze age.  Tried working our way back up to leadership in the new order, but playing general is a bit more tricky than playing agriculture minister... so we got punted back down to the lesser nobility again...  oh, and, throughout the game play, you get these little vignettes detailing turning points in the lives of your family members, which often have an impact on the game itself.

Past that, I'm not going to say much... it's got way more moving parts than the mechanical-looking interface lets on at first glance, and, for me at least, part of the fun was finding out how everything works.  Yes, there are instructions, but they're really not necessary, if you pay attention to how the game behaves.  Besides, if you follow that link at the top of the post, there's a free demo on their site... all it can eat is your time, and, if the $15 asking price for the full game is a bit steep for you, I wouldn't be surprised if it cropped up on another Steam sale one of these days.