Mavors is a multiplayer tile strategy game with an emphasis on city building. Resources are drawn from tiles and refined by buildings the player places. Materials travel from building to building via roads. The ultimate goal being to create armaments for units in order to defeat other players in the session. This game, my first game, was conceived as a criticism of other tile based strategy games. Perhaps my friend group is different, but the best part of a session was always warfare. An aspect of strategy games that has been continually discounted in recent years. Here, warfare takes center stage. The entirety of the city building and population dynamics is a means for the player to create a military industrial complex. Additionally, rather than a bland linear progression of units, the player must balance the resource cost and effectiveness of a given unit in a given situation. For example: Units can be equipped with one of four melee weapons: swords, axes, maces, or spears. Swords get and extra attack upon a successful attack indefinitely, but have low armor penetration. Making them excellent for trash killing, but horrific against heavily armored units. Maces just sport high armor penetration, and nothing else. Axes ignore the effects of shields. While spears determine their armor penetration via speed and allow for denser units. So, you can see how a unit's effectiveness depends on the opposing unit's composition. I also tried to minimize tedium in this game. You don't need to move your lumbermills or your mines. Both will expand out their gathering range as they deplete the surrounding tiles. Additionally, you can queue up units and even turns. Nothing forces you to take action every turn. Probably the best innovation I made in this game is simultaneous movement, not who clicks first, but rather that a unit is given future movements and actions that are played out at the end of the turn. If you like the sound of this, or at least appreciate my attempt at novelty, then give this game a go.
