Approaching Horde! by Craig Ruddell
That was surprisingly fun. Approaching Horde! is a worker placement game where we have to survive the zombie apocalypse by smartly investing in a variety of pursuits: finding more survivors, farming, improving our farming techniques, building up our defences, searching for a zombie cure. I played the game on Normal and didn’t manage to find the cure even after three tries (although the third time I was two thirds of the way there with 45 researchers working on it), but I was entertained throughout. The use of real time was effective, generating a sort of tension that one rarely gets from a Twine game.
I have one problem with Approaching Horde!, which is that it isn’t transparent enough. Some things are clear: for instance, it’s clear that improving your farm yield from 3 to 4 will generate a 33% increase in farm productivity, while improving it from 4 to 5 will generate a 25% increase in productivity, and so on. I also assume that the speed at which the different tasks are performed goes up linearly with the number of people working on it. But I never got a good idea of, for instance, the influence of captured zombies on research speed; the influence of happiness on research speed and other activities; the influence of defences or damage on anything; and so on. Strategic games usually have more transparency than this, e.g., when we see that our city in Civilization has 3 angry populace because [and then there’s a whole list of factors]. Although I enjoyed my time with the game, I feel less inclined to go back and master it because I don’t have the required information on which I can base my decisions.
Edit: played a fourth time in which I focusses on defences and an escape tunnel for an easy win. There’s an amusing look at ‘our’ notebook when you receive this victorious ending.