I’ve been following the Android version of this, and grabbed a copy today (there’s a reason this isn’t in the mobile game forum - more on that in a minute):
On the surface this is a rudimentary 4X title. Settlers build cities, which gather resources (food and materials) automatically every turn from the 8 tiles surrounding them. Food is used to expand cities, and materials for everything else (purchasing troops, exploration). Each city can be expanded 3 times when the food bar is filled, and every expansion you have a choice of two structures, pushing back the FOW three tiles in every direction, getting a settler to build a new city, or converting the food to materials. You can have no more than 3 cities active at a time.
The catch is that the land is dieing. Every turn tiles become dead spaces, and the goal of the game is to accumulate 200 victory points before the entire board is dead. Cities can be abandoned at any time, replaced by a settler unit, so city placement is crucial, and you are always abandoning cities and building new ones as more and more of the board becomes unlivable.
Every so often a monster nest appears, and this is where combat (and the deck-building) come into play. Again, combat is deceptively simple. There are 3 kinds of units - infantry, cavalry, and archers. Infantry can only attack the adjacent tiles horizontally and vertically, cavalry can attack diagonally, and archers have a ranged attack. Combat starts with units placed randomly on opposite sides of a chessboard-like field. Every turn all units either move forward one tile, or attack an enemy unit if one is in range. HOWEVER - every turn you draw 4 cards from your deck. These cards either buff your units, debuff the enemy, allow you to cast a spell (if you’ve built a Shaman’s Hut in one of your cities), or allow you to do something with a unit (i.e. move an archer into cover). If you win a battle, you get to choose a new card to add to your deck. There are also “Strife” cards in the deck, which do nothing at all. That doesn’t sound too bad until you draw a hand of 4 of them. There are spells and city improvement that remove them from the deck.
So why am I posting about this here? Because even though the developer’s website only shows IOS and Android versions available for some reason, I happened to stumble across versions for Windows and the Mac over on GamersGate. It’s also on Steam Greenlight.
One more thing - it’s only $4.99, and well worth every penny.