Verdict: delightful

In a Nutshell: Zatikon is an electronic strategy board game that feels like chess but with a good helping of medieval fantasy thrown into the mix.

(from the game’s website)

“Welcome to Zatikon. Construct your army out of creatures as varied as the magnificent dragon or mighty warrior to the evil necromancer or holy Templar. Destroy your opponent with a heavy cavalry charge or defeat their army before they can reach you with archers, crossbowmen and mages. Use an unlimited number of strategies to defeat your opponents and earn gold to increase the might of your army. Play Zatikon for free and start building your armies today!

Zatikon is a turn based multiplayer tactics game featuring over 50 unique units. Build your army and defeat your opponent. With an almost unlimited number of possible strategies at your disposal Zatikon highly addictive and fun. Zatikon includes online player ranking and several extra game types including co-op, single player and random army mode.”

• Fun Rating: Fun
• ESRB: n/a
• Players/Mode: single player/vs AI, two-player/co-op or pvp
• Game Duration: each game takes about 20 – 45 minutes
• System: PC – Mac, Linux, Windows (web server login required)
• Developer: Chronic Logic
• Website: http://www.zatikon.com/
• Cost: $13.95 from Chronic Logic
• Demo: available from Chronic Logic

Playing the game

The goal of Zatikon is to get one of your pieces into your opponent’s castle. You have a limited amount of time and a limited number of moves available each turn in which to advance your units towards the goal.  Winning a game will give you gold to spend for a random unit to add to your list of available units.

Moving your pieces around requires that the unit has unused action points left and that you have commands left in which to use those actions.  Attacking an enemy unit first requires your unit’s attack range to be able to reach it.  For simple units, damage is determined by your units power and the amount of armor the enemy unit has.   Reducing a unit’s life to zero will remove it from play.

Once you’ve gotten a good feel for moving and attacking, the next major point of strategy is forming your custom army.  Armies are built from your list of available units.  You have a certain number of points to spend and each unit costs a varying number of points depending on how powerful a unit is or what variations that unit has.  Unit variations include such things as special abilities and spells, armor to reduce damage, and attacks triggered on certain enemy actions.  In addition to moveable units, your army can include various structures such as towers for defense, barracks to produce a soldier each turn, or command posts to increase the number of commands available.

What the game gets right

The art is hand drawn, which is actually kind of refreshing,  and adds a bit of quaintness that I usually only find in actual board games.  The interface is clean and simple and all you really need for this game.  The gameboard interface is also extremely helpful by highlighting available movement and attack ranges letting you save some brain power for strategy.

The gameplay is solid and getting the basics down doesn’t take much time.  This whets the appetite for researching the units to build your own army and, with this vast array of units to choose from, there’s a lot of strategy to be had.  As the game is primarily a player vs player style, I’m glad for the single player vs AI section of the game.  The progressively difficult AI opponent is a good chance to understand the game and try out new armies and strategies (and keeps me from getting embarrassed about my lack of strategic ability.)

What the game gets wrong

With the level of strategy that this game requires and the sheer number of units to choose from, it was a little disappointing that there is no overall unit/strategy guide other than a table and a basic overview of how to get the game rolling.  This is probably fine for the hard-core strategerrites but the rest of us like to look at the pretty pictures as we plot world domination.

The main menu for the game is a little unintuitive.  This is especially noticeable when trying to manage your armies (assuming you have more than one army) making it difficult to know which army you are editing or how to save your new, unbeatable, most awe-inspiring army ever known.

Sum it up

If you’ve played chess before, the gameplay will feel very familiar.  The simplicity of  the gameplay makes it slightly addictive (“I’ve got time for one more game”).  Zatikon has a classic board game style to it and, if not for the logistics involved with all of those units, would probably make a for a fun physical board game.

Other games you might like to read about:

• Forbidden Island

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2009 at 12:24 pm and is filed under Fun, Independent, PC, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.