Last year we said a sad goodbye to Zachtronics, developers of some of the most interesting independent video games of the last decade. And this year we say hello to The lucky sevena new card game—from some of the same people –it looks extremely cool.
A “tactical solitaire” game, it’s being made by Coincidence, a studio/collective made up of a number of former Zachtronics contributors, including Zach Barth himself (who designed The lucky seven) and artist Jonathan Stroh.
The game is described as:
The Lucky Seven is a tactical solitaire game set in an unknown conflict of the 20th century. As a tactics game, you will move and attack with your team members to neutralize randomly placed threat cards and keep the situation under control. As a solitaire game, The Lucky Seven is different every time you play and requires you to look ahead and make the most of your opportunities.
Which might make a little more sense if you read the rules and take a look at some pictures, like this one, that show the cards arranged in a way that is reminds me (in a very good way) of the excellent Undaunted.
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I’m interested to see how the game is able to strip a tactical experience down to something as (relatively) simple as a solitaire card game, but at the same time, through its flexibility, promises a game that could be endlessly challenging.
The lucky seven is currently up on Indiegogo, though it should be noted that it’s just there for pre-orders, not development; The odds say that “the game is designed, the art is done, and all we have to do is get the game printed”.
One neat thing – and bear with me on this – is that the box doesn’t come with instructions. Instead, you want to print them out at home. Which sounds like a cheapskate decision, but it really isn’t (small manuals are a negligible cost in game production vs maps, tokens, art, etc) because as they say, it means “we can update them after launch and give a FAQ for anything unexpected that pops up”.
Do you know how many board games I’ve had to play over the last decade that had bad instructionsand which had to be fixed either by making house rules to get around them or frantically searching through threads on BGG? Almost every singles I’ve played. So the promise of a regularly updated digital set (assuming it is, of course!) sounds infinitely more useful.