Introduction
Ozymandias is an elegant, quick-playing (I can finish a map in less than an hour), “minutes to learn, lifetime to master” strategy game from the Secret Games Company1 about claiming territory, building cities, and clashing with other empires in the Ancient World.
I touched on it in a recent roundup and now that I’ve beaten every map at least once, I wanted to share my thoughts in more detail.
What do you do in this game?
The basics of Ozymandias will be familiar to historical 4X game players. While there’s no exploration, most other genre elements are here:
- There are four resources: food, knowledge, money, and power. Turn-to-turn, the gameplay consists of spending food to claim new territory or build cities, spending knowledge on research, recruiting and moving armies and fleets, and allocating resources between different priorities.
- Controlled territory generates resources, so expansion is important.
- Spending knowledge on new techs makes it cheaper to expand into a certain terrain type, or increases the resource yield from that terrain.
- Cities produce money and knowledge, and project power into nearby terrain, at the cost of food.
- Spending money on power makes armies and navies stronger.
So, how does this play out? I’ve illustrated with a few screenshots from a recent game on the Asia map as Gojoseon (light blue, top right).
The early game is a land grab, as empires spend their limited food to expand into unclaimed territory (and ideally freeze each other out or secure better positions for later in the game). Early research typically focuses on facilitating expansion: my turn 1 research in this game went all-in on grassland tiles.
Eventually, players begin to run up against each other, and run short on room to grow. Food becomes relatively less important, although it’s still needed to build and grow cities. Instead, the focus shifts to wealth (in order to recruit the first military units) and power. In this screenshot, you can see the neighbouring dark blue player placed its first army near my border, cutting me off from the grasslands. But I still had the forest plus room to expand into the ocean tiles.
In the late game, the surviving empires race towards their victory conditions: these range from having a certain amount of wealth, territory, or population, to conquering enemy cities or having a certain amount of military power. The relative number of points awarded for each victory condition is randomised at the start of each game (but can be customised during setup). In this case, I eliminated the red player, left the rump of dark blue as a buffer, and clashed against teal on land and yellow at sea (the colourful pie charts show the balance of power between the different empires when they clash over a tile).
It usually takes about 30-60 minutes to finish a game. After an empire makes it across the finish line, it’s time to either celebrate (as in this case!), or try again with the benefit of lessons learnt.
Why the experience shines
As this suggests, Ozymandias feels a lot like a PC version of a Eurogame. Its brevity and simplicity shine: I can play when I’m too tired or don’t have the time for a more complex game.
Importantly, simple does not mean shallow. Skill, experience, and strategy matter. Here’s another example: a game I played as Zhou (dark blue, on the left) on the China map:
After previously being defeated when I tried to go into the mountains early on (they’re expensive and are good for research and money, but poor for food), this time I set out to avoid the mountains as much as possible and race across the forest to the river valleys. It paid off: I locked down my side of the map, let the wealth pour in, and then went on the offensive.
Because games are quick to play, this contributes to replayability. While there is no random map generator, there is a variety of maps from around the world, complemented by DLC. Maps with abundant free space play very differently to maps where everyone is at each other’s throat from early on. Empires also play differently: are they on the edge or in the centre? What’s the nearby terrain? What are their bonuses and penalties?
The pacing ties into game length and replayability. Under the default victory conditions, Ozymandias tends to end when one player gets to the snowball stage, before the tedious cleanup associated with 4X late games. Again, that makes it easy to jump back in and start a new game.
A final note is the production values, which are simple but effective. The graphics are clean, attractive, and easy to read, and the soundtrack is pleasant to listen to — I sometimes listen to it as focus music or on a walk.
Conclusion
Ozymandias is an easy recommendation for fans of strategy (and especially historical 4X) games who want something quicker, simpler, and easier to fit around real life than the genre’s behemoths. I’ve played more of it lately than I have “larger” games, and I like it enough that I bought it on multiple platforms (Steam plus Android). As a bonus, it frequently goes on sale, making it an easy stocking stuffer. Well worth a look on the next sale!
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- I interviewed the developer about an earlier game, Kim, all the way back in 2016. Small world… ↩
