Writings of Mass Deduction

I’ve long been a fan of mobile gaming. My first handheld was an Atari Lynx. I then picked up a TurboExpress (portable TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine), which was an impressive piece of kit for its day (yes, I may be the only Canadian who adopted the British expression “piece of kit”; I grew up reading British gaming magazines, what can I say?). Other stops along the way included the Sega Nomad, the Game Boy Advance, the Nintendo DS, the PSP, and somewhere along the way I also picked up an original Game Boy and a Sega Game Gear (each for a song). I even did some Chao raising on a Dreamcast VMU on bus rides into work.

I played each successive system less and less. As I got into smartphones, I found myself doing mobile email and web browsing on the go, so that I was free to do big screen gaming when I got home having got the productivity stuff out of the way. All of that changed recently when I discovered “World Domination”, a strategy game for Windows Phone. It’s awesome (and, nicely, comes in a fully featured free version, with an optional paid enhancement that simply increases the number of games you can play at one time).

What I love about the game is that it’s managed to do something interesting with its inspiration. Let’s get one thing out of the way, its inspiration is undoubtedly and undeniably Risk, the venerable board game that I discovered about 30 years ago and have enjoyed ever since. But, here’s where things get a little interesting.

In Risk, I was often frustrated that I was forced to cash in my cards. If things were going well, and I could live without the reinforcements, why should I have to cash them in? To the best of my knowledge, all official variants of Risk force you to cash in your bonus-reinforcement generating cards when you hit a critical mass. Not so in “World Domination”. Cards are done away with, replaced by a system where you earn bonus reinforcements on each turn where you conquer at least one territory, and a single additional unit if you chose not to cash in your reinforcements in the previous turn.

I’ve been able to earn some obscenely high reinforcements that I cashed in on a single turn, but there’s risk/reward to it: to go that many turns without bonus armies means you’re providing a short-term advantage to opponents. It is therefore generally less useful in team play, but potentially extremely useful in free-for-all play.

Speaking of modes of play, the game has free online multiplayer (even in the free version of the game). Modes of play include 1 vs 1, 2v2, 3v3, 3 player free-for all (FFA), 4FFA, and 5FFA. Random matches and private matches are supported, and there’s a chat system within the game for those trying to find a specific kind of match, or just to socialise. And socialise they do. I’ve never seen such an active chat community in a game! It’s unreal how active the chat section of the game is.

The game’s controls are excellent. Territories are named after key cities (rather than regions, which actually makes more sense) and colour-coded based on who controls it. Just drag your finger from where you would like to attack from, to where you would like to attack to. Couldn’t be simpler. At the end of the match you can do a single unit transfer between any two allied territories that have a contiguous chain between them of territories your side controls. In team play (aka 2v2, and 3v3) you can actually deploy reinforcements into your allies’ territory (I don’t recall that being supported in any official Risk variant) or do a unit transfer to an ally at the end of a turn (ditto on not having seen that in an official Risk variant).

Last I checked with the developer, there were 16K registered players, of which about 1000 were very active. That was months ago and, from what I’ve seen, activity has done nothing but pick up steadily since then (probably in lock-step with Windows Phone’s growing popularity). At the present time I’m #2 in the global leaderboard, so I guess I’m pretty good at the game. The name’s “Mass Deduction” if any of you want to join the game and play me.

The game’s developer operates a server for the game at his own cost, and relies on donations to keep it running. He asks for a $1 donation if you like the game, so it’s kind of like the old “shareware” concept. If you donate, he increases the number of games you can have on the go from 4 to 10, but otherwise the game is the same. It’s also worth noting that the game has released steady post-release support from the developer. It also smartly supports both portrait and landscape modes (something FAR too many mobile games don’t do) letting you re-orient the map depending on what’s most useful to you at the time. I often attack in portrait mode, but do unit transfers in landscape mode, for example.

I have a bunch of free upgrades to the paid version of the game to give away. They’ll be doled out to people who leave a comment on this article requesting one, so if you have a Windows Phone then comment away!

If you like turn-based strategy games, I can’t recommend World Domination more highly.