Over the last week, I've spent far too much time playing Galcon, an addictive game developed by Phil Hassey using Pygame and other tools.

In Galcon, you are a general out for conquest. You start with one or a few planets that produce fighters, and you're pitted against "independent" planets and other players, either robots or humans. You send fighters out to take over other planets and get their production rate working for you. The controls are simple, the games are pretty short -- 15 minutes is a long game -- and it's easy to join an online game.

Apart from the clickfest nature of the game, my academic leanings appreciate the sort of game theory involved in playing. Especially in the beginning, you're in a sort of tense situation where making a move in one direction invites an attack from the other direction. This also occurs throughout the game, when (for example) there's a clearly dominant player A facing players B and C. Who should attack whom? A attacking B invites an attack on A from C, and so on. Often A will sit there and grow stronger, while B and C wait it out. If B attacks, often C will help them until it looks like A is one the ropes, and then C will backstab B. Lots of fun.

Likewise, an enduring source of frustration is players who don't seem to understand this: today I got taken out of five or six games when I was weak and the other weak guy attacked me. Naturally the strong guy wiped us both out. (Note that there's no second place...)

Another nice thing about the game: logistics, logistics, logistics. I've had a few games where I won even though I was down because I owned a tighter cluster of planets. That let me resupply more quickly than the other guy.

There are a number of problems with the game, but overall it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.

--titus

p.s. Be sure to pressure Phil to add board generation and 'bot plugin capabilities to the game! After all, it's written in Python...

Legacy Comments

Posted by Michael Carter on 2006-12-17 at 02:17.

This game is very simple and ridiculously addictive.  I think at this
point the permanent bot is the only player with more games than me.
As for the game theory, what makes it particularly tense is zanthor
the bot. He seems to have a pretty crude strategy that is incredibly
simple to defeat one on one. He just sends raiding parties out to
planets in conflict or to locations that just sent ships out or
otherwise likely have few defenders. In a three player game, the first
person to commit more than 10% of their troops somewhere is almost
immediately hit by about 90% of zanthor's forces. It gets more
ridiculous in the large games as zanthor can totally turn the tide of
the game, but he almost always attacks the weak player when its clear
that the only way not to lose is to attack the strong player.    I
guess his problem is that he doesn't care rather or not he wins,
whatsoever. True, he uses a strategy that helps him win, but has no
real concept of game theory.      Anyway, as of tonight I'm done with
galcon for a while.