There’s no ticking clock, and you can undo actions provided you haven’t revealed any new information, but everything that yields tangible results saps just a little of the limited time you have for your run. Everything you do, from launching probes to connecting planets with the titular Slipways, costs time. Each standard run lasts 25 years, which is somewhere between 45 minutes to a couple hours in real time. Until you get overconfident, leave too many planets screaming into the void for the green goop they so richly crave, and your Scandinavian train network of clean efficiency now resembles a Scalextric track in a washing machine. You’ve got a late-game tech planned that’ll nullify the missing resource anyway, right? It’s fine. If you’re fine with temporarily eating the happiness penalty, you can still make use of whatever resource that planet produces. The moment you opt-in to colonising a planet, that planet will begin both producing and requiring resources. The secret sauce to all of this is a two-fold blend of efficiency and risk-management. Happiness is also a score multiplier, while money isn’t. So, while empire size is a scoring factor, you’re encouraged not to expand just because you can, since excessive surplus is actively detrimental. You’re penalised Happiness for having planets without their basic needs met, units of population that are unemployed by not being utilised, and planets that have no exports. It starts at 100, and if it ever gets below 60, you’ll be booted out of office, presumably into the cold vacuum of space, and lose the run. Here, it’s one number, with a few simple rules. Sustainability is important because of Happiness - Slipways' distillation of the civic and public order stats you’ll usually find in a grand strategy. To reveal unexplored space you’ll send out probes, which cost both time (Slipways' most important resource) and money (less important, until you have none, which loses you the game.) The distance you can launch probes is limited by the edges of your empire, which means you’ll sometimes have to make risky expansions with no guarantee of future sustainability. Exactly what types of planets lie beyond your current borders are initially a mystery. Many planets offer a choice, so you could spec out a forge world to produce either robots or computer chips from minerals, for example. The titular slipways can’t cross each other, mind, so each expansion needs consideration of future connections.Įach planet has a type, and each type requires imports and produces exports of specific resources. Perfect, because now you can link up the final cog in your self-sustaining planetary cluster and, noticing you’ve got a unit of surplus pasties, start to think about expansion. Ah! The pasty factory world runs on spice. The spice must flow, as they say, but the spice planet needs miners, and the miner planet needs cornish pasties. The goal of Slipways is to create a prosperous, star-spanning galactic civilisation by linking up networks of planets so that each has access to the resources it needs to first survive, then thrive. It’s hyperspace bypass: the game, but thankfully far more thoughtful and pithy than Vogon poetry.

$cool math slipways$

The 4X games this one shares a postcode with can be slow burners, but Slipways' joys are distilled, immediate, and schedule-shatteringly moreish. Space strategy puzzler Slipways provides joy that is distilled, immediate, and schedule-shatteringly moreish.Īt the centre of Slipways' galaxy is a black hole, and on the other side float the seconds, minutes, and hours this treat of a puzzler has effortlessly siphoned from my weekend.

Cool math slipways