Games You Might Have Missed: Polytopia

Originally titled Super Tribes, The Battle for Polytopia released on February 9th, 2016 from publisher Midjiwan. It’s a mobile game that’s essentially Civilization in your pocket.

Polytopia has a great tutorial that teaches you how each system in the game works, without being too overbearing. Gameplay-wise, it’s incredibly simple. You use cities to create units that can explore the world, take over villages, and fight enemies. By investing resources that you get each turn, you can research different disciplines such as mining, riding, and farming. Investing in these allows you to build things that will help your cities grow and put out more resources.

There are two modes: Perfection and Domination. Perfection is a 30 turn game where you compete against other societies to expand your influence over the game board, build the best cities, and defeat any enemies that cross you to gain the highest score. Domination is a last man standing mode where you fight to destroy the other civilizations and completely take over the map. Perfection mostly tests your efficiency, while Dominion challenges your military and conquest strategy. Each mode allows you to choose how many opponents you’ll face, and what difficulty you’d like to play on.

Visually, Polytopia is as simple as its gameplay. It’s all cute papercraft models. The maps are brightly colored and varied, as they’re generated for each game.  Using a cute, simple style helps keep a casual, fun feel to the game, though if you’re more inclined towards competitive play, there are leader boards to keep track of how you stack up.

The only thing you’ll have to shell out money for is unlocking new tribes. The game comes with four tribes you can choose to play with, but there are 11 human tribes total. These sell for $0.99. You can also purchase the Aquarion special tribe for $1.99. While different tribes start with different technologies, you pretty much have access to everything at some point as long as you budget your resources correctly. The Aquarions do have a slightly different tech tree, but they aren’t necessary to play the game successfully. There aren’t any pop-ups asking if you want to buy a different tribe, so the game feels genuinely free unless you’re checking out locked tribes.

If you like RTS games, but need something a little more casual for on-the-go, Polytopia is a great pick. It’s fun, charming, and easy to learn but hard to master, giving it a longer lifespan than many other free-to-play games. You can find it on the Google Play and App Stores.