Innovative mobile game will get you stabbing buddies in the back

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Both scheming and strategy will help you win in this game. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac
Both scheming and strategy will help you win in this game. Photo: Rob LeFebvre/Cult of Mac

Remember when you’d hang out with your pals all night long, scheming and swearing and stabbing each other in the back as you played board games like Monopoly, Axis & Allies or Risk for hours on end?

The developers of upcoming mobile strategy game Subterfuge want to recapture that competitive and fun gaming magic on the iOS era’s platform of choice.

“We started with the idea of making a game that would give you a shared, epic experience with your friends,” designer Noel Llopis told Cult of Mac. “We’re hoping Subterfuge provides something like that,” Llopis says, “but in a way that meshes with people’s real lives.”

Noel Llopis, left, and Ron Carmel, two of the creators of Subterfuge. Photo: Noel Llopis
Noel Llopis, left, and Ron Carmel, two of the creators of Subterfuge. Photo: Noel Llopis

While board games used to be real bonding moments, mobile gaming has largely devolved into self-centric, throwaway experiences. Free-to-play games rule the roost, and only a few smart exceptions — like The Room, Banner Saga or Revolution 60 — remind us that mobile gaming can be as deep as console or PC titles.

Llopis has an extensive pedigree in iOS gaming, with titles like the seminal Flower Garden from the early days of the App Store and the Rovio-purchased Amazing Alex (formerly Casey’s Contraptions).

His goal with Subterfuge, directly inspired by PC game Neptune’s Pride and is planned for summer 2015 release on iOS and Android, was to create a mobile title with the heart of an epic board game.

Ron Carmel, one of Llopis’ partners on Subterfuge and co-creator of 2D Boy’s World of Goo, says he knows a lot of developers who examine their games from the perspective of the player, treating gamers with the honesty, consideration and good will they would show toward their best friend. “If there is one overarching philosophy in our development of Subterfuge,” he says, “this is it.”

The team (which has no official studio name) doesn’t want to make you play their way; rather, they’d like to encourage players to engage with the title without any structure beyond that of the game system itself.

“When I play a game,” says Carmel, “sometimes I can feel the designer in there, forcing me to do things their way, or being pushy about giving them money, or some other thing that makes me feel uncared for. In designing Subterfuge, we try to do unto others as we would have others do unto us.”

Subterfuge involves SUBmarines. Get it? Photo: Subterfuge
Subterfuge involves submarines. Get it? Photo: Subterfuge

Besides the obvious meaning, the game’s name is a play on “submarine,” as you’ll find yourself sending out troops to neighboring outposts in little icons that look like underwater vessels. The gameplay progresses over the course of about a week, but you only need to check in a couple times a day to see what’s happening. You’ll start each match with a few cities and a capital and then send out your various drillers and specialists via submarine to other outposts around you. Some may be empty, which lets you occupy them, while others might be filled with opponents already making camp. These will become battle zones, and you’ll win if you have more and stronger troops than they do.

Where this really plays out is with the behind-the-scenes scheming, though. Here’s the team’s promotional video to show you just how much fun this game can be:

In my time with Subterfuge, I’ve joined two matches and created a third, each with random other folks in the closed beta. There’s a chat feature where you can taunt each other in a public channel, and an easy way to privately chat with other folks playing the game. I’ve been approached by some players to gang up on others, but I’ve been completely eliminated within a couple of days in each match. It’s frustrating and incredibly compelling at the same time.

Llopis and his team (which also includes artist Shane Nakamura) played down the addictive qualities of a game like this so players won’t end up spending their entire life performing mundane tasks.

“If a feature would result in players gaining an advantage by obsessively checking the game every five minutes, we cut it,” Llopis says. “Instead, we’d rather tell the players when something important happened through push notifications.”

Another way they’ve respected players’ time is in the timing of actions, which simply need to be responded to within eight hours. If you have to set an alarm to remember when to check in, something’s wrong.

“We also allow players to schedule actions in the future,” says Llopis, “which avoids more stress and more alarms.”

The game is tricky to learn at first, but it gets easier with each match. You can read the Subterfuge rules online or just do what I did and jump right in, trusting your instincts and failing miserably as you learn the game. Yay!

What really matters, though, is that Subterfuge will recreate that epic, old-school experience among groups of friends — the kind of deep dive into an engrossing game that becomes basically impossible once your buddies get married, move around the country and start losing sleep, because babies.

Let the scheming and back-stabbing begin again.

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