Titanium Court is a most rare video game vision

Anybody who cares about games should take the Seumus McNally Grand Prize seriously. The top award given out at GDC’s Independent Games Festival has gone to some of the best games of the century, games like Outer Wilds, Return Of The Obra Dinn, and A Short Hike. In 2012 Fez somehow beat out Spelunky, FTL, and Dear Esther; the year before that an obscure little game called Minecraft reeled it in. There are too many awards handed out to games every year to keep track of, but this is the one you most need to pay attention to if you care about games beyond their commercial potential. And this year’s winner, AP Thomson’s Titanium Court, absolutely earns it. 

Titanium Court is a strategy game, a match-3 puzzler, and a tower defense game wrapped into a single package, and there’s surprisingly little tension between the three. It squeezes them together snugly and smoothly in a way that feels so natural and so obvious that it’s hard to believe there isn’t already a long history of this type of game. Here’s how it works:  Every encounter has two halves. Your map is made up of tiles with various types of terrain on them, like the hex map of a wargame (only these tiles are squares); your court, which you have to protect, is usually on the center tile. During the first half you slide those tiles to make matches of three or more; the matched tiles disappear, the tiles above them fall deeper into the column, and new tiles appear to fill the open space on the map. There’s a meter to the left of the map decreasing every time you make a move, and most matches earn you a resource based on the kind of tile; forests get you wood, fields get you bread, hills get you stone, and water gets you, uh, water. If you match more than three tiles at once, you get extra resources; if you string multiple matches in a row, with tiles matching up and clearing out as they cascade down after an initial match, you’ll not only get a lot of resources but also add time back to the meter. Various enemy tiles also appear. Some are enemy courts, little pink castles that can generate different classes of warriors that will attack your court during the second phase. You also have to watch out for catapults, volcanoes, and the occasional angry goat. You can clear out enemies during the first phase by matching three of their tiles, or move your court’s tile one space at a time to put it in a better defensive position; you don’t get any resources when you do either one, though, so you’re constantly weighing the opportunity cost of every decision.

Those resources are vital in the second phase. This is when you prepare for the actual battle. You’ll use your resources to spawn your own units—some defend your court, others go out to attack enemy courts, and various worker units can collect more resources for you—or use spells and other skills to help in the fight. Once you’re done prepping, you can start the battle, which runs automatically in a tower defense style. If you withstand the assault, you’ll move onto the next skirmish, working your way through several maps toward a boss fight with a dragon, a kraken, or some other mystical beast. (Or sometimes a whole team of angry goats.) And when you fail to slay the monster again and again, you’ll see a fourth genre poking through, the roguelite, as you lose all the resources and units you’ve acquired during the run and restart from scratch the next time.