The UFO 50 Diaries: Avianos
Pray to whatever ancestor you want, sicko! I'm still stealing your castle!
Why did the T-Rex lose the war? Because of his small armies!
Avianos is a really fascinating strategy game, one that both requires you to plan 11 moves ahead but also give you enough slack to pull yourself back from the brink should things go south. It’s as generous as it is punative but in that delicate balance I’ve found a really engaging, cute and bite sized strategy game that I just really got on with.
A turn based affair, you pick an ancestor to pray to each round, and that choice determines the output and your options for the remainder of that round. One ancestor is all about producing resources and building upon settlements, whereas another will be about recruiting soldiers and expanding territory.
For every action you take, your foe has equal access to the same deities and powers therein, with the only difference being an inpenetrable fog of war that ends up being the game’s greatest feat. It makes you take pause before approaching contested space. A combination of guess work and blind luck push you through into decisions that will make or break your game. There’s so much to gain from bravery, but also so much to lose!
On the other side of that coin, this is a game about premonition as much as it is about reaction. Success is hinted at many moves before you finally hit the clear screen as seen above, but it’s a success that has to be voraciously defended. Once you capture four castles, you must stay there in the wake of all manner of horrors being thrown at you by a largely invisible foe.
Do you knuckle down, build up your forces on these freshly captured spaces? Or do you laugh in the face of peril and treat yourself to a victory lap claiming even more land and resources knowing that a castle left unattended could so easily be ripe for the picking.
That tension, the push-pull is a brilliantly inviting thing.
The fact that you can't just keep praying to the same deity each round is a good piece of design balancing too, it forces you to contend with other options alongside the old faithfuls.
I know it’s inviting to just keep bolstering your troops and venture out into the wild, especially when returning to the same ancestor again and again grants you additional buffs to your options, but there’s only so far you can go before either you run out of money, or manpower, and so easily you can become undone by your own hubris.
In a way this single choice helps to tutorialise a game that otherwise has no tutorial. There’s still choice, but one offered up by slight of hand rather than simply being a la carte.
Avianos does that brilliant thing a lot of UFO 50 games have done in that it keeps its scope small and its moving parts smaller. That minimalist approach to a genre that often gets wildly out of hand allows it to revel in these more mysterious elements. It’s a small game that feels big, and that’s an absolutely wonderful thing to engage with.