Tacticus is a multiplayer strategy board game that I am working on in my free time. I am putting the beta on Google Play for free, calling it “Early Access” unless Steam sends me a love note 
My goal for the game is to make it fast, fun, competitive, and available on every platform I can, with a “buy once, play anywhere” model.
What I still have left to do:
- Add the ability to surrender
- Add timeout to games, so that players don’t let them sit un-played for weeks.
- Add rankings and leaderboards
- Add replay sharing
- Publish on iOS, and Windows Universal at least.
- Think of new things to add to this list.
I am using the beta period to not only find bugs but balance the game a bit better, and gauge “funness”.
This is a slow moving project, since I have to do client work to keep the bills paid. 
I told you guys this was going to be slow!
Tacticus is a mashup between Risk and Stratego.
The goal of the game is to capture your opponents flag, while protecting your own.
During each turn you can perform one of three functions with each unit
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Move: Move your unit up to its maximum range per turn
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Attack: Attack once with your unit per turn. Higher number wins, but the lowered numbered piece causes damage to the winning piece.
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Merge: Merge two units together to heal a damaged unit
There are three different units.
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Spearman: Gets a bonus +2 on attack. So a 6 spear can take down an 8 of any other unit. He can move one place per turn.
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Archer: Can attack without being attacked back, except when attacking another archer.
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Horseman: Can move two places per turn
You start the game by placing your pieces. You can choose which unit gets which strength, and were to place them in the first 3 columns.
You get:
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1: Flag
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1: 10
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2: 8’s
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3: 6’s
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4: 4’s
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5: 2’s
When your layout is this modular, allowing you to have anything from all archers to a mix of all three units at different strengths, your initial choices are very important to the outcome of the game. You need to think carefully of your layout, and hope your opponent doesn’t setup a better mix than you!
Here is a sample of one of my layouts:
I made a game manual to show all of the rules of Tacticus. I’m rather happy with how it turned out:
http://tacticusonline.com/GameManual/manual.html
I placed the game on Greenlight 4 days ago, and so far it has been beyond my expectations for this type of game. I was expecting maybe 20 votes and 2% up the ladder at this point!
