Free Board Games Including Axis & Allies to Play Online
Thursday, May 8th, 2008I’m not sure how long this will stay free, but you can sign up for the Gleemax Games Alpha now to play games like Axis & Allies and Acquire online for for free. Other games listed include Magic the Gathering Online, Guillotine, and Vegas Showdown. This definitely has potential!
Check out this post from one of their blogs:
We’re going to be trying out a number of different things in the next few months and along the way there’s lots of free gaming to be done. Eventually we intend to make money off of our Gleemax Games content, but we aren’t ready for that step yet. For now, we have some cool games coded and we figured we’re better off making those available for free rather than having our test servers sit around mostly empty while bored employees (like me) played yet another game versus the computer AI.
What we have ready right now is five of our best Avalon Hill board games: Acquire, Vegas Showdown, Axis and Allies, Guillotine, and Robo Rally. These are inherently multiplayer games which you can play through the website against any combination of humans or computer AI’s. Note that the computer AI opponents are not good, and they aren’t intended to be. We had two goals in mind with the AI: 1) make it possible for new players to learn without embarrassing themselves in front of other humans and 2) fill in for anyone who drops without disrupting the experience for the other people playing the game.
In order to play these board games for free you’re going to have to jump through a couple of hoops. They use Java so you’ll have to download that if you don’t already have it – the prompts should make it pretty easy to do – and you’re also going to have to set up an account on our Alpha server (which is currently a separate account from anything else you might have on our systems – yes, for now you’ll need a new account even if you’re already a Gleemax user).
In addition to the board games, we also have one flash game available: Desktop Tower Defense. DTD won our Gleemax Award for Strategic Gameplay (“The Gleemie”) at the Independent games Festival at GDC two months ago. It’s available for free elsewhere on the ‘Net but we really wanted to include it here as an example of the kind of gameplay we value.
Big picture, the goal here is to have one page that folks can go to in order to learn about all the various digital game projects that Wizards of the Coast is involved with. In some cases it will be direct transliterations of our tabletop games (Magic Online fits this model, as do the board games). In other cases it will be original digital game designs (like Uncivilized: the Goblin Game, which has been in the works for a while but isn’t going to release until we get some back-end infrastructure stuff worked out). Yet a third category of stuff you can expect to see is digital distribution of indie games content. In addition to flash games like DTD, look for our recommendations as to which try-and-buy download games are worth your time.
For now, this is just an Alpha test. We expect to learn a lot and you should expect that stuff isn’t always going to work perfectly and may change without much notice. You should also expect us to experiment with various business models before we settle on the right way to make enough money to keep these games available. We’re optimistic that free, high-quality games will make this an enjoyable ride for you even if it’s a bit bumpy at times. See you in game!
