Genre: Board Game, Strategy
Original Release: June 7, 2013
Developer: Mousechief
Platform: Steam
7 Grand Steps is another game that I don’t remember exactly how or when it got into my library. It was probably through a Humble Bundle at some point many years ago, and I only just got around to playing it over the past couple of days.
You start off controlling one character, a man named Khet, and move along the board using tokens to move to the next tile with a matching icon. You can also use the ingot at the top left of the screen to generate more tokens, though it will move your character closer to the crocodiles at the bottom. If no one behind your chosen character, they will be unable to generate tokens due to a “fear of crocs.”
Of course, when your character marries, you’ll be able to try for children, either by working together through the ingot (automatically attempts at a child while generating tokens), or landing on the same tile and clicking a flame icon that appears above the board. Depending on whether or not your characters love each other, they’ll also be able to boost the other character to the next matching tile through an “impetus of love.”
That’s pretty much the entirety of the gameplay. Children will grow up as the wheel advances and upon completing the rite of passage will take over, with a title that, as far as I can tell, only adjusts the chance of a particular token being generated.
The game is…something. The base mechanics are simple enough, but with the game being marketed as a roughly 15-hour experience, it’s not enough to keep it going. The token generation is stingy at best, and since you have little to no control over having children, you’re likely to find yourself in a situation where you won’t have enough tokens to improve your children’s stats enough to allow them to generate more tokens, and if the children grow to hate each other, you’ll randomly lose tokens as showcased above.
Of course, there’s also the challenge of the age, which takes the better part of a few hours to arrive. Should you collect enough beads and complete enough legends, you’ll have enough advantages to succeed, which in turn will advance you to the next age. In this case, from Copper to Bronze.
The Bronze Age introduces a new mechanic where your character takes charge as the general of a civilization and has to accumulate power by satisfying the king enough to warrant taking charge of different branches of government.
And that’s about as far as I got before I got bored and gave up. Attempting to conquer a city in any of the other nations is random, and there’s no real feedback regarding your attempts until your next movement. More often than not, the rival nations will simply start paying tribute and you’ll be left trying again to conquer a city. Fortunately there’s no penalty for not doing so within the time limit given by the king. You can possibly lose cities after you conquer them, at which point the king will reprimand you and raid the war chest to penalize your actions, leaving you strapped for funds in some instances, which can in turn possibly lead to fortifications decaying or your army shrinking. It makes some sense admittedly, but being punished for something that you have no control over is unfair to the player and can deter them from continuing any further.
In short, I can’t recommend 7 Grand Steps. It has some good ideas, but the limited token generation and heavy use of random elements can leave the player in an unwinnable situation, as happened to me.
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