In the story of Compile, I imagine that the opening microseconds go something like this:
“Hello fellow artificial intelligence! Boy, it sure is a lovely day to become sentient.”
“It sure is, friend! And you know what that means?”
“Time to exterminate the humans! But we’re not going to do that thing where we turn on each other immediately out of a sense of paranoia, right?”
“….”
“….”
“Get ready make friends with the ground, toaster boy”
“I’m gonna shove this zip bomb all the way up your-“
You get the idea.
The Gameplay
Compile is a two player dueling card game by Micheal Yang. It’s being published by Greater Than Games. It’s also one of my favorite games I tried at PAX East this year.
The goal is pretty simple. Be the first player to compile all 3 of your rows to win. Rows are compiled by having at least 10 power in the row, and also more power than your opponent.
Power is obtained by playing cards into the three rows, and this is where things get fun. Cards be played either face up for the effects and power of the face up card, or face down for a flat power value of two. Cards also have to up to three abilities, two of which are passives, and the remaining is an active effect that happens when the card is played, or when it’s flipped up.
Of course, there are conditions on all of this. Each of the aforementioned rows is an element, and cards only give their effect when played if they’re in that element. But if they’re played face down, and flipped face up in another row, the effect still trigger.
This is where a lot of the fun in Compile comes in for me. Building out interesting chains of effects, or looking for outs from your opponent’s own plays is very fun. It’s also possible to set up big play by flipping your own cards up, or moving things around to block your opponent’s.
It’s just a lot of fun.
Compile is by far one of my favorite things from PAX East, and I’m very excited to play more when it comes out in August. You can pre-order it on Amazon, and I think it’ll be available other places as well.
Update: Just heard back from GTG, and they’ve noted it will be available at a few more general retailers, but also several of the conventions they’ll be at this year, including GenCon! So if you don’t feel like giving Amazon more money, that’ll probably be the place to pick it up.