The life of a dwarf is tough. Born into the depths of the Earth, you're soon sent on a search for precious ore, digging further and further from your home. If you're lucky, you'll strike gold, and shower your town in riches. If not... you'll shower it in less friendly things, like monsters and giant spiders, or flood it with water or lava from an underground stream you accidentally break into. In those events, not only are you sure to perish, but lest your peers act fast, all of them will, too.
Such is the premise of Dwarfs!?, a management game that has you looking after dwarves mining for treasure. The game begins at an underground town placed at the center of a map, from where, one by one, dwarves come out and look for a cave wall to dig into. You can give direct orders to each dwarf, but once those are exhausted, they'll just go their own way and dig wherever they want. And sometimes, they'll find more than they bargained for.
Should your dwarves dig into a monster den, those are set loose and you must quickly deploy and move in soldiers to deal with the threat. Tunnels flooded by lava or water must be responded to even more quickly by sending another dwarf to collapse them with explosives. There's an escalating peril that confers an arcade-y quality to Dwarfs!?: the further you progress, the more dwarves there are and the farther away from home they'll be, so there's a growing chance that one of them will cause a disaster that finally costs you the map -- your goal is to score as high as possible before that happens.
It's a surprisingly fun casual game that had me engaged for a couple dozen hours. It comes with several modes, and while my favorite is the default, F2P one, which gives you a time limit (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) to explore the cave as far as you can and maximize your score, I never regretted getting the paid version of the game, as it proved to be great value anyway.
...it could have done without the obnoxious voice acting, though.
Such is the premise of Dwarfs!?, a management game that has you looking after dwarves mining for treasure. The game begins at an underground town placed at the center of a map, from where, one by one, dwarves come out and look for a cave wall to dig into. You can give direct orders to each dwarf, but once those are exhausted, they'll just go their own way and dig wherever they want. And sometimes, they'll find more than they bargained for.
Should your dwarves dig into a monster den, those are set loose and you must quickly deploy and move in soldiers to deal with the threat. Tunnels flooded by lava or water must be responded to even more quickly by sending another dwarf to collapse them with explosives. There's an escalating peril that confers an arcade-y quality to Dwarfs!?: the further you progress, the more dwarves there are and the farther away from home they'll be, so there's a growing chance that one of them will cause a disaster that finally costs you the map -- your goal is to score as high as possible before that happens.
It's a surprisingly fun casual game that had me engaged for a couple dozen hours. It comes with several modes, and while my favorite is the default, F2P one, which gives you a time limit (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes) to explore the cave as far as you can and maximize your score, I never regretted getting the paid version of the game, as it proved to be great value anyway.
...it could have done without the obnoxious voice acting, though.