[Let's Talk] Multiplayer Games

Recently I've been trying lots of turn based multiplayer games, trying to find a few ones I can play with J when we don't have time to meet up and fulfill our point & click adventure urges. I've stumbled upon two games I found very worth mentioning:

Fortune Winds - Ancient Trader
Number of players: 1-4
Usual time for one game: 40-60 minutes
Available for: PC / Mac / iOS

Ancient Trader is a very beautiful game. But besides that it's also very fun for quick inbetween gaming session. You start with choosing your name, avatar and a map to play on. And those maps are so pretty. *_* 

At the beginning of each round the whole map besides a few spaces around your ship are covered with clouds, more and more gets slowly uncovered as you move around or pick up map pieces. You can enter ports, to buy resources for preferably cheap prices and sell them at other ports for a higher price - that's your main income of money. You can also upgrade various aspects of your ship, like its speed or weapon prowess. 

You've got three types of weapons to choose from in the rock-paper-scissor type turn-based battles. Most of these merely depend on luck tho and can get a little frustrating from time to time. If you lose, you lose some gold or resources - if you win, you get some. ;>

To win the game you have to get the three artifacts located at various ports, find the leviathan and beat it. (There might be other winning conditions for other maps, I'm not too sure about that right now. ;>)

It feels a lot like a board game and that's what I like about it. It's not a game you'll spend hours with in one go, since it gets a little boring quickly. But it's certainly lots of fun for a round with friends from time to time. :)

Greed Corp 
Number of players: 1-4
Usual time for one game: 30-60 minutes
Available for: PC / Xbox360 / PS3 / iOS

 In Greed Corp you take charge of a race of robots, have to manage resources & units and fight off all of your opponents to win the game. Just as Ancient Trader, it's perfect for a quick round with friends. It isn't overly complicated to get in to, playing the tutorial takes less than an hour and I'd definitely recommend doing that before jumping in to the game. The story mode is also quite cute, but just as with Ancient Trader, the game can get boring after a while. Tho it took me longer to get bored with this one. :>

At the start of each turn you can move your robots freely around the spaces you own on the map of floating islands and to one adjacent space, to claim it as your own. If it's occupied by other robots who aren't on your team, you'll have to fight them. If you win the battles or not is decided by your number of units, if it's higher than your enemy's, you win. If it's not, you get killed. Simple as that.

To build units, you have to first build an amory, besides that you can also build cannons (and bullets for it), which can shoot at enemies further away, without taking any damage yourself. And transporters which you can use to send your units to spaces that aren't connected to other spaces on the map and therefore unreachable otherwise.  You'll also need to build harvesters, which will provide you with income. 

But there's a twist to this: Each time when it's your turn, your harvesters stomp down the space they're build on and the surrounding spaces one level. When it's down to zero, the spaces crumble and fall down - taking any units placed there down with them as well. It's always a good idea to take over other player's harvesters (if you can) and have them all fall down and die, hurrdurr. :>

Greed Corp also feels a lot like a board game and it's pretty fun when playing against friends, but not very challenging in the story mode. Most of the time eat least. :> I wouldn't exactly recommend either of these games to people who would only play them alone, as both of them get really repetive after a while. 

These really are best played when you just want about half an hour to get your head off of things and have some quick fun with friends. :)

Besides those two, I've also been playing lots of Torchlight II, which is incredibly fun and gosh, some of those monsters have some rather creepy designs, which clash a lot with the colourful, bright and cute surroundings (I even saw a little froggie jumping around on one of the maps, so cute *_*), but in a good way. Yes, so far I'm really enjoying the game. I had no chance to try the co-op mode yet tho, sadly... but I'll hopefully get to that soon. :)

So... do you guys have any great multiplayer / co-op games you could recommend? :D