{"id":257,"date":"2026-05-07T09:05:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T13:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/?p=257"},"modified":"2026-05-07T10:39:43","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T14:39:43","slug":"thoughts-after-four-hours-of-amberspire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/thoughts-after-four-hours-of-amberspire\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts After Four Hours of Amberspire"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"\">disclosures: I know nic (designer and director), and I have played lots of games with nic, and that makes me familiar with their sensibility. I am not a city-builder player. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><a href=\"https:\/\/store.steampowered.com\/app\/3350750\/Amberspire\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">amberspire is on steam<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">edit: nic&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/nictringali.bsky.social\/post\/3mlbeqsb6mk2j\" data-type=\"link\" data-id=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/nictringali.bsky.social\/post\/3mlbeqsb6mk2j\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">bluesky thread<\/a> of all of the people who worked on the game is a good corrective for my glossing over of all of the folks who contributed in my disclosure above; it wasn&#8217;t nic in a vacuum!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li class=\"\">It&#8217;s (four or five hours in on one city, at least) so chill. The city doesn&#8217;t feel like any threat is particularly existential, which makes sense since this is a city that is going to last a long, long time. Thinking about Rome, I guess, ebbing and flowing.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Sometimes I&#8217;ll just choose dice that will cause an event to occur, so I can see more events.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">I like that I am making some decisions that constrain randomness to a specific set of areas by choosing which building-dice to roll. Then having to deal with the outcome of that randomness. I limit the dice, then the dice limit me. But I still get to throw them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">The stubbornness of the residents! &#8220;Damn I wish this residential area wasn&#8217;t here because I&#8217;d like to build&#8221;, I think, making me understand and dislike developers and Urban Renewal even MORE. You can&#8217;t clear them out! You&#8217;ve got to work with them. It essentially turns the residents en masse into a group you HAVE to work with!  This is <em>great<\/em>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Time from clicking icon to being in-game is small, making it easy to jump into for a few rounds (and then it&#8217;s an hour later oops)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">I wish I could zoom out further, both to see the whole city at once and also to have a better idea of where my dice are usable. Or maybe if I double clicked on a rolled-die it could center on the building? Oh no. Oh shit. That&#8217;s me wanting more omniscience, more god-like ability that is promised by the isometric view from above! I guess that I could just focus on one area at a time&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">It frustrates the fantasy of the urban planner \/ property developer \/ etc as god. This god does play dice with the universe!<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\">Everything, building and destruction, feels&#8230;small? In the way that cities are an accumulation of everything that has ever happened in and to them. That gets abstracted into the randomness of the dice. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li class=\"\"><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\">It&#8217;s not a city building, it&#8217;s city accretion!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>disclosures: I know nic (designer and director), and I have played lots of games with nic, and that makes me familiar with their sensibility. I am not a city-builder player. amberspire is on steam edit: nic&#8217;s bluesky thread of all of the people who worked on the game is a good corrective for my glossing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","tag-amberspire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257\/revisions\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/btphotographer.com\/postdraft\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}