GOL Cast: Furiously Counterattacking in Ground Pounders

There aren't too many collectible card games on Linux, but here's something a bit like that. Though it comes with plenty of traditional turn-based strategy along with the cards. Let's see what's in it!

Ground Pounders from Kerberos Productions Inc. is an interesting mix of traditional combat-oriented hex-based turn-based strategy and collectible card games and it throws in dice just to be sure. The theme of the game is not too original: you are the commander of an interplanetary army, whose job is to simply complete the given set of objectives which might include wiping out enemy forces, capturing an area or holding an area for a given number of turns.


At first the game looks like your everyday turn-based strategy game. You move your units on the battlefield that consists of hexes and try to eliminate the enemy units. The terrain types limit your ability to move and to attack/defend tiles and different unit types work better against other unit types. Normal stuff, right? Well, that's barely scratching the surface of this game.

Every turn consists of different phases that allow you to do different things. This is where most of the complexity of this title lies. Two of these phases only happen on your first turn: deployment phase and orbital phase. During deployment you, as you might have imagined, deploy the units you want to the locations you want to put them. In the orbital phase you decide what cards to discard to gain space superiority, a very powerful asset that can completely turn the situation on its head. With space superiority you can summon abilities like orbital strikes that affect the enemy units directly. After those two phases the game goes to resupply phase, where you can reinforce your damaged units or deploy units you may have left in your hand. Then you get to the equipment phase, where you assign dice to your units to determine their combat effectiveness. After this you enter combat phase, where you move your units and attack enemy units. The game then loops back to resupply phase. In the different phases you can play different sorts of cards. Some of them extend the range of your supply lines, some increase your vehicles' movement speed and some allow you to scout areas you wouldn't normally see.

The combat relies on multiple factors, the dice you assign to your, the supporting units you have and the environmental and unit bonuses. Based on initial stats a main battle tank battalion is more powerful than an infantry battalion, but if that infantry unit happens to have better dice and possibly an artillery unit to support it or air support, it might be able to bring down an unprotected main battle tank unit. To further add to the complexity, the battlefield is divided to three levels that each have their own units. You have normal ground units, like tanks and infantry, underground units and air units. Units on different levels have limited ability to fight each other but using helicopters and jets to provide air support for ground attacks is certainly possible.

As you can see, the game is quite complex and it took me a good 2 hours to learn all the necessary skills to even try making a GOL Cast of this game. This game has a lot of different mechanics and I didn't even mention all of them here, because if I talked about every little detail of this game I'd be rambling here for a dozen more pages. Luckily the tutorial is quite good at explaining all the necessary things, it just takes some time to remember when to play certain cards for example. The user interface is also quite clunky, which doesn't really help when you are new to the game.

Ground Pounders is definitely an interesting game and the concept of mixing card games and turn-based strategy intrigues me. However, the game lacks polish, especially in the audio department. There are often two different soundtracks playing at the same time and every time you move your units there's a short but quite loud hiss that really gets on my nerves. The game is probably best played with the sound effects completely turned off to get rid of that problem altogether. But there is a lot of fun to be had in the gameplay, that is if you are not put off by the number of mechanics and rules to learn. Especially for a more experienced gamer this might be a refreshing experience. Even though I'm a mediocre strategy game player at best I enjoyed it quite a bit, though it certainly took me a while to figure out how everything worked.

PS: I apologize for the weird timing of this article. I've been awfully busy lately and I haven't found enough free time to write articles. I'll try to hit my usual deadline with the next GOL Cast.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.