With lovely artwork, go prospecting in the wild west one tile at a time in ColdRidge

ColdRidge is a tile-based exploration strategy game that puts you in the wild west. As a prospector, you'll pick contracts and venture out to do some exploring. Note: key provided by the developer.

I've seen quite a few websites previously state before it was released (even when it had a demo) that it was a bit like the early turns of Civilization games. Really, it's nothing like it though. So if you read that elsewhere, get it out of your mind first. Yes you explore tiles, and it's turn-based, but that's about as far as the comparison goes.

Here you control a single person and pick some contracts of things to find that they want, then set off by yourself to go and explore — and hopefully hit the quota of each contract you pick. Things like finding bison, wood, creating a special "portal" on a tile enabling you to warp to it at any point in the current year, or even just going over specific tiles as many times as possible giving you more and more gold each time you do.

There's no combat, no building, just pure tile-clicking in a world that's beautifully styled with some chill-out tunes to keep you focused. You have a limited amount of turns, and so planning your exploration is the key to the game and what makes it a surprising challenge. The challenge is of the casual and relaxing sort though, since it's just click-click-click in the tiles to move around.

You might think that sounds simple, and well — it is. But that's only a small part of it. There's a fair amount to discover in the game outside of just the basic contracts you take. And to help you on your way, once you finish an expedition, you're then able to stock up on a few goods based on the amount of gold you've personally received for doing a good job. Or not, if you fail a contract, you'll lose some of that precious shiny gold.

Guild Merchants can offer to give you various consumables like a map that reveals a few tiles, give you extra days for your expeditions, reveal tiles containing specific resources and more. You can only stack a few items at a time, ready to then use at any point during your expedition.

As you explore you may come across lost prospectors which have optional extra contracts you can take from them, which you have to be careful on given that you might only have a few turns left, but the extra gold is worth it if you can manage it. You can also come across special merchants, who will have permanent items you can buy and stack in a different set of inventory slots to have things like a special pot that increases in value constantly, additional gold when claiming, consumable price reductions and plenty more.

Once you finish the current expedition, you'll see a nice end of turn sequence where a group will venture out into the tiles you put down flags on to carry off the resources leaving the tiles empty. And from there, you then repeat the picking of contracts (which you can individually re-roll for a price), buying from the merchant and then setting off in a direction of your choosing hoping to fulfil your contracts to keep making a profit.

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Each chapter of the game is split across a few years, with you doing multiple expeditions in each year until your time is up to then move onto unlocking the next chapter of the game. When a year is up, if you do manage to hit your quota, then you'll be given a fresh map wiped by the Winter to go exploring again.

Each time you finish a run (succeed or fail) you will begin to unlock more of the game regardless to access more permanent items, more consumable types and other extras depending on how much gold you earned during your run.

A really lovely exploration game that can get quite challenging. It's all about planning ahead and weighing up options to maximise your own profit. Good stuff. Worth picking up.

Developed by Frog Collective, a newer indie studio based in France that was formed by two AMPLITUDE Studios veterans. They previously worked on all of AMPLITUDE Studios' strategy games like the ENDLESS franchise and HUMANKIND.

The Native Linux version works to perfection as far as I can see. Although I expected it would given that it's made with Godot Engine. Going with Godot, the developer said: "We decided to build on Godot because we’re believers in open source initiatives for gaming, we hope to do our part and contribute in the future.".