No one said extraterrestrial capitalism would be a cakewalk, and lo and behold, it’s a cutthroat business. Offworld Trading Company’s

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“ You can sell off an opponent's stolen power for a profit.

You can hire pirates from the Black Market to steal resources for you.

Founder or Flounder

“ Being stuck in a bad starting location is a huge disadvantage.

You can never have too much.

“ There’s a nearly constant, urgent, real-time land-grab going on

EMPs can ruin your day.

“ Having to unlock structures as mission rewards just makes the early games less interesting.

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Pulling off elaborate industrial sabotage like this takes some keen observation of how the rival company is set up. That’s easy to do if you’re playing in single-player against the competent AI opponents and can pause to examine them at your leisure, but much tougher (and thus more rewarding) in a live multiplayer game where you have to split your attention between observation and managing your own company.To keep Black Market attacks from being too straightforward, Offworld has a clever mind game in play by allowing you to buy protection for any building. Do you risk hitting the most obvious target, such as a geothermal power plant, even though it might be protected? At the same time, do you let your opponent assume you’ve protected a crucial building and save the cash for other uses? What’s more, the pool of available Black Market abilities changes from match to match, keeping the mind games fresh by preventing you from repeating the same strategy over and over.You can compensate somewhat in your choice of which faction to play as, each of which uses a different combination of resources to upgrade their HQ and has a specific bonus, such as the Robotic corporation’s lack of need for life support. With the exception of the Science corporation’s ability to build factories directly on top of resource tiles instead of a mine, they don’t make dramatic differences, but they can offset a starting location that’s lacking in supply of one material or another.The late game is all about maximizing return on your resources, which by now are coming in fast. On that note, I love how this is a game about buying out your competitors’ stock and turning them into subsidiaries, which means to lose in Offworld Trading Company is to literally get owned. On the other hand, most games are already decided by this point. Once the leading corporation turns their advantage into advanced structures like the Offworld Market, giving them access to a parallel market where formerly worthless resources might be far more valuable, they can pull away quickly. By the time you see the warning that a competitor has most of the money they need to buy you out, it’s tough to single-handedly stop them without coordinated help from other players concentrating their Black Market attacks. But because rounds typically last around 30 minutes, you won’t suffer a long, drawn out loss. And since Offworld is substantially faster than most economic games, it’s more multiplayer friendly.Though it lacks character in its story, Offworld does have terrific industrial-sounding music that hasn’t gotten old over dozens of games. And while it’s graphically plain for the most part, there’s a good variety of terrain types to pick from to at least make each game look different, even if they’re not massively different in gameplay style.