Dubious Quality

My game of the year is one I only started playing about a month ago. It was developed by one person, and ranks in the top 20 of my favorite games of all-time (spanning almost fifty years of gaming).

Welcome to Our Adventurer's Guild.

Here's the basic set-up, and it's nothing revolutionary. You manage an adventurer's guild from a central headquarters with the usual structures (pub, church, blacksmith, merchant, etc.). You can send parties of adventurers (which you recruit) on missions which auto-resolve, or you can lead them yourself and determine battle tactics in a turn-based system.

The missions have plenty of variety, and there are always plenty to choose from. It's a satisfying network of possibilities, and every game system has plenty of meat on its bones. The character classes, in particularly, are terrific and have real differences between them. In addition, no part of the game is too easy (on normal difficulty), but no part feels impossibly difficult, either. 

Superficially, it resembles Battle Brothers or Wartales, but there are additional dimensions, including relationships between characters that far exceeds anything I've seen in a game of this nature before. 

Plus, and this is important, you have to explore EVERY game system to be successful. You need to become familiar with everything, and here's an example. I was struggling with one of the last two battles in the game (a particularly powerful and recalcitrant dragon) and kept getting defeated. Then I realized I hadn't explored the teamwork mechanic, which allows you train adventurers to build positive relationships with each other, which gives your party special bonuses when they're together in battle. This was crucial to my eventual success.

The game builds in a fantastic way, with battles gradually becoming more complicated. By the end, the battles are enormous setpieces and have an epic feel to them. A few qualify as some of the favorite battles I've ever played in a game.

It's not a short game. You'll get 60+ hours of entertainment. I didn't crash once, and never encountered a bug. Inconceivable, really, with today's development standards.

"GreenGuy" (the lone developer) has created a complex masterpiece of management and tactics, and it's all supremely satisfying. I could not possibly give it higher praise.

Is it expensive to play this wondrous cauldron of entertainment? No. $11.24, as of this writing. It's one of the biggest bargains in gaming history. Here's a Steam link: Our Adventurer's Guild.