Review: Motti

Score:
88%

Author: North Pixel

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Personally I’d add to Brockman's description by dropping in hints of Capture the Flag, Risk and Go into the mix as well. This might not look like a complicated game, with its blocks of colour and square game pieces representing armies, but once you look beyond the functional graphics, you aren’t going to care.

 

As each game round starts, the territory of the single screen land is marked out in the colours of each player – initially the two player challenges are red and green, but yellow and blue are added when the four player challenges are reached. There’s also sea as well, which nobody is allowed to occupy – there’s no navy here, just the slow territorial slugging out of armies that reminds me of trench warfare.

Each player, in turn, decides what move to make. It can be either:

1. Defensive, allowing you to specify three squares of land you own to be occupied by an army.
2. Go on the attack and nominate six squares that you would like an army piece to occupy. These nominations can be unoccupied squares of enemy territory, as long as you have an army next to the square (horizontally or vertically) that you are attacking. Once your six nominations are marked, you can “submit” them and one square will gain an army. You can do this six times, but each time only one of the six squares will convert. And don’t think you can get away with just nominating one – it’s a 1/6 chance of each square getting the army, so it’s never guaranteed.
3. Finally you could “guerrilla attack” which allows you to nominate just one square to capture, but it can be diagonally attached to one of your armies and be in enemy territory.

By only allowing once choice per turn, you have to balance off protecting your own territory (and home city – lose that square and it’s game over) with just three squares, racing ahead and capturing territory with the slightly more random 6 attacks, or a surgical strike on one square, useful to capture the enemy’s home city at the end of the game.

 

There’s one other way to capture territory, and it gives its name to the game, the tactic of “Motti” from the Finnish army. This is where one force completely surrounds another, entrapping them. If this happens in the game and you isolate territory squares so they are not connected to the home city square, you capture that territory.

You may eventually reach deadlock, where neither player can gain any enemy territory. When that happens, the “round” is over, all armies are cleared from the grid, and play continues with the new territorial boundaries and an empty grid. There will be times when you just want to go for deadlock so you can start again, and deciding when to do that is another tactical choice you’ll need to make.

This is an easy game, but it’s not simple. By that, I mean the rules and actions to play it will be something you 'get' in a few minutes. But how to use them to actually win a game, and continue to win, that’s a little bit more challenging. The constricted board is well sized, as you will probably be advancing only a few squares each round. Defend too much though, and your opponent will overrun you.

And like any war game, there are times when you get a lightning strike deep into your territory and a desperate rearguard action is needed.

 

Take this wonderful basis of a game, throw in multiple maps that you need to work through with up to three other computer AI players, and the ability to set up “scratch” games on any map, with any number of human or computer players depending on what takes your fancy, and you have a winner.

Could it be spruced up with better graphics, cut-scenes, animations and battle graphics? Yes, but then it would lose a lot of its charm. This is tactics and strategy, boiled down to their very essence. And it is a powerful essence. If you’ve any interest in this style of game, this is what your phone has been missing.

-- Ewan Spence, Jan 2011.

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 15:39 UTC, January 22nd 2011