Amberspire: A Fascinating, Incomplete Take on the City-Builder

In the months leading up to Amberspire, I had hoped to tell you a story. How, once, there was a City. A forge-world of kilns and furnaces. Where banners depicting soot-smeared workers proclaimed "The System is Built on Sixth Moon Steel" to the populace passing in the thoroughfares below. How trade ships bore the fruits of the Sixth Moon’s riches and ingenuity to the other Five clustering against the namesake amber glow of their gas giant, while merchants sipped alien wines from crystalline goblets in their villas overlooking swells of viscous moon-water. I’d reveal that their story was one of hubris and irony, one where the golden age they had painstakingly constructed and took for granted as their due for such cleverness was always doomed, and I’d explain that if you looked closely enough you could see the fatal flaws being built into the keystones of their monuments. 

By the book, Amberspire is the second game from Bithell Studio's Lunar Division. It is a turn-based 2D science fantasy city-builder that is powered entirely by generating and expending pools of dice. Amberspire is a game of grid-based, interdependent construction, of rhizomatic population growth, protean weather conditions, and a deck of consequential event cards. It has tiered progression, a clear win condition, a physical manual with little Destiny-like blurbs of lore, even a real consulting historian to bring it all together. If this sounds fussy, it isn't. Because really, Amberspire is a game about rolling dice and leaving a trail of forgotten cities in dust. 

Amberspire is not a game that will construct your stories for you, however. The Sixth Moon is filled with courtly peril, mercantile intrigue, and cataclysm, but it requires a player willing to fill in those spaces. Invent those spaces, really. And to do that you’ll be rolling a lot of dice, and making things up as you go along. Gameplay is cyclical, taking place in four turns over one cycle. Three of those turns are for the player to freely place buildings, roll dice, and distribute the resources they generate. On the fourth turn, the computer gets to roll. This is where your beautiful moon-city gets Pompeii’d. Well, at least that’s the expectation. 

Mechanically, Amberspire constantly runs the risk of losing the gravity grounding its dice in the locations and concepts imperiling the pleasantries of the Sixth Moon. Because while ambient grooves of lunar chill swirl with a warm verve around the soft palette illustrations of an alien Venice, when the atmosphere is ripped away like an aesthetic caul, it reveals that underneath everything is just a game of Yahtzee with a few more moving parts inventively cannibalized from other board games.

Population and Influence are the two main stats of Amberspire, and both are required to advance through the tiers of Renown, unlocking new structures and eventually winning by accruing enough of both to establish a Golden Age. Landing Pads and Starports bring people in fast, and you build Influence with locations like Arenas and the Bazaar. Population goes down sometimes, there are some larger calamities that can happen in events, and then small scale tragedies and misfortunes during the weather phases.

Influence is the measure of your city's status. This is a resource generated from marketplaces like Bazaars, Arenas, even Temples. The places where outsiders might come to see how impressive your city is, where traders congregate for business, and the wealthy get rowdy (or overly pious). Influence is how you purchase tiers of Renown, the societal advancement ranks that unlock new classes of buildings. Only by advancing to the top tier of Renown can you "win" at Amberspire. That means, if there's one way this game will absolutely fuck you, it's in modulating how much Influence you have in a given time. Each societal advancement tier burns your accrued Influence. It is the cost of doing business. Like going from a senior in high school to being a freshman in college, not only does the cost of advancement go up, you have to start from the bottom all over again. To make matters more dire, events might lessen your population, but they will absolutely drain your Influence pool. Not only can you spend Influence to choose an outcome, but many outcomes will drop you by huge amounts, even an entire Renown tier. One time, I lost two tiers back to back. You'll never guess what happened to that city. The histories don't even speak about it. They were a cursed people, doomed forever from making contact with the Frame. 

Placing a new structure and rolling dice to construct it becomes a chain of dependencies. I want to build a Spaceport, which requires Intrigue. A Salon generates that, so I must first construct a Salon. Players can construct not only a larger, more vibrant city, but the very fabric of the narrative from these flowcharts. Players who are used to building out their stories from the spreadsheets of 4X and Grand Strategy games will no doubt know exactly what I mean, but even those will offer up more concrete details—the pederast uncle and conniving cousin who have been plotting your doom since the balkanization of Big Portugal or your centuries-long holy war against Theodosia. There are no individual players on the stage in Amberspire, only high level factions without named representatives who show up as suggestions in their introductory notices and the very occasional event card. You’ll have to fill in that Frame representative who undercut your Weavers guild and decimated the textile industry for a generation. I imagine her as a ball-busting Talisa Soto in a gravity-defying mantilla. She has exquisite taste in jewelry, and touches people when she talks to them. 

That’s the kind of storytelling I’m happy to do in a pinch, but even I must admit that I wish Amberspire took the lead a little more often and gave me more and more evocative details to create with. There is a very delicate line between too much worldbuilding that can railroad players into one way of thinking about a space, and too little that becomes a lawless all-you-can-eat imagination buffet for some, and a cul-de-sac of abandonment for others. While Amberspire positions itself as being interested in the tidal flow of civilizations and the strata of history, I'm not sure it ever truly achieves this.

So many of the questions that come up when the dice rolls start suffering could be answered with—does the moonrace not understand the concept of public transit? Actually, fuck public transit, does no one have a friend with a truck? This is where things begin to fall apart, even for me.