Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

Lux Delux a Game of Universal Domination (20 play demo, $24.95 unlocked game) which the company SillySoft — great name for a game company, by the way — describe as a:

game of strategy and domination inspired by the board game Risk.

How long has it been since you played Risk? For me, it hasn’t been since middle school. Our family plays board games once in awhile and our middle son and I enjoy playing chess. He has this cool Star Wars chess board, but that’s a story for another day. Monopoly is probably the most played board game in our family, we don’t own Risk.

When it comes to strategy games on the computer I really haven’t played that many or often before. Earlier this year I was invited up to Microsoft to beta test Ages of Empire III and that was a thoroughly enjoyable experience (although I never bought the game when it came out) so I was stoked to try out Lux Delux and learn what it was all about.

Lux was originally created November 25, 2002 by Dustin Quasar Sacks in Montreal, Canada and a history page details the game’s origins until present, including the name change to Lux Delux in June 2006 when new features and plugins were made available. An annual tradition each October involves a contest called Luxtoberfest.

Time not on my strategic side
I think one of my main concerns about strategy games in general is time. My time, like many others I’m sure, is in very short supply and any game that requires a significant amount of time, brainpower and concentration is less likely to get into my wallet. I was curious if Lux Delux would be too involving time-wise for someone busy to go beyond the demo and pay $24.95.

Let’s find out.

Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, choose your poison
Upon visiting the Lux Delux website the very first thing I noticed is the game has cross platform support. Windows, Mac or Linux, Sillysoft has you covered. A definite plus for any software, especially games which tend to be a little lacking on our Mac (we’ve been somewhat lazy about finding good games to download and play). Lux Delux is written in Java so if your system isn’t up to date with Java it will get you there.

Single player licensing on multiple computers
I was curious if I paid the twenty-five bones whether or not I could run the game on both Windows and Mac or if I was required to pay for two licenses? It would be nice to see Sillysoft post their licensing terms — or at least a link — somewhere near the download area to make this clear.

As it turns out after a little more digging around the Sillysoft website, this is the very first question answered in the Lux Wiki Q&A:

A license is only good for one player. It is allowed for that player to use their registration on different computers (desktop and laptop for example). If 2 different players want to play each other then they will need 2 different accounts.

Note: I only reviewed the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Lux Delux so if you are a Linux user trying out the game and have a different experiences than what follows please feel free to leave a comment below with details.

Downloading the v5.5 demo on Windows and Mac OS X
The Windows download is a 20.6MB exe file and on Mac a 9.3 MB dmg. On Windows you know the drill, just click the exe to start the install. On Mac, double click the dmg and then drag the lux.app to your applications folder or where you prefer to store games.

During the Windows install an information windows appears explaining more about the various gameplay options:

You can play the Game Of Universal Domination any way you want. Versus friends on the same computer, against the 10 different computer AI players (from easy to hard), or versus the world in networked games. There’s an active Lux community to be found in network games and the the Sillysoft forums. There are also World Wide Rankings to determine who’s the best.

I definitely wasn’t ready as a first timer to get my butt handed to me in a networked game, so the most appealing option for the first time was playing against a computer AI player on the easiest setting.

Windows demo first startup screen:

Mac OS X demo first startup screen:

Java was up to date on both systems so no extra updating was required on either system. The installation and first run process was flawless.

Instructions and strategy for how to play
Before pressing the “Let me Play” button, I wanted to read up on how to play the game and consulted the Lux Wiki strategy page which linked out to a very detailed beginner’s guide from risk_man. Included in risk_man’s guide are instructions about what continent to choose.

The object of Lux Delux is to conquer the entire world.

Risk_man indicated that it “usually takes 3 or 4 hours to play” based on the number of (human) players. I would soon learn that playing against the computer was much, much faster.

With a plan to take on bots, I also consulted the Lux Wiki Agent Profiles page to learn about the different bots with names like: BotOfDoom, BotOMatic, Reaper, Brainiac, Killbot, Quo, EvilPixie, Boscoe, Shaft, Cluster, Pixie, Cluster, Yakool, Communist, Angry, Stinky, Ravitar and Bort.

Besides playing the game, you can also build your own bots and share with other players.

Plugin manager
The map section has a dropdown that allows you to search through the list of plugins — map, generator, AI — installed or choose from a sortable list of a couple dozen additional free plugins.

Similar to bots, you can also create your own Lux maps.

Enough reading, let’s play
The game starts by players alternating picking which region of the world to populate. ‘Timmy the tutorial box’ provides instructions so new gamers can become familiar with the basic gameplay.

I stayed with the default of six players but you can play with as few as two players by changing the dropdown to ‘no player.’ Once every region in the world is taken you can start adding your army and fortifying your regions. Lux is a turn-based game where some of the time playing is spent waiting for what the other players to react.

A clearly rookie mistake made was trying to spread myself out and dominate too much land too quickly and this caused my rather fast demise. The game was over in under 10 minutes, so it is possible to play against the computer — and lose — fairly quickly. Certainly not anywhere in the realm of 3-4 hours. I noticed when clicking on the “show network games” button that turns are time based with 20 seconds or more to make your moves. This would keep things moving along but it’s easy to see how if all six players took the full 20 seconds that the time could drag on.

After losing the first game, I decided to summon our middle teenager — the gamer in the family — who said he had played Risk before. I watched his strategy which was decidedly different than mine. He started by trying to cover Australia and grow his armies and fortifying only Australia while the other AI bots fought each other. When he had built up the army to over 60 armies he went on the offensive, attacking. Within 15 minutes he beat the computer opponents.

We ratcheted up the difficulty to ‘hard’ and he tried again using a similar strategy. In the beginning alternate region one of the AI bots chose parts of Australia. He was more impatient with the gameplay the second time around and attacked too soon.

I made a screencap video of him playing in action so you could get a sense of the gameplay, graphics and sound. The video quality is subpar, but you can get the basic idea of how things work.

I probably didn’t need to spend time reading the instructions and looking around as it’s fairly self-explanatory once you get into the game. I tried a game on the Mac vs. six computer opponents on ‘medium’ and there were no significant differences noticed on the Mac version vs. Windows.

Fun factor
I found the ‘classic’ game merely average in the fun factor department on the first few plays but it starts to grow on you a little bit with additional games, save for when you capture an entire continent (or area). The pace playing against the computer moves fast enough to sustain interest. The graphics and sound for some maps like the default ‘classic’ map are kind of dull. The alternate Vietnam War map looked good and the Spacestation Lux is nicely done and somewhat fun to play.

Overall, graphically and sound-wise nothing spectacular or stunning when compared to next generation games on the Xbox 360 (I know, gamers are spoiled these days) but since players can make and play their own maps, more extensive eye-candy maps could be created. I’d like to see a game like this in the Xbox Live Arcade someday but since it’s written in Java that probably won’t happen any time soon unless somebody wants to port it into C# via the XLA Game Express. This game would work well as a multi-player Xbox Live game. It’s a nice change of pace from first person shooters like Halo, Gears of War, etc.

Network play
After cutting my teeth on a half dozen games against the computer I decided to check out network play in voyeur ‘guest mode.’ For a little bit the rooms I tried connecting to were full because they “only allowed 1 unregistered nick” or because they didn’t like my alias “TD” which I changed to a different name. Once inside I watched the human players. A chat window is directly below the map.

The chat channel was very IRC-like in nature and a couple players started in on me, asking where I was from? Typical chat experience, the folks were friendly. I explained I was just checking things out. When you enter in the middle of a game you are queued to play the next game. I noticed some things in the menu up above that I hadn’t seen while playing against the computer, although they are there. There is a radio function which allows listening to some preselected channels while playing: BarStar Radio, Groove Salad, Indie Pop Rocks, Mostly Classical, Secret Agent, SmoothJazz, the 80s channel and Vocal trance. What, no podcasts or talk radio?

An autoplay mode exists for bathroom breaks or if you have to eject early from a game in progress, but reading through the wiki on Luxiquette, it’s not cool to leave before a game ends (or before you get beaten, anyway):

You should not start a network game you can not finish. Hex, Assault, and even some Classic Risk games (with six humans, with card pay-outs that never advance past 5,5,5…) can go on a very long time. Know what you are doing and commit (like to a marriage, or a pony-keg).

Support forum
As far as support for Lux goes, there’s an active community forum with some 40,000+ Lux-related posts, so if you get stuck somewhere along the installation or in playing, you won’t be relegated to dropping a support email or trying to find an answer in Google. The Lux-related forums are broken into several different areas:

Lux Talk (39,000+ posts) - a general chat area about the game
Map LAB (2,300+) - help and feedback on creating your own maps
Robot House (900+) - AI ideas and feedback on the SDK
Feature Request (3,600+) - something missing in Lux? Suggest it here
Bug Reports (2,800+) - get out the fly swatter

Summary and grade
Lux Delux is a solid, satisfying computer version of the game Risk with an impressive number of player options, plugins and tweaks. Whether you want to just play against others, the computer and/or develop using the SDK there’s plenty to dig into and be entertained. The Lux Delux website is established, freshly updated and full of information about the game, strategy and some human players you might encounter in the game. There are enough plugins to keep one busy playing around for awhile.

Lux Delux is reasonably priced at $24.95 considering the features and functionality plus unlimited network gameplay. If you enjoy the game Risk, can set aside the time and energy to play and have never heard or seen Lux Delux, there’s no risk diving into this game. I took a few points off for graphics and sound which could be improved, but otherwise this is an outstanding effort by Sillysoft. Grade: A-

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