10000000+1: You Must Build A Boat

Hey kids, remember April 2008? Remember You Have To Burn The Rope? Remember how we laughed? Well, You Must Build A Boat has absolutely nothing to do with that. A new game with an imperative in its title just sent me all nostalgic. Look at the stuff we were banging on about back then. Blueberry Garden! Demigod! Jetpack Brontosaurus! Possible Deus Ex 3 concept art!

Man. Man. No, no, I'm fine, I'm just... sniff. I SAID I'M FINE. It's just been raining on my face.

You Must Build A Boat is the sequel to wonderful RPG/match-3/endless runner mash-up 10000000. It'll also be free to existing 10000000 owners.

YMBAB began life as an expansion to 10000000, but dev Luca Redwood found it eventually deviated so far from its parent game that it made sense to spin it into its own thing.

As far as I can tell, there's now much more focus on having an adventure of your own, rather than simply striving to beat the thing. For instance, you get to capture monsters to, er, perform special services on your quests, recruit crew members to bolster you base and make snap decisions such as whether to try and translate ancient runes or smash open the thing they're inscribed onto.

This is all I know. I got it all from looking at this webpage. I'm sorry. I'll find out more soon. Oh, wait, he told us this too:

"It still has the same frantic-fast paced running and matching from 10000000, but each run is preceded by a period of exploration where you come across lots of choose-your-own-adventure style choices. You'll be going on missions to get more crew for the boat you must build, find artefacts and the like, so what is a good choice for one mission, might be a bad choice for another, and there are always cool risk analysis based tradeoffs or choices to increase the rewards in exchange for making things more difficult."

I'm also going to go out on a limb here and predict that at some point in the game, you must build a boat.

I loved 10000000, so the idea of a more fleshed-out, varied, player-personal take on it is enormously appealing.

Also, the plan is for anyone who bought 10000000 on PC to receive a free copy of You Must Build A Boat, given that was the original promise back when it was only planned as an expansion. Which is jolly nice, isn't it?

There's a little more detail on the whys and wherefore of YMBAB's genesis here. It also has a link to buy 10000000 if you like, as it's currently discounted to $1.50.

IMPORTANT DECLARATION OF INTEREST: YMBAB dev Luca Redwood lent me his Oculus Rift a while back, after Twitter-seeing me agonising over whether to buy one. While I have never actually met the fellow (he posted the Rift to me), it is my opinion that he is A Good Egg and therefore it's theoretically possible that anything I might say about his games is monstrously distorted by gratitude. YOU DECIDE.