Review of Silmaris

Our Verdict

An ambitious, narrative-driven kingdom management game that doesn't quite manage to pull its two distinct halves together as well as we'd like.

Mobile devices have become a natural habitat for storytelling games. There are several possibilities available to you outside of the vast pool of general choose-your-own adventure games, such as the mobile adaptations of popular gamebooks like the Fighting Fantasy series. Similar to the Sorcery! series, other developers have altered those books by adding complex new digital dynamics.

Then there's the resurgence of beloved adventures such as King of Dragon Pass and its follow-up Six Ages, innovative games like 80 Days and Over the Alps, and fun mobile experiences such as Reigns. With so many interactive experiences, it's difficult to give Silmaris a perfect recommendation.

The game Silmaris consists of two somewhat different sections. First of all, there are a number of procedurally produced tale portions that provide difficult decisions for you to make with no obvious "correct" response. This is where you decide whether your monarch is a conqueror, a negotiator, or something else completely.

After that, you play a dice-based resource management game in which your objective is to gather and hold onto the guns, grain, spies, and other items you'll need to complete your mission. With those dice, you may conquer other countries, form alliances, set up routes for smuggling, dispatch monsters, and grow your own city, among other things.

The fundamental mechanism of the game involves opposing dice rolls. Six-sided dice, each with two distinct sides, are gathered to represent various resources such as military might, diplomatic influence, amassed grain, and so on. There are a total of five colours for the dice. You may do many things in the globe with each one: conquer cities, forge treaties, go on expeditions, etc. If that's more your style, we've compiled a list of the top mobile digital board games, so you can discover some more to play.

In any case, you roll the dice against your opponent after deciding how much to invest. Rerolling is possible after you use the sixth resource. As you roll additional dice, the game helpfully indicates the probabilities of each roll, giving you a decent notion of your possibilities. However, failure may strike without warning: you're out of the game if you run out of rerolls during an attack on your capital city.

In the meantime, while your dice are helping you achieve an objective, you are essentially simply making decisions on how to best acquire dice in order to have the appropriate ones available when you need them. Your best bet is usually to accumulate dice with your strongest advisor; in fact, the fast roll feature on the home page automatically rolls all five of those rolls for you.

However, you could have to exchange dice across pools or make less-than-ideal rolls if you're short on a certain kind. This is particularly true when the other kings are attacking you and you are in dire need of recruiting enough men to last until the next day.

In the resource management game, your decisions are mostly about making the most use of your pools and rerollable credits. Should you save your reroll tokens or use them for a more costly advisor who would permanently increase your chances of winning one or two dice? Do you need to keep your soldiers at home, or can you afford to go for an artefact? Will you ally with another state or conquer them to bring in more dice?

Although there is some management required in the dice game, it may sometimes seem more like busywork than really leading a massive army or overseeing a complex espionage network—both of which are decided by identically opposed results. It's OK for the resource management aspect of the game to be less comprehensive since choose-your-own-adventure tales make up a large portion of its enjoyment. Only four of your resources in a game like Reigns respond to decisions you make in the narrative, and the game takes great pleasure in creating tension from this delicate balance.

But in Silmaris, you'll find yourself seeing rows of dice spinning and putting various coloured dice into various pools for a significant amount of time in between narrative passages. One of two routes would likely be more beneficial for the dice management game to go in. Either way, by removing certain dice pools and cutting down on the amount of rolls that occur in between tale pages, it might become more straightforward and abstract. Alternatively, it might become more specific and themed, including different military formations, structures, and a more intricate economy, among other things.

However, it is just half of the game; the narrative elements of Silmaris are what really make it worthwhile to play. These fantasy pieces include excellent writing and some very lovely, moving artwork. Many of the plot points unfold across many rounds, and the status of the board may also have an impact. In the narrative mode, angering a power not only incurs penalties there, but it may also make dice rolls against them more challenging.

In contrast to King of Dragon Pass, Silmaris's fantasy universe is more along the lines of Dungeons & Dragons or Tolkein. Although the results of your choices sometimes come as a shock, they are never as mysterious as they were in Dragon Pass. There are no strange ceremonies, no mysterious offerings, no warrior duck tribes, no bizarre cults. In addition, the tone is more serious than in Reigns, which included strange, dark humour and more developed adviser characters.Although not as shocking as previous games, Silmaris's tale is nonetheless engaging enough.

In the end, however, there's not much of a flow between the two game portions. There is some influence from the plot on the dice rolling, but not much. It undoubtedly presents challenges that call for the use of dice to solve, and as a reward, you'll often get one of the important re-roll tokens. The majority of the time, however, you will only win one or a small number of dice of a certain color—the same thing you get for making the usual rolls each round. That lends the plot choices an air of slight weightlessness.

With some entertaining narratives, Silmaris is a lightweight kingdom simulator that is rather intriguing. Going through every word in the game should take some time, although the dice portion becomes less boring as you get the hang of it. You might do much worse, but there are better mobile narrative game alternatives (several of them are included on our best mobile RPGs list).