Did you know an iOS/Android game can be worth playing? Shocked me, too,but 2014’sCalculordsmade me re-evaluate my opinion, and now I know thatonegame is worth playing. However, now you can playCalculordswithout greasing up your screen, as it can now be played onPC via Itch.io.
Did you know a game about math can be fun? Facts all around! I personally hate numbers. They’re the source of most of my misery. But it turns out that mashing them together can be used for good instead of evil. That’s right.Calculordscore concept is waging space war using arithmetic.
It succeeds by mashing together one of those popular attack/defense games that there are about a million variations of. You’ve seen them. They’ll literally have “attack” or “defense” in their names. This one, however, has you play your units by using cards with numbers on them. If you don’t have a card that is the exact amount as required by your unit, you then have to use arithmetic to calculate that amount. I think that technically means it’s algebra, but if you think I actually paid attention in math class you are laughably wrong.
I playedCalculordsback in 2014 and thought it was pretty fantastic. It was designed in part by the internet’s Seanbaby, who made fun of crappy NES games on the world wide web before it was cool. He then had a column in EGM back when it was a magazine and still existed. Now he does 1900HOTDOG with other comedy writers, which issupported through Patreon. Full disclosure, Seanbaby was an inspiration to me back when I was just starting to write, and I probably wouldn’t be here if I didn’t follow his example. Also, I back 1-900-Hotdog’s Patreon, because why wouldn’t I?
That shouldn’t really matter, though, becauseCalculordsis available forfree over on Itch.io. It’s playable via a web browser. Originally, there were in-game microtransactions ($10 was about all you could spend on the game for everything), but the paid content is just included in this one. The idea seems to be preservation since it was apparently delisted some time ago. Gosh, the future sucks.
