Fans of the award-winning tabletop strategy game OGRE are in for a big treat: Bristol-based videogame designer Auroch Digital has released the official digital version of the war game on STEAM.
“We did everything we could to make it feel like the original”
If you are not familiar with it, the board game was released back in the 70s by Steve Jackson Games and features giant cybernetic tanks called OGREs fighting a seemingly endless war.
It has garnered a strong community of loyal fans since then, so it was little surprise that in 2012, 35 years after its original release, a Kickstarter campaign for a new edition of the board game raised just under £1million to make it a reality.
In fact, it was this Kickstarter campaign that… erm… kick started (sorry) the creation of the videogame. Nina Adams, Ogre’s Producer for Auroch Digital (pictured left), tells us: “One of the stretch goals on the Kickstarter was to create a digital version. Tom, our Design and Production Director, is an avid OGRE fan – he’s been playing it since he was nine – so he contacted Steve Jackson Games to ask if we could do it.
“We’d done a lot of work turning physical games into digital previously, such as Chainsaw Warrior and our upcoming game Dark Future, and they said yes!”
Faithful to the original
The brief from Steve Jackson was to make the digital version feel as much like the board game as possible. Nina says, “We did everything we could to make it feel like the original, right down to using their original 3D CAD files from the board game models. Steve Jackson has even pointed out slight discrepancies in things like the turret design, allowing us to tweak it to match.”
Nina says the feedback from beta testers and first-time players has been great. She adds, ‘A guy who did the original artwork tweeted about us to say he approved – which coming from the original designer was really satisfying.”
Try it, you might like it
So, if futuristic warfare with armoured hovercraft, superheavy tanks, infantry, and, of course, those giant cybernetic war machine OGREs is your thing – this game is for you. Nina adds: “Ogre’s a really good game to get into if you are not yet in to wargame and strategy games – it’s a great one to start with, as so many people did with the original.”
You can get a feel for the game in the trailer below:
