Folk Emerging describes itself as a turn-based 4X strategy game, but in practice, it’s possibly more of a 2.5X strategy game, in that it puts you in charge of a nomadic hunter-gatherer community from before the rise of agriculture and the founding of towns and cities.
As this developer update suggests, it’s like the turn or two at the very start of Civilization when you just have one Settler unit, but stretched out across thousands of years, with a social element and rustic spreadsheet aesthetics that remind me of King Of Dragon Pass. It’s got somewhat doofy cartoon Stone Age muzak, but is otherwise the most intriguing Civlike strategy game I’ve laid eyes on since the one that looks like an octopus murder scene – and whadayaknow, by happy coincidence there’s a public playtest running from right now till August 18th.
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Going by the Steam page descriptions, you’ll move your tent-dwelling tribe continually around a procedurally generated hexagonal map that consists of nine climates. Each climate has a different food web that is represented by an actual web, with a node for each predator and prey species. Ideally, you’ll pick a mixture of food sources from that web so as to keep your cavepeople hale and hearty, without reducing the local ecosystem to dust.
While the hunter-gatherer premise obviously precludes construction elements, there is a research tree. You start off splitting flints, later gravitate to the mysteries of fire, and eventually clock domestication and the process of sowing and reaping. Alongside this, you’ll flesh out your community’s culture by picking between binary norms such as “pride” or “modesty” and “diligence” or “hedonism”: these affect things like the odds of war with other groups of humans and how you approach trade.
And then there’s the social simulation elements, which are represented as a tangled natto ball of coloured faces. “Manage the relationships between individuals, families, and tribes,” explains the Steam page. “Watch your collective adapt over countless generations. Beware the unintended consequences current choices can have on your great-great-great-grandchildren.” Mental note: try not to accidentally invent the patriarchy.
Lastly, there’s combat, which sees you autobattling with charcoal cave paintings. You’ll want to be wary of picking fights, because if Grarg the Forager takes a sharpened stone to the kisser, you’ll not only lose her foraging skills but also all of the “hard-won wisdom” she might otherwise pass on to her kids. So the technologies and practices at your disposal are hereditary, then, like in Norland?
Other points of interest: the world periodically succumbs to an Ice Age, which obviously requires ingenuity and preparation to survive. You can join up with other roving communities to form bustling tribes of quarrelling factions. I’m going to sign up for that playtest and see how long it takes me to become an evolutionary dead end.
