Orx is Carcassonne crossed with They Are Billions

If you like real-time card games, Orx has a nice twist for you: It's secretly tile placement, ala popular tabletop game Carcassonne. It's also not-so-secretly a tower defense, where hordes of the titular Orx are closing in, and you have to build up an effective defense in real time to take them down. It is, in many ways, Carcassonne meets They Are Billions.

For those not familiar with the tile placement genre of board games, each card puts down something like a piece of road, a farm, or a chunk of castle. Often, there are parts of each on a single card. The trick is that these things aren't active until you finish them, so in the case of Orx you're forced to complete a castle before its towers will start shooting—tough, when you just can't seem to draw that last corner piece you need. Same goes for your income, the gold you need to play cards is best gotten by finishing roads, but that means you need to draw the intersections or villages to finish them.

Spending a little time with the demo was fruitful, showing a neat twist on strategy gaming that isn't quite in any given genre at the moment. If that sounds appealing to you, well, there's a demo you can check out on Steam right now. Orx is developed by johnbell and published by Critical Reflex.

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Orx — (Image credit: johnbell and CRITICAL REFLEX)

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.