Gain Political Dominance in Siboot from Chris Crawford

Have you ever wanted to play a game where you didn’t have to have a twitchy trigger finger, reflexes like a cat, or the need to solve every puzzle on the planet? Chris Crawford has taken to Kickstarter to develop Siboot, a game based less on dexterity or intelligence and more on intuition and reading others’ emotional cues.

In Siboot you’re playing as one of four political rivals seeking to gain control of a colony on a remote and desolate alien world. Do whatever you can to succeed: gossip, lie, threaten, manipulate and otherwise use your enemies’ own weaknesses against them in debates and other forms of political machinations. Sounds like fun, no?

Here’s the thing. In Siboot you’re not talking to each other in English or any other known written language. Everything is done using pictograms, or pictures representing words, strung together to get your point across. The game will also have a sophisticated “emotional model” in which every character you’re interacting with will respond in kind. It’s up to you to read these cues and act appropriately.

Siboot also has a day/night cycle of a sort. During the day you’re dealing with the other delegates but during the night you’re engaging in what they’re calling “dream combat”. Use what you learned during the day against your rivals and the winner gets to learn more about them after the fact. The loser will also lose whatever resources they used during the battle…permanently.

In addition to the above, Siboot also will include what’s more-or-less text adventure snippets or “textual encounters” where you get to read an event and make a decision based on what you see. This may seem like a lot of different gameplay elements, and it remains to be seen how they work together. So, if you want a political thriller with unique gameplay, you should check this one out.

Track the progress of the Siboot Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.