With surprisingly intricate tactical gameplay hidden behind a charming interface and nonchalant storytelling, 7 Grand Steps is one of gaming's greatest metaphors for life. [July 2013, p.73]
7 Grand Steps is a smart digital board game enriched with strategy elements and some surprises. A strange game, indeed, that brings us trough 7000 years of dynastical challenges.
The game has sophisticated, deeply strategic gameplay which has a distinct "just one more turn" feel to it. What excites me the most, however, is the idea behind the game. Leading your family through the ages, it's like Civilization on a family scale. And to think that this game is only the first "Grand Step" in the planned series of seven games, covering only the Ancient history. The second game would cover Middle ages, and from what I've heard you would be able to transfer your progress from the first game. 7 Grand Steps - a great concept that i'd very much like to see become a reality.
Incredibly fun and addictive. Build a family over several generations with a gameplay that feels like a sophisticated slot machine. Not a game that you play on the subway or while waiting in line for a movie. This is the kind of game that takes commitment. Definitely worth it.
In retrospect, I like having this unique story to tell. However, I found little joy in actually playing it. Frustration, irritation, and boredom, sure. But little joy. I might have been better off playing the slots in my local, dilapidated amusement arcade. At least then there would have been a chance I could have won a few quid, and with my winnings, I could just have bought a book.
This game is both simple and addictive. It's really fun to improve a family through ages with differents skills and to see the interaction between pawns. Highly recommend for board-game lovers!
Extraño juego, pero interesante para investigarlo. Su mecánica y dinámica hace plantearse si llega a ser un videojuego o no pero quieres continuar usándolo.
I have no idea what this is actually supposed to be. It's sort of a board game, sort of a strategy game, and sort of a roleplaying game and exists as something entirely its own thing.
Normally I'd call that a plus, but as you might have guessed by the gratuitously pretentious title, it's a game much more full of itself than it is actually well-designed. Playing as a family, you use tokens to move forward on a board that's constantly rotating towards a pit of crocodiles which represent failure to thrive. As you play, you might produce children, and one of those children moves on to be your next player character and start a new generation eventually. Choices you make, like neglecting one of your offspring, might affect you down the line.
Pretty cool in concept, but everything is just so slow and boring that it lost me. I remained curious and entranced despite the repetition for a while, wanting to know where this was all going, but eventually I realized just how much time I was wasting clicking on tokens again and again. Every actual in-game action is so far removed from the overall story it's trying to tell that it requires you to bring your own personal narrative to things just to make it interesting. Coupled with a really self-satisfied writing style and a way of trying to sound philosophical without saying much, and my goodwill quickly faded away entirely.
This was a bundle game for me, but I'm still not interested in playing any longer. That it sells for $20 normally is insane. Some people might find something of interest here in the unique concept - I do recommend giving it a try if it makes its way to your library via bundle - but everything it was trying to do just didn't work for me.
I am surprised I spent as long as I did on this game, around ten hours, considering how boring and uneventful I found it. I spent the money and there were comments saying it was so amazing, so I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Also there is something addictive, without actually being fun or interesting, about the putting the coin in the slot.
The whole game is essentially repeatedly rolling dice and making making small decisions based on the outcomes. These small decisions add up, and if you choose well, your family's destiny improves as the game progresses. Sadly the amount of time vs the payoff is way out of wack. It takes too long to learn what amounts to general guidelines of how to play, and after you know the guidelines it is just random. And the writing, which is where it needs to stand out if the gameplay is so repetitive, is really boring. It is very family oriented and very dry. If they added more historical detail then this could be a fun educational tool for children.
The game itself has a really unique presentation in the form of a constantly rotating board game, but that's about where the charm stops, unfortunately. Gameplay and movement is based on a limited number of tokens, but you can generate tokens based on skills and interaction with other characters on the board. Unfortunately, you don't make nearly enough to do much of anything before long, especially when you end up having children and need to feed them tokens to improve their respective skills.
Again, the game has a lot of neat ideas, but is let down by the execution and the random events that players don't really have much control over beyond one choice, the outcome of which seems to be based on skills, but isn't clear enough to know for certain. Later phases (I only made it to the second stage) introduce the idea of generating clout, but don't explain it at all.
I want to like this game, I really do, but I can't.
SummaryPart turn-based strategy, part interactive narrative, part boardgame, '7 Grand Steps' tells of ancient ancestors that started western civilization. From the sweat of laborers to the perspective of kings, experience the drama of a family lineage that survived the changing ages... or did they survive? How you guide them will determine thei...