A series of orange shapes floating on a black screen. There are two red boxes, two green boxes, two yellow boxes, two cyan boxes and a purple box. A bar at the bottom of the screen goes from green to red.
It’s always a joy to see a new game pop up on the Steam Store. It provides me with an opportunity to see what fun, independent games are being created. Sometimes, I’ll reload the store just because I want to see if something new popped up. I know, it usually doesn’t happen, but on the off chance it does I always feel justified in restarting the application. That’s what happened to me not too long ago, and I saw Vertex Dispenser pop up. It looked interesting so I got a copy and gave it a whirl so I could tell you all about it.
The game is an abstract strategy game, where you play a little ship that tries to take over geometric shapes by taking over various vertices while your opponents are trying to do the same thing to you. Sounds simple, but the way your power ups work is that their charge depends on how you capture the vertices. There is a hierarchy of colours, starting at red and ending with white, and no two colours can be connected. That means if you capture a red vertex, all the ones around will be blue which is the next colour down. Depending on which blue you capture, your next choices will be either red or green. That means the more powerful abilities are lower down the colour chain, which makes setting the colours up pretty important because they will determine what abilities you get to use. That’s where the math puzzle comes in.