Greed Corp.

Greed Corp. is a turn-based strategy game, though it's unusual for the genre. It sets itself apart from ordinary TBS games in that it's partly a puzzle game as well - and thanks to having opponents, it's a dynamic one. In an ordinary TBS game you have your environments, and you move your units around it to try and defeat your opponents units, or to capture more of the environment. Sometimes you have resources, or a variety of units with various uses. Greed Crop. Features all this  it has a  variety of unit types, resources and environments  but the key feature of the game is that the environment is always changing. The main mechanic of the game is that in order to gain more resources, you must deplete and destroy the environment.

The environment in Greed Crop. is a board made up of octagonal panels. The board is arranged in layers  between 1 and 6  that serve to create height and depth on the terrain. Beyond the board, there is nothing, save for a vast expanse of bottomless mists. 

Your most common, and indeed most valuable piece, is called a harvester. It will give you a set amount of resources for every one of the octagonal panels adjacent to it, and in exchange it lowers them by a single layer. When a panel is out of layers, it crumbles into space, and can no longer be played or built on. The entire game is a gigantic balancing act. In order to get more resources, you destroy the areas where you can build or place units. By the end of the match there's little left of the board  maybe four or five out of the original 40 or 50. Each team becomes confined to their own tiny island, firing at one another with mortar shells and trying to gather enough resources to build a plane to fly over to their enemy's collection of panels and deploy enough units to take it over. The end of the game becomes less a game of strategy and more a race. Everyone can see what needs to be done, it all comes down to what you did before the final stretch, and how that helps you get what needs to be done, done. There can be up to four teams in a match at once, making the game a frantic land grab, forcing the player to be wary of the enemy to the left, even as they conquer the enemy to the right. The experience as a whole rapidly shifts from a slow and methodical game of chess to a frantic and heart-pounding conclusion.

Greed Corp. is available on Steam for about 10 dollars. With a few dozen missions and online multiplayer, it's well worth the price if games like this are your thing.