Hello!  I'm Wolff Dobson, designer and chief engineer for Little Green Guys With Guns (LGGWG) found at http://lggwg.com.

Here's a short intro movie about the game.

My brother and I played a lot of Myth II, which is a real-time wargame with lots of little units getting chopped up. We had all kinds of fun until we moved to distant time zones.  At that point, coordinating our gaming was too complicated.

Worse, since we're men and don't call one another randomly to chat, we weren't staying in touch.  We tried a lot of wargames with hotseat and play-by-email components, but none of them were quite right.  I just wanted to do a little bit of gaming all day during coffee breaks and long compiles-a constant-but-not-overwhelming stream of fun and an excuse to bug my brother.

I started coding here and there, sketching out a turn-based wargame that would be fast, fun, and bloody with just the right pace.  Little Green Guys with Guns was born then, and has grown hugely over these many years.  And, if you <a href="http://lggwg.com">come on down,</a> today, you can play with us!

What is LGGWG?

Little Green Guys With Guns (LGGWG) is a social play-by-email strategy game.  It is played in short bursts across your work day.

Your goal is to use your team of cute, one-eyed aliens to annihilate the other teams of cute, one-eyed aliens on the map.  Casualties are always extremely high.

In the long run, your goal is to fight valiantly against other human players on our 70+ maps to earn rank, medals, and awesome hats.

The game is played largely over the web and by email.  Simply create an account, pick a challenge, and you will be sent your first turn. And, if you're shy, we have single-player and allies vs. environment content as well.

To play LGGWG, you can go to our website and click on the giant orange “Play Now For Free” button.

How does LGGWG work?

LGGWG is a turn-based game.  Every turn, you give orders to all of your units, and then the client uploads them to the web.  When everyone has uploaded their orders, the server computes what happens and sends on the next turn.

Here's a movie giving a rough outline of how the controls and gameplay work.

Each player issues orders for a given turn, giving serial orders which might eventually look like this:

These orders are then interleaved with everyone else's and are resolved in order.  The gameplay resembles RoboRally at times as units attempt to obey orders despite collisions or other failures.

As one of our players said,

Quote: "To me, the heart of the game and something not too many other games have in the same way is the gap between plans and reality."

You submit your orders as your best hope of what may happen, and frequently you see something else entirely.  It's unpredictable and fun.

Here's a movie we made of a game that smashes 3 days of gameplay into about a minute and a half, complete with comical speeded-up sound effects.

The website, http://lggwg.com, processes all multiplayer games and keeps track of running games and open challenges.  We have an ELO ranking system, a weekly tournament, single-player and co-op missions against the AI, achievement medals, and awesome hats to collect.

The client also ships with a map editor.  Our beta testers have designed the majority of the maps, which is a lesson in empowering your community.

Our cast of characters

LGGWG has many unit classes, each of which serves a different purpose.

	Execs are like kings in chess.  He has great power at short range, but if he dies, everyone on your team dies with him.  They are also sore losers, and explode when they are killed to take out their attackers.
	Snipeys are long-range riflemen.  (Snipers, even.)  They have very random damage.
	Maxes are grenadiers.  They can fire through walls and around corners with their area effects, but those same area effects make them very vulnerable to hitting themselves.
	Puffers were pets before the wars came.  They are close-range units with a big-damage chomp attack.
	Firebots are armored tanks with a room-filling flamethrower attack.  Due to severe design flaw, they explode when they die.
	Miners can lay and clear mines.  They are extremely cheap, but nearly worthless when in a close-in fight.
	Mines explode when all units walk over them, except for same-color miners.  They are visible if you have a sightline on them, but otherwise disappear in the fog of war.
	The flag is both a spy outpost and target practice for your enemy.
	Always popular (and frequently cursed) are our trio of one-eyed sheep.  Sheep wander around randomly right before the troops move, meaning they act as variable terrain.  The safe move is to clear the sheep to avoid collisions (and the inevitable self-damage that comes with collisions), but, you know, sometimes lunging through the sheep and saving your bullets for the enemy pays off.

Come on Down, the Mutton's Nearly Free

LGGWG lives on its community.  There's a great crew playing now, but we'd love to have more.

We are offering a truly amazing deal to get new people playing.  We are offering 4 weeks free play and an astoundingly low early-adopter subscription fee of just $3. 

As patrons of Wargamer.com and thus the finest men and women of strategy gaming, we think you'll really enjoy LGGWG.  We also would love your feedback on all aspects of the game and gameplay.

Come take a look!  Challenge me, wolff, to a Newbie Challenge!  You can also try the single-player missions, too, attacking the dopey-but-always-arrogant RoboBot in single-player mode!

See you soon!

About the Author

Dr. Wolff Dobson has been working as a professional in the game industry for 10 years.  He created artificial intelligence for Sega Sports (NBA2K, NBA2K1) and then co-founded an AI-game startup, AiLive, that has released multiple successful AI middleware products. Currently, he is at an unannounced startup building social games.