Overview: BC Wars bills itself as a “sandbox” game, but that’s a little misleading – it’s basically a straight adventuring/leveling game with a crafting and economic side. The artwork is pretty basic and the layout of the site is not terribly intuitive, but it’s doing some interesting things nonetheless. The tutorial video is amateurish although worth spending the three minutes on; the game guide is brief but much more useful.

The first thing you’ll do is create a character. There’s not much customization beyond hairstyles available, but the meat of the character is in the skills. There are fourteen of them, which is a little bewildering at first, but you can reassign your points as often as you like until you hit level 10, so you don’t need to worry about making a mistake. The one real caveat is it’s not at all clear that you can’t use the five or so crafting skills at all until level 10 at the earliest.

The main part of the game is exploring. This is a very simple mechanism – you pick an area and click “Explore.” Each click brings up a random message – you might get a bit of flavor text about the area, a simple choice – investigate a noise, or follow it? – a random item, or a monster encounter. You get 200 “steps” per hour – it seems to refresh at the top of the hour rather than on an individual timer.

The monster battles are simple turn-based fights. You can pick a weapon if you have one equipped, pick a special attack if you have spare Stamina, and click “Attack” to get the outcome of each round. If you prefer, you can choose to fight automatically – you’ll have to fill in a CAPTCHA but then you’ll get the round-by-round outcome and the results immediately. As the combat is not very exciting either visually or strategically, this is a great option to have.

The rest of the game either involves simple chance-based minigames – slots, over/under, and the like – or the economic game. You can buy and sell land, create a shop to sell items, participate on the auction house, and, after level 10, use found or purchased materials to make fancier items. There’s no real progression other than to become wealthier and wealthier – the game guide literally says “The currency is clams, and the main goal is to amass as many of these as possible.”

You can pay money to get Gold, which you can spend on various upgrades from getting more step-per-hour to explore to increasing the number of items you can sell in your shop at once. None of the upgrades are critical, but a lot of them are appealing. One way to earn gold other than paying for it is to boost the game’s ranking at a number of game rating sites, which seems somewhat shady, but the rating sites all seem ambivalent about that kind of traffic.

BC Wars does not seem like a professionally developed game – the art is low-quality and the game does not have a cohesive overall design. However, if you enjoy playing the market, it is geared expressly towards that kind of play and may be worth a look.