In a sharp contrast to Dwarf Fortress, Goblin Camp has no world generation at all. When you start a new game, everything is on a flat plain with a river in the middle. Unfortunately, said river also prevents you from harvesting or building on the other side of the map, essentially rendering only one side of the map usable. There's no other civilizations, and your only goal is to survive. No story, no anything. Just pure and simple sandbox gameplay.

Unlike Dwarf Fortress, Goblin Camp has no support for non-ASCII symbols at the moment, which means you have to play entirely without sprites. Thankfully, it's a lot more frugal with its symbol usage, opting for readability over artistic merit. The colors are also simple. a solid brown dash, for example, is a log of wood, while a vertical orange line is a wooden plank. The perfectly square grid and colored, simplistic symbols instantly make it more approachable than Tarn's masterpiece. There's no sound or music, so if you want some, you'll have to play some in the background yourself.

The first major difference from Goblin Camp's inspiration is the interface. This is the interface that Dwarf Fortress really should have had from the beginning, and it's a joy to use. Simply put, you use the mouse to do everything. Right clicking brings up the menu where you perform all your actions, and you can play the entire game using only the mouse. It's a definite improvement over the disaster that is Dwarf Fortress' UI, although it does have some issues of its own. As the developer has stated, he wants the game to be more about macrostrategy and establishing the framework your goblins inhabit. Micromanagement is not desired, nor is it encouraged.

The basics of the game revolve around increasing your population and protecting them from external threats. If left to their own devices, your goblins and orcs will quickly die off, thanks to attacks from ants, bees, minotaurs, griffons, and various other abominations of nature. Therefore, you must provide food, drink, housing, and protection for them, all with limited space and resources. In practical terms, this functions much like Dwarf Fortress: you build workshops, set stockpiles, create farms, and provide for the poor greenskins as best as you can. However, the game differs from Dwarf Fortress in a few key ways.

First, stockpiles of goods are determined through the stockpile manager. Rather than micromanaging the production of your workshops, you simply go into the stockpile manager and set the minimum amount of goods allowed in your stockpiles. This both allows you to keep important things safe for later (food, weapons) and macro-manage your production. As you change the minimum amount, workshops will go to work to sustain the economy. As long as there are resources, there will be production. This is a sharp contrast with Dwarf Fortress' method of handling the production chain, and is frankly a lot better for the average player. Nobody wants to micromanage the creation of soap, after all.

Another key element is how the game handles the gathering of stone and the immigration of greenskins. In short, it doesn't. Both the quarry and the spawning pool are permanent structures, and both provide for the fortress. The quarry produces rocks, which must be hauled to a stockpile to be used. Sharpened rocks are particularly nice. The spawning pool creates greenskins, with the chance of a goblin or orc spawning being mostly random. Generally, you want twice as many goblins for each orc, and here's why.

Orcs and goblins in your camp are segregated. Goblins do most of the manual labor: planting seeds, hauling goods around, and fleeing for their lives from the ravenous wildlife. They also chop trees, gather plants, and do all of the stuff Orcs find too unsavory for their gruesome greenish-brown bodies. Orcs, on the other hand, are more sophisticated and only take on workshop jobs. Orcs are also the only military you can have, which turns most goblins into cannon fodder. Losing an orc sucks, but losing a goblin is nothing, as long as you still have a few (and you should).

Goblin Camp suffers from some notable issues, but it is also in alpha, so issues are to be expected. Continuing the game is a little awkward, and the game should simply continue the game from the last save you played, rather than forcing you to open the last save and click on "continue." There's no armor, furniture, vertical levels, or anything of the sort, although a good number of important features have already been planned in. It's simple, but addicting, and manages to steer free of the pitfalls that Dwarf Fortress has fallen into. We want a better interface already!

There are some games which are pure, unabashed clones of the original. This is not one of them. While Goblin Camp shares the graphics standards and focus on economy as much as Dwarf Fortress, it puts it in a different light. Altogether fun and free, it's a must have for any fan of strategy games. The next update is even coming on the 6th! You can download Goblin Camp from the developer's website. It's easily becoming one of our favorite games, as its zen-like atmosphere and ASCII art bits are direct lines to our hearts.

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