Serf City

The game takes place on a hilly hexagonal grid, and your first move is to place your castle. After that, you must start placing other buildings (somewhat a la Colonization) which act as centers for collecting natural resources, or processing them into more useful items, or for defense or storage.

You must have a good supply of wood and stone to create buildings, wood and steel to create tools and arms, gold to keep your soldiers happy, and food to keep your miners strong. (Oddly enough, no one else seems to need food.)

Your territory is determined by the placement of your castle and guard buildings, defined as hexagonal swatches extending about six grid points away from each guard building. To increase your territory, and therefore land to build more buildings, you must place enough guard buildings to cover the desired territory.

Of course, you have opponents, and they are also expanding their territory, so it behooves you to do a bit of expanding just for the purpose of cutting off your opponents' access to resources. Whichever player manages to complete (and staff) a guard building over an area first will obtain rights to that area. Any enemy buildings and roads in that area are immediately destroyed.

Battle is performed by sending your soldiers out of their guard buildings and off to attack an enemy guard building. Once your soldiers have managed to eliminate all the enemy soldiers in a building, you gain that building. All enemy buildings in the territory you thus gain are destroyed. Eventually you can score a major victory over your opponent by destroying their castle. Opponents may be AI based, or human with network or shared-console gaming.

Perhaps the most entertaining thing about Serf City, at least at first, is the cute little 12-pixel-tall people that tromp about your territory, happily carrying heavy objects from point to point, or hacking away at trees or stone (or enemy soldiers).