Hello citizens! The Emperor welcomes your return to Nero Gaming—the email newsletter that’s good for your soul AND your steam library.

Here’s what we have for you today:

• Hexarchy: The new deckbuilding 4x strategy game ⚔️ 

• Meet the stock market bros of Eve Online 💲 

• OpenAI (who created ChatGPT) gets into the gaming business 🎮️ 

Hexarchy Review

I had the opportunity to play in the playtest of Hexarchy, a new game that describes itself as a “4x deckbuilder.” Below is a short overview.

TL;DR—Hexarchy is a nice twist on the deck builder genre. The unique aspects of the game mean the tutorial is very necessary—but after a couple hours, you’ll be in a good spot to have lots of “pick up and play “fun.

As a general premise, Hexarchy is best thought of a deck builder with a 4x theme (not a 4x game that uses cards for some things). The win condition is accumulation of victory points and games last about 30 minutes (usually 30 turns).

On your turn, you take several actions in any order you like (allowing for some strategic creativity):

• Play cards from your hand to create units, build buildings and unlock technologies.

• Move and attack with units

• Use other resources on a case by case basis (Example: spend gold to draw more cards or spend food to grow your cities…)

What we like: The game has a very good tutorial and friendly(ish) UI. Once you get going it’s very pick up and play. Also, unlike many card games… It’s decently fun against just the AI—something that isn’t easy to do.

Minor criticisms: Hexarchy doesn’t have the same immersive, casual fun typical of 4x. Games are fast and competitive so if you’re hoping to build a society slowly and enjoy a casual RP experience, this isn’t for you.

Also, players can’t really formulate a strategy until they know all the cards—this is bit of a cognitive load to unlock all the game has to offer.

Overall, though—really well done. I think this game will be played best with friends, so I’m hoping for a lower price point on release (which should happen this year).

Eve Online Stock Market Bros

Today we’re taking a look at the trading community at Eve Online—with a healthy mix of salutary admiration and judgmental chuckling.

Warning: Not a lot of pretty pictures in this one. Just a bunch of nerds and fake money.

Eve Online is a very large, immersive MMO that takes place on a single server.

In most MMOs, trading exists at some level—buy low, sell high at the auction house or grand exchange or whatever there is.

But the scale, community and tools from the Eve players are what make it so entertaining.

First, let’s start with their uncontested leader: A content creator named Oz.

Oz runs an “investment fund” in game—players send him their money in hopes that he can turn it into more. He also makes content on YouTube detailing his trades and strategy.

At one time, Oz’s investment fund was worth 4 Trillion Isk. Currently, that much ISK is worth about $57,000 USD.

While you might first picture Leonardo’s repulsive character from Wolf of Wall Street, Oz is much more akin to Warren Buffett: kind, calm and an absolute genius in the market.

He is well respected in the Eve community and players are highly active in his discord discussing new opportunities.

Eve players have also created many impressive tools and strategies for finding good trades (somewhat reaffirming Eve’s nickname: Spreadsheets in space).

Perhaps most impressive: Players have even figured out a way to do high risk, high reward trades by taking out loans. (Leverage, baby!)

Let’s say you think Hydrogen fuel block is going to go up in price over time.

• Buy 10 billion ISK worth of fuel (with your own money)

• Secure a loan of 9 billion ISK with that fuel as collateral

• Buy 9 billion ISK worth of fuel with the loan funds

• Repeat

Now, if the price goes up (more than your combined interest rates)… you have a LOT of fuel to unload for a HUGE profit. (If not, you lose everything!)

We love immersive experiences and think it’s awesome how Eve can provide this gameplay to people.

As someone who has found financial success on Runescape’s Grand Exchange, there’s a part of me that wants to dedicate my life to becoming space rich. 🤑 

(If you don’t hear from me for a bit, check the Jita market!)

OpenAI Acquires Open Source Game “Biomes”

The company behind ChatGPT has purchased an Open Source game that could be it’s new playground as it strives to create Artificial General Intelligence (or AGI).

With all the news about the over lap between video games and AI, this isn’t surprising.

However, given that the game itself is open source, the acquisition may be more about game developer talent than anything else.

All eyes are on OpenAI—we’ll see if anything comes out of this for players to enjoy.

The Emperor’s New Memes