Goblin Times

My spreadsheet instincts told me to pay close attention the moment I read 'five-resource economy' and 'branching incident system' in the same sentence. Goblin Times pitches itself as a turn-based strategy game with RPG crossover DNA, inspired by Civilization-style 4X thinking and the anarchic board-game energy of Gremlins Inc., wrapped in a steampunk aesthetic and filtered through the satirical lens of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. That is a genuinely interesting cocktail. The bad news is that the glass is still half-poured. On the mechanical side, there is a real skeleton here worth examining. You juggle five resources simultaneously: gold, food, staff, reputation, and happiness. Each one feeds into the next in ways that can cascade badly if ignored. Build the wrong structure at the wrong city-level threshold and your happiness rating can crater into negative figures, triggering citizen uprisings before you have the turns to recover. That kind of punishing resource interdependency is exactly what strategy fans live for, and the tile-based map, where you move your faction leader and direct workers to construct buildings across the grid, gives the whole thing a compact, readable structure. The faction system adds another layer, with distinct playstyles between leaders like the explosive Bomb Girls duo and the politically manipulative Politician archetype, each leaning into different win conditions: reputation dominance, resource accumulation, or straight aggression. The RPG side of the loop comes through the incident system and a handful of minigame mechanics. Random incidents force branching choices that ripple into later turns, which is the kind of decision depth I want more of. Gambling minigames let you risk your gold for outsized gains or losses. Tarot draws add a fate-modifier layer. The Immortal faction mechanic, which literally resurrects the greediest dead goblins through the power of money, hints at the dark satirical humor the developer was clearly going for. The inspiration from Chicago and Modern Times comes through in tone, at least in flashes, though the execution is rough around the edges in ways that a polished 1.0 release might have fixed. Here is the problem that no amount of strategic optimism can paper over: the last developer update was over six years ago. The Early Access roadmap, which promised a six-month cycle toward a full release, has not moved. Community posts flag localization issues, including questions about whether English is even fully functional. Bugs around the happiness and city-level systems have been reported with no patches in sight. The Steam review pool is tiny at 20 reviews with a mixed 55% positive split, which is too thin a sample to draw firm conclusions but certainly not a confidence signal. For a strategy fan who values AI quality, mod support, and ongoing polish, this is a serious flag. None of those promised features, including a potential co-op mode and mod extension, appear to have materialised. If you are a patient player who genuinely enjoys prodding at an unfinished system and does not mind roughness in the UI, there is something here worth a couple of sessions. The resource tension is real, the faction differentiation is interesting, and the satirical capitalism theme is more thoughtful than the genre average. But the honest read is that this is an abandoned Early Access project with an incomplete tutorial, potential language support gaps, and no community ecosystem to lean on. Strategy fans are better served by finished games in the same genre.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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