The pause in posting here has been caused by Antiyoy. It's a simple turn-based strategy game where you use armies and forts to conquer (and hold) an island made up of hexagons against assorted other players.

A peasant unit can capture undefended land. Combine two of those and you get a spearman, who can conquer land defended by a peasant or a capital city. Add another peasant and you get a knight, who can conquer land defended by spearmen or towers. Add a final peasant and you get a baron, who can conquer knights. But – as with modern business – the latter require 27 times the pay of mere peasants, and if you run out of money all the people in your territory disappear. So you have to have plenty of money-generating land before you can dream of having knights.. and the towers that are proof against anything less are much cheaper.

It's been scratching the Empire: Wargame of the Century itch very happily for the past few days. It looks like I've been playing that for, erm, twenty eight years, and it runs very well on a desktop's DOSBox but doesn't work well on a tablet's one. (There is an Android port of the Empire Deluxe sequel, but it doesn't work very well on a tablet either – both really want a mouse.)

I thought Antiyoy was a polished game, and it turns out that this isn't surprising: it's an utter clone of Slay, which has been around in one form or another since 1989, the year after EWotC.

Fortunately, I've now got through the seventy level 'campaign' and the latest change to the program – starting the one-off games with lots of neutral territory – simply doesn't work well at all. So you might well see some more posts soon…

.. unless there's a sale on the Android port of Slay.