Article: A New Kind Of Strategy by Charles Harte

“If you want somebody to make the next big strategy game, get yourself somebody who’s really good at strategy,” he says. “But if you want to get something that might shake up [the strategy genre], then pick somebody who doesn’t, right?”

The grid-based combat you see in the trailers is reminiscent of something like Fire Emblem, but less clear is the influence from “merge” games, like Threes or Infinite Craft, where you condense units to make more powerful ones. To test this concept, Australia Did It actually began as a Microsoft Excel file. It automated enough of the game’s features for Ismail to test the idea.

“I would sit with somebody else and I would say, 'Okay, here are the rules, and then what would you do?' And I would cut and paste the cells around to affect their move,” Ismail says. “And it was already fun. [People] were already having a good time with it.”