We were lucky enough to get our hands on an early copy of A Game of Dwarves at the Paradox Event in. A Game of Dwarves. A Dwarven Prince on a quest to reclaim his people’s stolen land will take you on a great journey.

Apart from singing the ‘gold’ song, pondering each other’s gender, and quaffing, digging is what dwarves do. (Do you mean Because that is definitely what dwarves should sing – Ed) focuses on the digging. You dig your digs, starting from the throne of the head Dwarf and spreading out in all directions, expanding your underground empire, adding rooms in the increasingly unwelcoming nethers.

It’s a slick little strategy management game, welcoming to those who look at such things and wonder where the crosshair is. Me, basically. The man from Paradox wiped away my tears and showed me the easy way it works, and after pointing and clapping I got to it.A randomly generated world awaited. My little underground dwarf haven is full of wandering dwarves: warriors, craftsmen, workers, diggers, and the blank slate dwarflings. They’re here to dig and find the resources: food, wood, gold and stone, that’ll help produce for the Craftsmen and Workers material to make it prettier and productive.

I set my diggers to their task: All it takes is selecting an area for them to chunk out and they’ll do the rest, there’s not a lot of micro-management in this aspect, just broad strokes of the brush, out and up or down, to them in motion. They do need somewhere to sleep, somewhere to feed, and niceties to keep them happy, but I never manage to get to that point in my brief playthough. That’s because in my initial excavations I found little of anything: a tiny amount of gold and stone, but not enough to get my home truly thrumming with activity.Not like those playing the game next to me next to me. A glance left and right showed other members of the press pack dungeon’s coming together: I can see diggers uncovering reams of rock, I see crafters working from build menus, making tables, building ladders, workers tending crops. Their worlds look alive and orderly. My diggers are dutifully excavating my bounding box and finding nothing at all, and my world is expanding in desperate room sized jolts as I hope to find something.

I’m getting dwarf envy! I want to start placing feeding tables, as my little crew are now thinking about food; I don’t have the wood to make it. Wood, incidentally, is grown and then harvested underground: this is a game of resources as well as dwarves.I only have a short amount of time to explore, so I decide that if building out is yielding nothing I’ll instead aim down. The deeper you go in the huge map (75 tiles across, 50 down) the more resources. But also the more obstacles. I set one dwarf on an exploratory dig: checking the map I can see my empire spreading out nicely from the opening chambers, then there’s this ugly shaft straight down. It’s the least stylish part of my build, making it look like a mushroom: it’s a desperate dig down in the hope of coming across something to write about.Because he’s autonomous, and because sadly there’s no chance of a cave-in, or watery death while digging, I leave my digger to get to it.

I return to the main chamber: I finally have a few elements, so I start flicking through the build menu to see if can get the Crafter dwarves to make something, or a cultivation stone to let the Worker dwarves feed the population. I decide to cultivate, because I have a beard and therefore hippyish pretentions. This is why I fail at these games, btw. I’m just not militaryish enough.

That becomes clear when I’m pondering the placement of the stone and suddenly the nearest dwarf is killed by an Orc.I’d forgotten about the military caste: you need to tell them to patrol, and it’s best to keep them near excavations because building out is building into enemy territory. The shaft down had plunged into an Orc cave and they were now coming up and out, like a meaty water spout. I send as many of the Warriors as I can find to the hole where they’re coming out and watch the little fight. It’s flaily and undynamic, and like the digging and crafting I only control where the dwaves need to be: a few dwarves are sacrificed until the Orcs are taken out, but at least I uncovered something.It’s the luck of a dice roll that’s left me like this: on the monitor to the left (damn you Dan Gril) there’s a neat world laid out, an efficient little dwarf operation is thrumming. If I cross my eyes, I can pretend it’s my world, and all those gold seams are mine, but it hurts doing that, and it’s frankly weird.So I didn’t have the best world, but I was aware, surrounded frankly, by what it has to offer. It’s an easy to play but hard to master little strategy game with cute charm. It probably has a few more hidden depths, and the nature of it means you’ll end up with sprawling, multi-level dwarf operations that the very thought of terrifies me: expansion and ability to consider the ecognomic (that’s the best pun I’ll ever write, btw) and gastronomic needs of the little people is the key.

It’s got a nice, welcoming smile but I’ll bet when your kingdom grows, and it has a vast amount of space to fill, it’s more than a challenge.

PC gaming is in the middle of an avalanche. An avalanche of roguelikes where you Dig, Explore, have Accidents and Die, or DEADs, as I'll henceforth call them.A Game of Dwarves resides comfortably in that subgenre, along with Minecraft, Terraria, Dwarf Fortress, and plenty of others. Hell, you could even argue that Dig Dug is somewhere at the bottom of the DEAD pile.A Game of Dwarves is on the management end of the spectrum.

You have to look after a small collection of dwarves while hunting for treasure in the depths of the earth. You don't have direct control over your charges – you just hint at what you'd like them to do by marking out areas for diggers to dig, crafters to build, warriors to fight, researchers to research and workers to grow food.You gather resources, expand your fortress, kill aggressor monsters, level-up your dwarves and eventually find the objective room, which contains a boss you have to slay. At least, that's if it all goes well. More likely, at least a few dwarves will die under your care as you delve deeper and more greedily. Not a grand death at the hands of an unspeakable hellbeast, but something more mundane. Something as simple as asking a dwarf to dig a hole underneath themselves but forgetting to put a ladder in it first.The concept, like other DEADs, sounds like it has addiction carved into its rockface, but in actuality it's strangely dull. The dwarves have no real personality, and while you can customise your environments, there's no point to doing so.

The only thing it boosts is the dwarves' happiness – which merely changes the rate at which you can get new dwarves when they die. That doesn't seem to happen that much unless you're completely incompetent.The game tried its best to stop me from finding out if the dwarf respawn rate becomes more of an issue towards the end of the campaign: after getting some way through, the completion of a level caused my machine to hang – one of those gut-wrenching hold-down-the-power-button-to-reset hangs. Freelancer mods. On reboot, my campaign save file had totally disappeared, and I was back to square one.The game has other graphical and control glitches, and it's a bit of a pain to move up and down between vertical levels. You'll get lost from time to time in the bowels of the Earth, while the tangy odour of 'was this actually finished when it was shipped?'

Permeates your nostrils.The best bits are when you're just starting out on a level, picking how you're going to strike out into the earth. The worst bits are when your fortress starts to sprawl beyond control, you lose track of things, and get bored because there's none of Dwarf Fortress's charm to distract you. A Game of Dwarves has a solid foundation, but you're better off with other DEADs.Expect to pay: $13 / £8Release: Out nowDeveloper: Zeal Game StudioPublisher: Paradox InteractiveMultiplayer: NoneLink.