Maybe because of the unspoken nerd prestige that accompanies 4X games (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate, for the uninitiated), or perhaps because the previous two titles from Gamelyn Games, Dungeon Heroes and Fantasy Frontier, both ranked alright-to-okay on Space-Biff!’s Universal Objective Scale of Personal Preference, Tiny Epic Kingdoms really wants you to think of it as a 4X game.

But that’s somewhat misleading, because Tiny Epic Kingdoms isn’t really a 4X game. It’s more of a 3X game, which is just a 4X game minus an X — in this case, exploration, because there is absolutely no exploration in TEK. Unless laying a map tile on the table at the start of the game counts as “exploration,” in which case nearly every game is about exploration.

Not that it matters one dang bit, because Tiny Epic Kingdoms is easily the best title we’ve seen so far from Gamelyn Games.

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