Goblin Legion HD is a free iPad exclusive fantasy world-building/war-strategy game. The game consists of resource- gathering quests early on that are tutorial-driven. Once the gameplay tutorials are completed, increasingly challenging quests are available, which carry higher rewards. The overall goal is to build one’s dominating world empire and in the process gain experience in both battling the nonplaying characters and the surrounding human players. As one would expect, Goblin Legion HD requires a continuous Internet connection as the game world is a constantly evolving environment in which everything plays out in real time.

The main currency of Goblin Legion HD is gold, which literally reinforces the old saying that “time is money.” Gold speeds up building processes and can be acquired in a number of ways. The easiest way is to buy gold with real money via the game’s microtransactions. Other resources such as wood, stone, food, etc. also are required to build structures, thus requiring a good handle on resource management. Alternative ways to earn gold are to invite friends to play the game (nets 25 gold coins per friend) or by completing various game quests.

As soon as the most basic world’s infrastructure is in place, and there is a surplus of resources, the next common sense move is to start waging war. The player can either start attacking various NPCs or other human player kingdoms but should be very careful at choosing what enemies to wage war against. Higher-level combatants (computer or human) can spell doom on one’s kingdom and a good strategy in general is to form alliances with other players in order to both preserve one’s progress and secure future experience growth. Goblin Legion HD contains a nice built-in chat system with two open chat rooms (World and Legion). The third chat room is intended for private communication, which comes in handy when people group and plan and share strategies.

In conclusion, Goblin Legion HD is a very addictive game that reminds me of old classics from the 1990s with the added benefit of being multiplayer accented and having a more structured and detailed oriented experience. I highly recommend giving it a try, especially since it is free.