For the next 18-ish hours, most of the Endless franchise is on sale at Steam, to celebrate the release of the latest Endless Legend expansion & early access to Endless Space 2. For $20 total, you can pick up Endless Space, Endless Legend, and Dungeon of the Endless, which are some of the best sci-fi strategy, fantasy strategy, and dungeon crawler... -ish thingy... to come out in recent years. I'm planning to do a more in-depth series on these games and why I follow them so closely, but since this sale will be over in less than 20 hours, a quick summary now will be more useful.

Endless Space I can't discuss in-depth, because I've never played it. It was their first strategy game and from what I heard, it was a middling clone of Master of Orion 2 with a few decent ideas, such as hero units, wildly different factions, and the use of ancient nanomachines as a universal currency. The Endless race referenced in the title was an ancient race of precursors who created Dust (nanomachines-doubling-as-universal-currency), along with numerous other breakthroughs in genetics and computers, before erupting in a civil war over whether to stay flesh-and-blood or go virtual, subsequently wiping themselves out of existence. The player races are upstart species trying to master Dust to control the galaxy (except for one race who's actually trying to eliminate all Dust in the galaxy; yes, the races are that different). This sets up the framework for the other 2 games in the series.

Endless Legend is the game I hopped onboard the series with; it's a Civilization-style game set in a seemingly fantasy world with draconic humanoids, all-devouring bugs, and animated suits of armor. However, as you progress through the game's plot, you learn that Clarke's Third Law is in full effect here ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic") and the whole world is actually the remains of an Endless planetary genetics lab. Oh, and the climate control is about to fail, plunging the whole world into an eternal ice age, so you might want to learn how to get that ancient spaceship functional again before that happens.

Coming to it after Civilization 5, I was impressed at how different it was. Each faction had wildly different mechanics: one could never negotiate peace, another relied on Dust instead of Food for population growth, a third one had mobile cities and had to rely on mercenaries to fight for them, and so forth. Each faction also had 3 different core military units out of 5 total types, and with certain weapons gaining bonuses against certain types, you had to think hard about who you were planning to fight. The landmasses were divided into regions, and you could only build one town per region, so you not only had to decide which regions to expand into but where in the region to settle. The varied mechanics and the unusual fantasy sci-fi story made for an intriguing game, and I played this $30 game more than the $60 Civ5. Even though I only finished one match (the typical Civ-type late-game boring grind is still in effect here), I do not regret any of my time with it.

And Dungeon of the Endless... whew, this might take some explaining. Dungeon of the Endless feels like a game idea they came up with while drunk and decided to run with it. The premise of the game is your prison ship got blown up above an ancient planet and your escape pods burrowed a dozen floors down into an abandoned Endless laboratory filled with plenty of hungry creatures... of course. Your goal is to get your ragtag group of survivors up to the surface by exploring rooms to find the elevator on each floor, fighting monsters and gathering resources and equipment along the way.

"So it's a dungeon-crawler roguelike, right?" Not quite; you also have to gather resources and protect yourself by building modules in powered-up rooms, which you light up by spending Dust from your Power Crystal. You have to be careful which rooms you light up because every time you explore a new room, enemies can spawn in dark rooms and attack your survivors, your modules, and your Power Crystal.

"So it's... kind of a strategy game, too?" Well, once you actually find the elevator, you have to power it up by carrying your Power Crystal to it. The problem is, carrying the Power Crystal causes infinite enemies to spawn and rush the Power Crystal. You need to set up your defenses to defend your carrier's route and protect him with the other survivors while infinite enemies throw themselves in front of you. And once you get to the next floor, you do it all over again.

"So it's... I don't know what to call that." Neither do I, honestly. It's the type of game that crosses so many genre boundaries simple definitions fail to describe it well. It reminds me of games in the early 90s that stretched the boundaries of existing genres and sometimes created entirely new genres. It shows the Endless devs are perfectly willing to toss strange and new mechanics into a game just to see what pops out. It doesn't hurt the plot and the characters of the game itself are weird & absurd, like a fictional extension of the game's mechanical oddities.

As for its connection to the other games? Well, the prison ship is from Endless Space. And the world you crashlanded on? The setting of Endless Legend. The survivors are even the predecessors to a few of the factions in Endless Legend.

This series is weird. I love this series.

You can currently buy all 3 of these games for $20. If you have any enthusiasm for turn-based strategy, I'd suggest you do so, if only to try out a strong alternative to the industry standards of Civilization, Master of Orion, and Galactic Civilizations.