Yeah, those are fun.  Especially if you get your name in the manual

The beta will NOT be fun.  Not beta 1 anyway.

We have literally stripped out all kinds of things from what was at PAX to ensure it's not fun. Seriously.

If i already draw a fair amount of enjoyment of discussing and speculating on various aspects of the game on these forums. How can adding the beta to the mix not result in more enjoyment? Even if the beta itself isn't all that fun, it probably will enhance the discussion (if only by granting us more concrete things to discuss).

Though i admit you have succeeded in bringing down my expectations from "unfinished unpolished game" to "unfinished unpolished tech-demo".

Still going to have fun though.

http://www.excelgames.org/

I've got a bug to report already!  Time seems to be getting slower and slower as the day of the beta release approaches.  I have found the only real workaround is work, school, and sleep.  If anyone else has experienced this problem it would be great of you to confirm it, that way the devs might finally take a look into it.....

Actually, I work at a company that does "Serious Games" using Excel, so I know well the kinds of hoops you can get Excel to jump through if you really try   Our uses are a slightly more traditional use of a spreadsheet though (well, at least compared to ExcelGames.org), since our "Games" are more along the lines of Competitive CEOing (with an educational focus on finance and business acumen) which involve much more of the type of modeling that spreadsheets are meant for.

When you get down to it, a spreadsheet is just a calculation engine - and since games tend to do an awful lot of calculation, there are far worse fits in the world.

Something mechanically like Elemental (or more likely something like an early iteration of Civ) actually wouldn't be undoable in a spreadsheet (although poor old VBA might get seriously overloaded...).  Almost anything turn based could work quite well, actually...

(Dammit, now I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to figure out how I'd have to go about recreating MoM's tactical combat system in Excel...)