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Games

Jason Rohrer's New Game Is A Diamond In The Rough

Diamond Trust of London looks really awesome, and we want to play it, but he needs to buy cartridges.

One of the games we featured at The Creators Project: San Francisco 2012 was Jason Rohrer’s psychedelic, space-is-no-object game Inside a Star-Filled Sky, where your character is a micro map of a game level which you can zoom into, effectively navigating through yourself as another character, which of course you can also zoom into, and so on and so forth into (seeming) infinity.

His newest game is much more grounded in reality. Diamond Trust of London simulates the world’s diamond trade in the year 2000, when the UN passed the Kimberley Process Certification in an attempt to ensure that the diamonds being harvested and sold were conflict-free (you might remember the hot button issue of blood diamonds).

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In light of this development, the diamond traders of Angola, who until then had a fairly easy time traipsing around the world “with buckets of rough diamonds, and making a lot of money doing it,” began scrambling to move as many diamonds as they could before the proverbial hammer dropped.

This is the setting of Diamond Trust of London, where you’re an untrusting diamond trader with money on the mind. If the diamond trade was a shady business before, it got a whole lot shadier when the clock began ticking—get ready to give (and receive) some bribes. This unusual concept is executed with the same thoughtfulness and precision as Rohrer’s previous games, which are all brilliant and unusual in different ways.

Diamond Trust of London is on the cusp of distribution, and Rohrer needs your help to lodge the cartridges of it into every Nintendo DS on the planet. Hit up his Kickstarter page to learn more about the game and make a donation. The close is 15 days out, and he’s just about halfway to his funding goal.

As a little side note, Tom Bailey produced the music for Diamond Trust of London, which changes according to what’s happening in the game. Though it was created to be the background for a bloody and illegal diamond hustle, the beats are really hot, and you can download them for free.

@ImYourKid