How did you spend your Christmas? I played some Diamond Trust of London, a game I funded on Kickstarter a few years ago and first wrote about in November of 2012. Sadly, I never played it until now. What really made me interested was the fact that it’s an indie DS game released on an actual cartridge. The game is about the diamond trade in Angola in 2000.

DTOL is a turn-based strategy game in which the two players choose their actions at the same time, and once they’ve made their decisions, the results are shown. The goal is to have the highest number of diamonds at the end. Each turn, you can move your agents to various regions, bid on diamonds, sell diamonds, and bribe opposing agents. If you bribe an agent with more money that your opponent pays them, you’ll get to see their planned actions and modify your own actions.

One thing that’s cool is that it only takes about 20 minutes to finish a game. You can change the AI difficulty or play against another person. It’s a pretty fun game, although I haven’t had a chance to play it against a human opponent. It’s really interesting that someone managed to release an independent game made by two people as a full retail release.