A Game of Dwarves is pretty basic: get resources, dig deep. There's not much more to it than that. You can summon in dwarves and assign them different roles, like farmers, diggers, military, researchers, and crafters, determining what they will do for what is essentially the rest of their lives. Squares of dirt hold resources for you to spend on various pieces of furniture and equipment, and its really just a matter of keeping your dwarves happy, well fed, and alive as you dig.

The problem with the game is that...well, that's all there is. Unlike other games in this sort of genre, there's no escalating threat, no need to adapt to a situation - danger doesn't appear unless you specifically dig into one of the numerous caverns (which are clearly marked) where enemies live. Otherwise, all you need to sustain a dwarven colony indefinitely is a few food plants and a dwarf to tend them.

Whether or not you survive a monster attack is pretty much entirely dependent on if your military is stronger than the monsters that have been revealed. If a single goblin can carve through your military dwarves, your entire colony is dead, since no one else will fight, and any dwarves you summon will start at the beginning level, making them near-useless in battle.There are traps that you can build, though they're pretty useless and often don't work. Additionally, monsters have an irritating ability to teleport through any barriers you put up between them and your colony (this is not a bug, they actually poof in and out of different areas), making these barriers pretty useless and rendering any possibly strategy moot.

The campaign of the game sees you bringing your dwarven civilization to bear against a dastardly force of mages. It's pretty formulaic - each area gets unlocked as you complete previous areas. Each mission gives you a number of objecties to complete, as well as optional quests: these earn you experience that lets you level up your prince, giving you abilities for each mission, like letting your prince fight in combat, or granting you extra research points and resources. The campaign isn't very interesting - poorly written dialogue and simple objectives make things simple, and each mission is just a repetition of the previous one. There just isn't enough variety here, and it shows.

Aside from digging, you can do research, which just involves just having a researcher and a research table. This gets you some bonuses and extra things you can build, but isn't really necessary. Worse still, you need to start from scratch in every single mission you begin.

So, there's no challenge to the game, and no real variety either. It's simply boring, lacking any and all of the depth that other games in this genre display. In short, A Game of Dwarves is a game you can pass on.