In September of last year, Deed – The Game (Free) officially launched in the App Store, but it wasn’t until today at GDC that I’d even heard of it. There are a couple reasons for that, I think. For one, it’s based on a physical board game named simply Sustainable Business that’s popular in Brazil but not so much elsewhere. Second, Deed was somewhat positioned as an educational game, which is accurate as it’s a simulation of global trading but that’s sort of dismissive of the actual fun and strategy contained within. Well, it turns out that that initial launch of Deed was sort of a learning experience anyway, and so developer Sinergia Studios made the tweaks and fixes that the game needed based on feedback while it was live in the time since its launch, and in fact ended up even completely revamping the art style for the “real" launch of the game when a big version 2.0 update hit last month.

Anyway, with all that backstory out of the way, after actually trying the game out at GDC I came away quite impressed with Deed – The Game. You basically control a nation and must make business deals with the other nations of the world, first and foremost to improve your own nation’s status but you’ll also need to give in order to receive as the rest of the nations are trying to better themselves at the same time. You deal in 5 major resources like Technology, Population, and of course Money. If you try to pull a fast one with a crooked deal, you’ll likely get rejected and that nation will do business with someone else instead, leaving you out in the cold. It’s an interesting subject for a board game-style game, and translates really well digitally in Deed.

Being that Deed – The Game has been launched already, it’s available right now if you’re interested in checking it out for yourself. You have the ability to play solo against AI opponents or asynchronously with friends online, which is a rather perfect form of multiplayer for this type of turn-based game. It uses Facebook for its multiplayer so you can play cross-platform with Android players in addition to those on iOS. This isn’t normally the kind of game that’s on my radar but I found it surprisingly fun, so give it a try and leave your impressions or find folks to play with in the thread in our forums.