ludocene launch
Image: Ludocene

We reported on Ludocene back in February, when the new search tool for video games was looking for backers for its Kickstarter campaign, which then went on to find enough supporters that it's launching a whole month early. Hooray! In fact, it's launching today, which is National Playday here in the UK. What are the chances?!

We've been very impressed with what we've seen from Ludocene thus far; it all looks very nice and swishy, like a fancy Apple-designed Tinder but for finding games to love. Y'know the vibe.

And we're not just saying that because founder Andy Robertson is also behind Family Gaming Database, whose family-friendly ratings you can find in some of our reviews here at Nintendo Life. No, this genuinely seems really cool and useful, actually.

Essentially, what the app does is take your game-related initial search and construct a deck of suitable games around it. But rather than just being a simple filter affair, there's lots of effort been put in here to get the guidance of a bunch of gaming industry professionals. So you can have bespoke decks of games to check out, enhanced by pointers from folk who've proper melted their minds playing stuff.

Here's some more deets about the launch from the official press release:

What Ludocene does:

Presents a stream of Game cards
You swipe to Love/Discard and build your deck.
We suggest matching games for you to Pin.
Add Expert cards for specific gaming taste.

Ludocene has been built to solve the challenge of finding what to play when over 1000 games launch every month. It does this not with AI or heavy algorithms but meticulously researched data built over the last five years:

Free and ad-free to use, including all game cards.
All human-researched data, rather than heavy algorithms or AI.
Mobile and Desktop web-app.
Save your runs and suggestions across both.
Supported by a subscription tier (£3.99/month) that grants Discord access, more experts and monthly digest emails.

One thing that's got this writer particularly interested in this, even as someone who considers themselves fairly well-read on games, is the idea that you have a sort of game built into the thing itself, with all of the experts to choose from and, as the press release puts it " the ability to create as many game-finding runs as you need." As the sorts of people who sit browsing game stores for absolutely no reason a lot of the time, this sounds like it's threatening us with a good time.

Right, we're off to type "games for when you need coffee really badly" into this thing. Let's see what these boffins come up with.

Will you be checking Ludocene out? Let us know!