You may not realise it, but you've probably heard of Eufloria already. It made waves as a finalist in this year's IGF Festival under the moniker of "Dyson", and for all the reasons you'd expect. It has striking minimalist watercolour-styled graphics, beautifully atmospheric music and sound, and procedurally-generated assets. What really catches your attention, however, is its premise. It's a real-time strategy game, where you create space colonies using trees.

In each mission (which is randomised to an extent each time you play) you're presented with a sector of space filled with surprisingly round asteroids (think Little Prince), at least one of which is under your control. Your only unit, which doubles as "currency", is the humble Seedling – a bio-engineered spore capable of interplanetary travel and packing a built-in laser cannon (!). By sacrificing ten Seedlings on an unoccupied asteroid, you are able to plant one of two types of trees to gain control over it. Dyson Trees spawn new Seedlings at a regular rate, while Defense Trees act as passive defense platforms, launching short-range explosive spores at any enemy Seedlings unfortunate enough to enter the orbit of the asteroid being guarded. The longer your trees survive the larger they grow, spawning Seedlings and missiles more regularly and becoming more resistant to attack. Fully mature trees also occasionally produce Flowers, which you can link to the adult version of either tree type to produce more powerful Seedlings or (my personal favourite) the dreaded Laser Mine, which can obliterate an entire attack force on its own. The number of trees you can plant per asteroid is capped at a different amount per mission, and once you plant you can't go back, so planning which trees to plant is pivotal.

The asteroids that you control not only determine where on the map you can travel (since they're used as pathfinding nodes by the Seedlings), but also determine the composition and strength of your fleet. Individual asteroids have three randomly-generated statistics which determine the characteristics of the Seedlings spawned on them – Energy (determining health and the speed at which enemy asteroids are captured), Attack (determining attack strength), and Speed. Acquiring asteroids with good stats and effectively utilizing the resultant Seedlings forms an important part of your strategy in the early-to-mid game.

If an asteroid is already occupied, then you're in for a fight. Your Seedlings and the enemy's will duke it out, with yours also attempting to destroy at least one enemy tree. A destroyed tree leaves a tunnel which allows your surviving Seedlings to burrow to the core of the asteroid and sacrifice themselves to convert it (and any remaining enemy trees on the asteroid) to your side. The destroyed tree is then replaced with a freshly-seeded tree of your own which, until it grows and gains sufficient damage resistance, leaves the newly-captured asteroid vulnerable to a counterattack. Depending on the relative sizes and composition of your Seedling "fleets", these battles can get quite hairy, with multiple teams continually wresting control of the same asteroid from each other.