Slipways

Slipways advertises itself as a game with all the possibilities of a space-themed grand strategy game, but with a playtime of just 60 minutes. While that statement immediately strikes me as false - you can't shorten a game a hundred-fold while retaining everything about it - I do still believe the end product they've created has merit. I enjoyed it for quite a few hours.

Slipways is definitely not a grand strategy game, and not a 4X game. If because of nothing else, then because there's no combat or conflict in the game, so nothing to exterminate. One might even be hard-pressed to call it a strategy game, because it just has so many features indicative of a puzzle game instead.
Your goal in the game is to set up the biggest trade empire in a span of 300 months. You do this by exploring new planets around your existing ones, choosing a production for each, which indicates the resources it takes in and gives out, and finally connecting everything together with a series of trade routes, or slipways, if you will. The whole thing is a grand puzzle requiring foresight to choose the right production types in order to maximize the amount of resources flowing in and out of each planet and then linking them correctly, because connections can't cross each other. On top of that, you'll need a nice helping of luck when exploring new planets, to make sure you can't just plan an optimal network off the bat.

I had a couple fears regarding some concepts quite early, and the more I played, the more they turned out to be true and bothersome.
For one, the game is too simple. Not to be confused with the game being too easy, which it is not, but the amount of things you can do is rather limited. I did leave out a couple things, like constructions that can be built anywhere, starting with just labs that can take in some resources you have in abundance and produce science for new technologies out of them, but even then, they don't feel like they shape the core game. The same can be said for the campaign mode, which does introduce a different minor mechanic each level, but the core game remains the same. Perhaps only after researching several technologies do some more interesting mechanics begin to emerge, but the game tends to be over by then, if not sooner. After a few runs, I found the novelty running out, and my second fear becoming more and more apparent.
Namely that thinking ahead matters. A lot. Slipways promises quick 1-hour games, but thinking longer gives very clearly improved results, meaning you can either play badly, or you can have you runs last upwards of 3 hours, with very little playing, and a lot of thinking and planning. This is a very unfortunate and sneaky problem games run into, because it might seem like it means the game has depth, but in reality, it frustrates me to have to choose between being a bad player and getting frustrated at not getting to play the game because I'm planning each step.

I think the biggest problem with the game is that it tries to be too simple. I think there can be a market for a 4X game with a shorter run-time and no combat. However, trying to fit into a single hour, Slipways has too little content, too few choices, and too much determinism. I might even have loved to play a multiplayer version of this. Alas, it's no use considering if I might have recommended this game had it had more content, for right now it does not. Still, I think it can be fun for many people for several hours, and if you're particularly fond of solving these types of puzzles, then perhaps even longer. For keeping me entertained for a good chunk of time, I'll give this a partial recommendation.