The iPad app version of Forbidden Desert is absolutely stellar, one of the best adaptations of any physical boardgame i’ve seen to date, and I can verify that the game is highly addictive – in some ways even more so than the strong app version of Pandemic. Forbidden Desert just could use a little more fine-tuning to help it run more quickly, but the app is stable, the graphics are bright and clear, and the game – which I gave a fairly positive review when it first came out – showed itself to be more difficult than I’d realized after a couple of plays of the physical game.
Forbidden Desert is from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, and the mechanics are similar to those of Pandemic and Forbidden Island. Two to four players, each with a specific role and power, play team members stranded in a desert that’s represented by a 5×5 grid of 24 tiles plus a central dust storm. On each turn, one player takes four actions, which can include moving to an adjacent tile, flipping a tile over to reveal what’s underneath, or clearing one sand token from atop the tile. You can only flip a tile once there’s no sand on top, and you can’t occupy a tile with more than one sand token on it; if you’re on a tile that ends up with two or more sand tokens on top of it, the tokens are also on top of you and you must clear all but one before you can move. After each player’s turn, the team draws two to six cards representing the progress of the storm, which may move the central storm and add sand tokens, increase the number of cards drawn each turn, or show the sun beating down on players, reducing their water supplies. The goal of the game is to find the four pieces of the escape vehicle and get all players to the launching pad before any of the various loss conditions occurs: one player dies of thirst, the supply of sand tokens is exhausted, or the storm level reaches the end of the track.
The app plays beautifully: Everything is clear, there’s a great undo function (although you can’t undo a tile flip or a storm card), and the app makes it immediately evident what you’re allowed to do. Cooperative apps are easier to develop than competitive ones because you don’t need to create AI opponents; the opponent here is the clock, so to speak, but the developers did hit just about everything else you’d want to see. I did have two minor complaints with the app. First is that some indicators end up covering others temporarily, such as the location of a vehicle piece covering up the indicator that a tile contains a tunnel, in which players can hide from the effects of the sun beating down. The second is that flipping a Storm Picks Up card causes a needless delay to show the board shaking, an effect that players should be allowed to turn off. They’re both pretty minor, really.
Indeed, any issues I have with the app are really issues with the game, like the need for a few more role choices to give more diverse options for replay. The game comes with six, and while I did beat the app without the Water Carrier, the challenge is more reasonable when you’ve got a Water Carrier (who can retrieve more water during the game than other players and can pass water to other players more easily) among your team. Even just adding a role similar to Pandemic’s Generalist, who has no special powers but gets a fifth action each turn, would help boost replay value. I probably played the app 40 times on the normal setting and only beat it four games, way below my typical rate on Pandemic, so I have to think this game is much more challenging than I originally thought.
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Two other apps of note: Reiner Knizia’s The Confrontation originally had a Lord of the Rings theme in the physical version but has been rethemed (sort of like The Shinning) for the app version, which treats the two-player game to a hybrid board/videogame treatment. It’s an unbalanced two-player game where the victory conditions differ for the two players, and conflicts between pieces are resolved in a separate screen that adds animations to the battles. I thought it was well-done and the hard AI was appropriately hard but not unbeatable, but I own an iPad 2, which is below their recommended hardware levels, and the app does run too slowly on my device for me to play it often. When I eventually upgrade, I’ll likely play it a lot more, since I think I like the game and generally enjoy Knizia’s products.
Tsuro: The Game of the Path is a very simple boardgame for two to eight players where the goal is to build a path that keeps your token on the board the longest. On each turn, you place one of three tiles in your hand, mostly trying to keep yourself on the board, but also trying to limit your opponents’ options late in the game and occasionally even getting the chance to run an opponent’s token off the board or, most fun, making two opponents smash together, eliminating both at once. It’s a basic game and there is a lot of luck involved as well as a disadvantage for the first player – if everyone manages to stay on the board till the end, the first player to play will be the first eliminated.