→ June 15, 2013
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Agricola iOS app.

Agricola is among the top-rated board games on Boardgamegeek’s rankings, and one of the best-reviewed board games ever released, a complex strategy game with very little luck or randomness involved that requires players to make a ton of difficult decisions. I like the game, but I’ve never rated it as highly on my own rankings because of its extreme complexity: The decisions and tradeoffs are so tight, the game straddles the line between play and work. A successful game brings as much relief (that you didn’t screw it up) as pleasure (which is the point of games, no?), and it can take two hours to play a four-person game, more if you don’t really know what you’re doing. The design of the game is brilliant – it is so balanced, and the idea of forcing players to choose among a host of imperfect options, accepting that they can never check all the boxes, is pretty unusual even with all of the games on the market. But good grief is it frustrating to play, even when you’re doing it right.

Playdek just released its long-promised iOS adaptation of Agricolaicon earlier this week, and as adaptations go, it’s just about perfect. The app runs smoothly, without a single crash through a half-dozen games so far. Rules and requirements are easy to access within the game. The graphics are superb, very clear and very bright, easy to stare at for the 10-15 minutes it takes to play a solo game against AI players. And the AI players are solid competition, even the “easy” opponents, at least for a novice player like me.

I’d only played the physical game twice, so I came to this app as a near-rookie, only understanding the basic concept of the game and the part of the mechanics that resurfaced in the later game Le Havre. In Agricola, each player is trying to build a farmstead, beginning the game with a husband and wife, each of whom can handle a work assignment every round. Tasks on the farm include collecting resources, plowing fields, sowing plants, rearing animals, and building additions. The point is to maximize your scoring opportunities while ensuring that you can feed your family at the game’s five Harvests, which occur more frequently as the game progresses. The catch is that you can lose points in any area where you don’t accomplish something – leaving any farm area undeveloped, failing to rear any of the three animal types, etc. And getting enough food each harvest is no easy task; it would be ideal to get a steady food supply going, but that’s hard to do early in the game, and by the time the game is nearly over, the harvests are happening faster and you’re also trying to max out your scoring.

One way the game reduces the potential for frustration is by giving players a slew of choices for work assignments, adding another choice in each of the fourteen rounds of the game, so that players can vary strategies and won’t often find themselves blocked from all of the moves they need. (Most work assignments appear on only two spaces on the board, and some appear on only one.) Another is with Minor Improvements, which appear in the full game but not the shorter “family game,” a quicker, simpler version that only includes Major Improvements. Improvements offer players ways to gain extra resources or convert resources to more food. Players can also choose Occupations, which function much like Minor Improvements and can also provide point bonuses or spend less on future construction. (Hardcore players of the physical game may be interested to know that the app only includes the E deck so far, but other decks will be available as future in-app purchases.) Understanding what Improvements and Occupations can do for you allows you to tailor slightly more focused strategies – fun, but also again skating dangerously close to ‘work.’


The town.

Playdek’s biggest challenge beyond crafting the AI players had to be the interface itself, as Agricola takes up a lot of space when played on a table. There’s a central board with the ‘town,’ containing all of the work assignments, which gets larger as you include more players. Each player has his own farmstead, with up to a dozen or so squares, as well as his own resource piles and room for Improvements and Occupations. And there should be central piles of those cards as well. The app does a solid job of including all of those views without sacrificing too much information. The player can switch from town to farm view with one click. A bar at the bottom of the screen shows his/her current resource levels, including a food counter that shows how much he’ll need to feed his family this round. The player can find out what an assignment space or a card does by double-clicking on it, and there’s an option to include the labels on all assignment spaces if you want. When you drag one of your workers to a space, it’s grey if you can’t place your worker on it (because you don’t meet the resource or space requirements), and beige if it’s available. After two games, I was familiar enough with the town to know where everything was without having to keep all of the labels visible.


A player farm.

I’ve only found tiny flaws in the app version so far, nothing that seriously interfered with gameplay but, when the big stuff is all done right, these are the little things that stand out. The AI players seem to hang on basic decisions for five to ten seconds at times, and sometimes it becomes unclear what the app is waiting for (as in, is it my turn?). The tutorial is a little sparse and seems to be written for players who’ve tried the physical game at least once. The default animation and gameplay speeds were too slow for me, but turning them up in the options panel solved that problem. It might be easier if a greyed-out assignment space also explained why you can’t place a worker there. It also took me a few games to figure out that if you acquire more animals than you can house in fenced-in pastures or with stables, you can cook the extra beasts immediately if you have a fireplace or oven. They’re all minor issues – considering how many boardgame apps have crashed on me, the fact that one this complex played six games without such a hitch puts it in the best-of-breed category.

The two most comparable games in app form are Caylus, not as complex but with a similarly long view; and Le Havre, which takes many of the best features of Caylus and Agricola in what might be the most complex game I’ve ever seen. Caylus and Agricola both have bright, sharp graphics, while Le Havre’s are dimmer and less attractive. Le Havre gets everything on to one screen, while the other two force you to jump around or scroll more for the sake of larger images and clearer text. Caylus has the easiest AIs for me to beat, which means Agricola will probably have far more staying power for me – if it doesn’t turn out to be too frustrating when I’m playing the stronger computer opponents. It’s absolutely worth the $6.99 price tag, especially for a game that usually retails in physical form around $50, but with the caveat that the learning curve for this game is steeper than what fans of games like Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne might expect.

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→ May 14, 2013
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The Battle for Hill 218.

I have a new column up discussing the game’s top young shortstops, and recorded a new Behind the Dish podcast, speaking with ESPN’s umpiring analyst Jim McKean about last week’s great moments in MLB jurisprudence. My projection of the first round of this year’s Rule 4 draft will be posted on Thursday morning.

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Based on a two-player card game that is currently out of print, the app version of The Battle For Hill 218 ($2.99) plays incredibly simply, making it perfect for an adaptation to iOS, with a strong AI because the number of potential moves at any given time isn’t that large. It also plays very quickly against an AI opponent, with an entire game taking maybe five minutes, and the skill of the Hard AI player was strong enough that I found myself playing again and again because I was going to beat that sucker come hell or high water. (It took about 30 tries if you count my earliest screw-ups.)

The game revolves around a battle for the titular hill, which sits at the center of the playing area, between each player’s home base. Players have decks of cards representing unit types that are distinguished by the strength and direction of their attacks and by the directions in which they can support or be supported by other units, and on each turn a player places two cards. The goal is to take your opponent’s home base (by eliminating the unit there and then placing one of your units on it) before he takes yours; in the event that the players exhaust their decks and hands before either base falls, the player with the most active units still on the table is the winner.

The limited number of unit types available makes strategy fairly simple – you must set up a position on one turn that would allow you to knock out your opponent’s home unit and replace it on your next turn. That means that you need to set up a position that your opponent can’t overcome with his two card plays on the intervening turn, which, as I’ve played it, means that control of the two positions adjacent to the central hill are the critical ones, and most of the game will involve back-and-forth battles over one or occasionally both of those spaces. Controlling that space at the start of a turn means almost certain victory, as a player can use one of his two Airstrikes (eliminating any single opponent’s unit, with no card placement) and then place a Special Forces card (which, unlike other units, can be supported by another unit to which it is connected diagonally) on his opponent’s home base.


The hill is at the center, with the two home bases above and below it.

The randomness of the order of the cards mitigates the fact that the game revolves around the same basic battle each time. You start the game with five cards drawn at random from your deck, discarding two, and then on each turn you play two and then draw two. (One exception: The start player plays just one card on his first turn.) If a player’s home base is empty, s/he must play a card there first, but otherwise there’s a lot of flexibility with a typical hand of five cards and six different unit types. You have to think through each move based on all of the possible combinations your opponent might hold, and, in the case of the hard AI, assuming the opponent makes the perfect move in response. Learning to anticipate combos like the air-strike/special forces move – which beat me more times than I’d care to mention – and planning moves to prevent it, even a move or two in advance (to the extent that such a thing is possible) is a big part of the fun of the game. I don’t care for chess, because it involves so much long-term planning that it begins to feel like work to me, but nearly all good two-player games involve some of that element, and Battle for Hill 218 strikes a solid balance.

The tutorial in the app is insufficient, so you’ll need to either play the game a few times and figure out how the cards work via context, or go back into the Help/Manual menu to read about what the Supply, Attack, and Support symbols mean. The app is currently only available for the iPad, although the developers mentioned in an interview today on boardgamegeek that an upgrade making the app and offering async gameplay is in the works. At $2.99 it’s absolutely worth the cost even if you only intend to use it for local play.

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→ December 23, 2012
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Baldur’s Gate for iPad.

I have new posts up for Insiders analyzing the Nick Swisher and Edwin Jackson signings. I’ll write up the Pirates/Red Sox trade if and when the clubs finalize it and we know all of the names involved.

I’ve never gotten into role-playing games as a genre, even though I think I probably fit the stereotype of avid RPG players, aside from the fact that I never actually lived in my parents’ basement. I tried the pen-and-paper version of D&D in high school with some friends but found it way too slow for my short attention span, and most of the computer versions I tried were too focused on combat (“hack-and-slash” games), which becomes really monotonous over a game that’s expected to take 30 or 40 or more hours to play. I played The Bard’s Tale in high school, but that game was horribly designed (you had to keep fighting the same battles over and over again to make your characters strong enough for the final encounter), and also tried the first of the “gold box” D&D games, Pool of Radiance (bad graphics, some clever subquests, but once I got to the Big Foozle at the end of the game he treated my party like we were the 2012 Astros), but neither of these was good enough to turn me into a fan of the genre.

Baldur’s Gate remains the one exception, and I think the main reason is that its writing is better than those of other games in the genre. It’s a D&D game, both in mechanics and in setting, but contains a fairly well-written central story, lots of dialogue (much of it funny, at least the first or second time around), and enough opportunities to roam outside of the linear core plot (also of the Kill-the-Big-Foozle variety) to give the game some replay value. Most importantly, the game worked: Early challenges are balanced enough to give you a shot even when your character is weak, and later challenges are difficult but don’t require advance knowledge or cheat codes to survive them. I played Baldur’s Gate and its two-part sequel through several times, using different character types to vary the experience slightly from time to time. I’ve tried other games that were supposedly similar, but nothing lasted me more than an hour or so.

A group of the original Baldur’s Gate designers have now reissued the game and ported it to new formats, starting with an iPad versionicon, with good-not-great results. The game looks and feels just like the original, with some enhancements that were either only found in BG2 or that appeared in user-created mods, but retaining the original graphics (looking a little dated), voices, and music (both big positives). Aside from the creation of a few new NPCs, one in the base game and a few available as in-app purchases, this is the original Baldur’s Gate game in every aspect. If you feel a little nostalgia for the original game, you’ll love the reissue.

The story, in brief, is a little cliched for the fantasy genre – you’re an orphan, and you’re being hunted by an unknown enemy for reasons that don’t become apparent until much later in the game, but it turns out you’re something of a Chosen One. That’s all blah-de-blah, but the overlaid story of an iron shortage in the region and bandit attacks up and down the coast give the story some texture beyond the linear who’s-trying-to-kill-me plot that drives a lot of these games. You’ll also get a ton of subquests if you talk to every named character you come across, only some of whom want to kill you or pick your pockets, and the game is loaded with enough non-player characters and special items to allow you significant flexibility in constructing your party however you like.

That said, playing BG on the iPad has its frustrations. Using a touchscreen to play a game that expects the precision of a mouseclick is extremely aggravating – it can be hard to get your party to enter a building or to get a character to attack the right enemy. Sometimes I find my characters are just standing around in the middle of combat while their mates are being disemboweled. (I still don’t know if that’s a game error or mine.) The app crashes way too often, so you’ll want to quick-save (one click on the left-hand bar) as often as you can – and once or twice I’ve crashed while quick-saving, unfortunately. (I also crashed once because I tried to take Boo from Minsc. Squeaky wheel gets the kick, I suppose.) The port didn’t update the graphics, so zooming to try to tap more accurately on the screen just produces a blur. I’ve spoken with one of the designers about the touchscreen issue, which they were already aware of and are working on for future updates. I’ve had to fight certain battles, not just major ones, multiple times strictly because of that one issue – either a character went where s/he wasn’t supposed to go, or I couldn’t get a character to attack the right opponent. I’ve adapted to the latter issue by specifically selecting the weapon (turning its highlight orange) and then selecting the opponent, but that adds up to a ton of extra taps over the course of a game.

The base game app is $10, about the maximum I’d be willing to pay for a port of an older game that is available in a complete four-in-one boxset, with BG2 and the two expansions, for $15 on DVD-ROM for Windows. I’ve played probably ten hours or so in total – I just wiped out the bandit camp, for those of you who’ve played the game before, and don’t act like those little pricks didn’t have it coming – and appreciate the fact that starting and quitting the game is so much faster than it was on CDs when I played it around ten years ago. If it wasn’t so crash-prone, I’d wholeheartedly recommend it, but even with that flaw I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of it even if I decide not to go after the Big Foozle after all.

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→ December 17, 2012
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Stone Age iOS app.

Stone Age is one of our favorite boardgames (which I reviewed in 2009) for its mix of moderate strategy, simple mechanics, a small amount of randomness, a strong theme, and appealing graphics; I ranked it 4th overall on my new boardgames ranking, and third when looking at games strictly in two-player mode. The new iPhone/iPod app version of Stone Age
icon is an excellent implementation of the game’s mechanics with an innovative UI that is easy to learn (although not entirely intuitive) and excellent graphics, although the AI could be stronger and the lack of an iPad-friendly option is disappointing.

If you haven’t played the boardgame, it’s a simple game of worker placement and civilization building where players compete to accumulate points through three methods: obtaining technologies, building buildings, or earning multiplier bonuses on core civilization points like number of workers or number of tools. On each turn, players alternate placing workers on various game board spaces that do things like add a worker (you place two at one hut, known colloquially as the “love shack”), add farmland to give you an extra food token per turn, acquire any of the four main resources, or claim cards or buildings that must be purchased with those resources. The quantity of those resources – wood, clay, stone, and gold – you obtain on a turn is a function of the number of workers you placed in that area and on the roll of dice, one per worker placed, giving the game its main random element. Buildings and cards are also shuffled in each game and you can only purchase ones that are visible on the board.

Gameplay in the app is very straightforward. On each turn, you simply drag from the large worker icon on the left side of the screen to the area where you want to place one or more of your workers, and if it’s to one of the resource sections where you may place multiple workers, you get a fresh screen where you tap the spaces you want to fill. When collecting your workers, you simply tap the workers one by one, in the order you want, and resolve each worker’s situation (rolling dice, paying for buildings, etc.) before moving on to the next one. The app has some small time-saving features such as automatically choosing your free resource in wild-card situations when you’re the last player to choose, although there is inevitably some downtime between your turns while AI players resolve their own workers.

Implementing a game with a fairly sizable board like Stone Age’s for the smaller screens of the iPhone and iPod is a significant challenge because of the difficulty of making all of the relevant information easy for players to access. Stone Age’s designers rethought the entire layout of the game, using familiar graphics but relocating virtually everything to make it easier for players to make their moves and obtain the information they might need before making moves. The three special spaces – the farmer hut, the toolmaker hut, and the “love shack” – are now in the center of the screen, since they’ll usually be filled first. To the right is a column with the four available community cards, with the least expensive one on the bottom of the stack; above that column is a dial showing how much of the deck remains. Along the bottom are five circles showing the five possible resources for worker placement, and in the center of each circle the player can see how much of that resource he already has on hand. Along the top are the four building piles, with a clever if not immediately obvious way of showing how many building tiles remain in each pile (there are stones lined up along the side of each building) and, for buildings with variable resource requirements, barrels in front of the building showing how many different resource types are required by that building. The upper left shows how many tools, buildings, and people you have as well as how much food you produce automatically each turn. The one non-obvious bit of information comes from tapping on the icon in the upper right that shows the community card deck – doing so reveals what technologies you’ve already acquired and what game-end bonuses you hold for tools, food, people, or buildings. I understand that sounds like a lot for one screen, but most of it is clear once you know where to look, and the game uses large screen-covering dialog boxes for most in-game events, like paying for buildings or feeding your workers.

The AI players are not that strong; there are three levels available and the toughest level is fairly easy to beat if you stick to a simple strategy of attacking two or three bonus types while ignoring the others. These toughest AI players tend to pursue one such bonus strategy doggedly, producing respectable results but never racking up a ton of points without substantial luck in the dice-rolling. I’ve also noticed that AI players tend to end the game with lots of unused resources, often 12 or more, which is insane when there are still buildings available for purchase. I’m also disappointed that this app didn’t debut in a universal edition that was also optimized for the iPad, even if the screen layout was identical, because pass-and-play works much better on the iPad – especially when the app allows players to sit around the device without having to hand it off. You can double the screen size for this app on the iPad but it’s not as clear as graphics optimized for the device would be.

The actual implementation at the heart of the app is very strong, though, another in a trend of boardgame adaptations with clean, bright graphics and relatively easy-to-learn mechanics. I’d love a stronger AI presence and I assume an iPad-friendly version isn’t far down the road. If you tend to play live (pass-and-play or online/synchronous) against friends, it’s definitely worth buying, and even just playing against the AIs has been fun for a half-dozen or so games so far.

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→ October 24, 2012
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San Juan app.

The iOS implementation of San Juanis a bit expensive for a boardgame app at $7.99, second only to the best-of-breed app Carcassonne among adaptations of existing physical games, but at least San Juan can point to a very specific value the app offers to justify that cost – some of the strongest AIs I’ve come across yet in any of these apps. While that’s in part a reflection of the simplicity of the game itself, it means the app offers replay value that ranks among the highest of any of the boardgame apps I’ve tried. (I reviewed San Juan’s physical version three years ago.)

San Juan is the card game variant of the highly popular boardgame Puerto Rico, a slightly complex strategy game that has consistently ranked near the top of Boardgamegeek’s rankings (which are skewed toward complex games), making San Juan more of a gateway title that’s easier to learn and to play than the original. The entire game is built around a deck of cards that show various buildings players can construct, with the cards also standing in as goods to be produced and sold and as currency to be used from the player’s hand to construct those buildings. The physical game’s only other required pieces are five small boards showing commodity prices for the five goods players can potentially produce, with prices fluctuating slightly from turn to turn.

Strategy in San Juan is fairly straightforward – players get points for buildings constructed, and there are four ways to earn bonus points through specific buildings, three of which award points based on what else you’ve built, while the fourth (the Chapel) awards points for stashing cards under it over the course of the game. In most games the winning player employed one of those four cards and pursued the strategy from early on in the game; occasionally, a player can win strictly through aggressive construction of high-point buildings and filling out his space early, but I’ve found that requires some luck early on in acquiring and constructing the production buildings that make it possible.

The limited number of strategies likely helped the developers in crafting the AI players, but having played at least twenty three- and four-player games against AI opponents, I can vouch for the quality of their efforts. The expert-level AIs identify strategies early and pursue them strongly, with only the typical AI weakness of an inability to identify the human player’s strategy, thus sometimes making moves that help you more than the moves help the AI player itself. I’ve only found one game with AI players that take that aspect of gameplay into account, the aforementioned Carcassonne, which is one of the reasons that app remains the best of its class.

The graphics in San Juan are outstanding, clear and easy to read and navigate on a smaller screen, and gameplay itself is simple, mostly requiring drop-and-drag motions, with relevant information available through a single tap to zoom in on your own hand of cards or to see what buildings a rival player has constructed. I’d like to see an Undo option after a player selects a role – on each turn, you select whether you want to be a Builder, Producer, Trader, or one of two roles that involve gaining cards – although that wouldn’t be feasible for the Trader role once the commodity prices for that turn are revealed. I’d also like an option to speed up some of the graphics that waste time between turns or the time lost announcing who the Governor (first player to move) is on each turn, which would improve the game’s already significant replay value. Overall, I’d call this app a pleasant surprise given the price; for a spinoff of a generally superior game, the developers added value through graphics and strong AI play that make the cost pretty reasonable.

I’ve also purchased and played the app for Reiner Knizia’s Qin, but after encountering a bug I’ll wait for the next update before reviewing it. The game itself is very good, but I couldn’t finish one particular match because of repeated crashing.

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→ August 31, 2012
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Lost Cities app.

I’ve been touting the physical version of Lost Cities, Reiner Knizia’s easy-to-learn two-player gateway game, for about two years now, because of its combination of simple mechanics, modest strategy, and portability, even though it has a little more luck or randomness than I like in most games. The iOS version of Lost Citiesicon is now out, from the same developers as the best-of-breed Carcassonne app, and as you might expect the Lost Cities app looks tremendous and plays very easily and quickly, with just a few minor glitches.

The entire game of Lost Cities revolves around a single deck of 60 cards, containing 12 cards in each of five colors: cards numbered 2 through 10 as well as three coin cards that allow a player to increase his/her bet on that color. Players build “expeditions” in each color by placing cards in increasing numerical order, so once you’ve placed the 4 card in one color, you can no longer place the 2 or the 3 (and must hold or discard it). Each player’s turn consists of playing or discarding one card, and then drawing a card from the deck or any discard pile. You receive points for an expedition equal to the sum of the card values in that expedition minus 20, so you can receive negative points if you don’t place enough cards in a column. Placing one coin card (before you place any numerical cards) doubles your gain or loss, placing two coin cards triples the result, and placing three quadruples it. There’s also a 20-point bonus for placing eight or more cards, including coins, in a single column. Since there is only one card of each number/color combination, the game’s decisions revolve around when to play a specific card – do you play it now, or hold it to see if you can get an intervening card first? Do you hold certain cards to keep them away from your opponent? Do you draw from the deck to move the game closer to the end, or draw from a discard pile to prolong it?

The app version has incredibly bright, clear graphics, enough that it plays well on the small iPod/iPhone screen, with a very sensible layout that makes it easy to see what’s been played, including coin markers next to the current score in each column. That ability to see the current score is probably the biggest advantage the app version offers over the physical version – the math in the game isn’t hard, but it’s easier to make quick decisions when the running tallies are there in front of you. (It can be a little disconcerting to see a -40 or -60 when you’ve played coin cards but no number cards in an expedition, though.) The app offers four AI players, one comparable to a box of rocks, one very challenging, and two in between. It also comes with a set of thirty in-game achievements that serve as tutorials on mechanics and on strategy, with the higher levels forcing you to handicap yourself in ways that will force you to think about the game a little differently. Online play is available, but I haven’t tested it out yet. I have played over 100 games against AI opponents, with most games taking under five minutes. It’s addictive enough that my daughter complained I was playing it too much.

The main glitch in the game is the proximity of the discard pile to your expeditions, making it far too easy to accidentally place a card in the wrong place. While your placement isn’t final until you draw another card, either from the deck or from a discard pile, if you move very quickly, which I found I was able to do after just a game or two, you’ll likely make a wrong move along the way because it’s so easy to put a card in the wrong place. Obviously there’s a user error element there – if I would just slow down, I wouldn’t make these mistakes – but I’d prefer to see more space between the two areas, perhaps by relocating the discard piles to the center of the board, which is how the game is set up if you’re playing the physical version. I’ve also caught the weaker AI players making what appeared to be extremely bad moves, such as playing coin cards late in the game when the probability of reaching the 20-point threshold in that expedition is very low, so once you’re up to speed on gameplay you will probably just want to face the most difficult AI opponent.

One of the best aspects of the migration of advanced boardgames to iOS has been the high-quality implementations, since the audience is still somewhat of a niche market, willing to pay a few bucks for every title released in this space. The Lost Cities app takes a fun if very simple game and gives it a high-class makeover for iOS, with tremendous graphics, plenty of replay value thanks to the game’s random element and one very strong AI player, and the potential for online play – another top of the line electronic version that matches or even exceeds the quality of the original.

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→ July 16, 2012
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Scotland Yard app.

In case any of you missed it, my top 50 prospects ranking update went up on Thursday. I’ll be back on the Baseball Today podcast on Tuesday.

Scotland Yard is one of the few mass-market boardgames from before Settlers of Catan ushered in the modern era of “Eurogames” to fare well in the comparison to the more sophisticated, less luck-based games that players like me tend to favor. It has a very simple mechanic, has cooperative elements, and involves a tiny bit of luck. The Scotland Yard iOS app, released early last month, is a very strong implementation that only falls short in that it’s a hard game to play with AI opponents or partners.

The game is semi-cooperative, with two to five players as detectives chasing one player, the thief Mr. X, around London, attempting to catch him by landing on the space he occupies in the span of 24 turns. On each turn, a player can move to an adjacent location or station using a taxi, a bus, or the subway. The detectives start the game with a limited number of passes/fares for each method of transportation, and when a detective uses a ticket, he gives it to Mr. X to use on a subsequent turn. The location of Mr. X is obscured for most of the game, but is revealed four times, after moves 3, 8, 13, and 18; on all other turns, the detectives see what method of transportation he used, but not his location. Mr. X also gets two “double move” tickets, allowing him to make two moves within one turn, and has several “black” tickets, where he can obscure his method of transportation as well as his location. Finally, he can take boats along the Thames by using black tickets, a method entirely unavailable to the detectives.

I’ve never played the physical boardgame, but the need for secrecy makes this tailor-made for an adaptation to a mobile platform, whether you’re using pass-and-play or online multiplayer. The graphics in this app are bright and pretty clear, no mean feat for a complex board with lots of fine lines representing paths for each method of transportation; the app also brightly highlights all acceptable moves for each player on his turn, and includes a countdown clock of variable move times for live games.

Playing solely against AI opponents, I found it more fun to play as Mr. X because you can’t coordinate with AI detective players when playing the other side. Yet escaping the detectives quickly became simple, even on the hardest setting, because they’re not deductive enough – for example, they never seem to grasp that when Mr. X reaches one of the stations on the Thames and uses a black ticket, he probably took a boat to a different part of the board. So while gameplay is clean and simple, it’s much better suited to play against live opponents, even if you want to supplement with an AI detective, or want to gang up on an AI-played Mr. X.

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→ June 22, 2012
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Le Havre boardgame & app.

The board game Le Havre is one of the best complex strategy games I’ve tried, although the emphasis is on complex, involving a lengthy setup, more pieces than I can remember in any other game (mostly tiles representing resources that need to be sorted into piles), and a lot of long-range planning with great potential for other players to inadvertently trip you up. It’s very balanced, nearly luck-free, and rewards patience and attention. But the time to set it up and the time to play it are both major obstacles unless you’re quite hardcore about your boardgaming – and you don’t have to get up early the next morning.

All of that makes it a perfect game for adaptation into electronic form, and the app version of Le Havreicon, released on Wednesday night by Codito, is excellent, playing easily with plenty of instructions and offering sufficient challenges from the AI opponents to allow for many repeat plays.

In Le Havre, a game by the designer of Agricola and heavily inspired by Caylus, players compete to acquire the most total value in buildings and ships while filling growing requirements to feed workers each turn, a balancing act that is far more difficult than it sounds because of the competition for scarce resources and the limited number of ways to obtain food, a problem exacerbated in games of more than two players. On each turn, a player may choose to take resources from any of the seven available stocks; to take the available supply of money (francs); to build one of three buildings visible on the stacks of building cards; or to use a building that is already built, even if it was built by another player. A player may also buy certain buildings outright in addition to that main action.

Each player has to have enough food or francs on hand at the end of every round to feed his workers, and the rounds are short – seven moves in total, so in each round of a four-player game, one player will get only a single move. Yet to acquire points from resources, players have to first acquire the right mix of resources, sometimes converting them to other kinds of resources, sometimes acquiring energy sources as well, and then build the building or the ship in question. It takes patience, and requires a lot of quick decisions about when to move for the short term (food) and when to move for the long (points).

There are multiple ways to win Le Havre, one of the key features in a game that is this complex (and my main criticism of Puerto Rico). Shipbuilding is the best way to beat the AI players in my experience with the app, but there are several different paths to high point totals through buildings, including several buildings that stack up point bonuses depending on what else you’ve already built. There are also several different paths to ensuring a regular food supply, and ships can provide a fixed quantity of food on each turn once they’re built. When a player can’t feed his workers, he can take out a loan – annoying, but sometimes the right strategic move, and sometimes the path to digging a hole you can’t quite escape.

Game play within the app is very straightforward, and one of the benefits of an app version is the fact that you are protected from rules mistakes, which, given the complexity of Le Havre, is a significant advantage. Each card replicates the graphics from the physical game, including symbols that indicate the card’s price in resources, fee to use if it’s not yours, value in points, and resources or gains from usage. Clicking on the question mark in the upper right once the card is expanded gets the full text explaining the card and all of its costs and benefits. Learning the lay of the board took me two or three games, but all of the critical information is either visible or is a click away. The game also gives players the ability to undo a move while the turn is in progress, and confirms the ‘end turn’ request as well (an option that can be turned off). There’s a solid tutorial, although it is no substitute for playing the game a few times against easy AI opponents.

Those AIs are good enough to continue to challenge me, a relative rookie in Le Havre, because they offer multiple levels of difficulty. I do find them a little predictable, and they often race out to early points leads because they plan more for the short term than the long; the first two settings are like training wheels, but in a 4- or 5-player game against all AI opponents, the hardest AI setting is a good enough challenge to allow for repeated gameplay. The app now offers turn-based online multiplayer through GameCenter, which I haven’t tried yet.

My criticisms of the app are minor – the graphics could be brighter, and the font isn’t as clear as it could be, so some of the text is tough to read without expanding it from the background. The hint feature, suggesting the next move to make, can be a little too focused on the short term, although the point of the hints is to help you learn the game, not help you beat the AI players that are running on the same software. I ran into some very minor graphics glitches that should be addressed in the first update. Also, the music made my wife want to strangle me after about two minutes, so I muted it for my own safety.

If you like Agricola and/or Caylus, I strongly recommend Le Havre. It is as elegant an adaptation as I can imagine for a game with this many elements. I’m also impressed by how Codito’s boardgame apps improve each time out – the leap from Puerto Rico, another complex game with a lot of elements, to Le Havre is outstanding – showing an internal commitment to improving the player experience (and, I presume, increasing revenues). That said, if you aren’t a fan of boardgames with a lot of rules or a relatively steep learning curve, you might find this game frustrating, particularly the physical game given all its pieces. (It took me the better part of an hour to break apart and sort all of the little cardboard resource tiles.) It’s very fair to jump off the boardgame bandwagon before Le Havre or Agricola – but at least the app lets you try it out for $5 first.

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Recent ESPN content, if you made it this far: My quick reaction to this year’s Futures Game rosters; an early look at Mike Trout’s MVP case; this week’s Klawchat; and some fun podcasts from Thursday with Dave Schoenfield and from Wednesday with Chris Sprow.

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→ February 4, 2012
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Caylus iOS app.

The complex strategy game Caylus is one of the top-rated games on Boardgamegeek, a site where voters tend to favor intricate games with pages upon pages of rules and little to no luck involved. It’s the kind of game I can’t imagine playing as a rookie against someone who’s played a few times – an experience I had with Agricola that ended up with me getting my ass handed to me by a slightly more seasoned player (who is, most likely, about to read this review). It’s also the kind of game that makes me say I’m not a “serious” boardgamer – I love smart games, but the complexity and length of games like Caylus (and Agricola, and Le Havre, for which I still owe everyone a review) keeps them off the top tier of my own list.

So I’m pleased to report that the Caylus app for iOSicon is very strong, with outstanding graphics, a very easy-to-use layout (no mean feat given the amount of information a player might need midgame), and, after a recent update, no issues with stability. The AIs could be better, and the rules included in the app are not sufficient, but once you get the hang of it, it’s easy to play and keeps you thinking the entire time – 15-20 minutes for a game against AI players. (I have yet to try this multiplayer, but that is available through GameCenter.)

Caylus is a worker-placement game: Each player has a small number of workers to place each turn on buildings that might return money, resources, or points; allow the exchange of some of those things for others; or allow him/her to construct something of value. Caylus operates around five resources, the value and supply of which fluctuate as the game progresses, and offers multiple paths to victory (although I found one the AIs just can’t seem to beat*). There’s really no luck involved, and because most buildings on the board allow just one worker per turn, each decision, from small to large, requires the player to consider not just his own future moves but those of every opponent as well.

* The strategy requires gold, the scarcest resource in the game. A human player would see that I was stockpiling gold and certain other resources and would at least try to made it harder for me to get gold from the gold mine, the one place to get gold for no cost beyond the cost of the worker. A human player would be trying to get gold for himself anyway. But the AI players don’t do either of these things, and I don’t think the AI players are that good at pursuing points via multiple, simultaneous strategies. I’ll come back to that.

The centerpiece of the game is the castle, which players build in blocks during three separate phases, after which their contributions to the castle are scored. Building certain numbers of blocks, or just building the most in any particular turn, grants the player one or more “royal favors” – money, a resource, victory points, or the ability to build a building at a discount. Failing to build at all in any of the three phases costs a player two victory points, but the opportunity cost is just as significant.

The graphics in this app are the best I’ve seen for any boardgame app so far, clear, bright, and very easy to look at for the length of a game. The layout is another strength, with critical information available in a left-hand sidebar that the player can rotate through several screens or can shrink to half its size to see more of the board. Moving workers is straightforward, and in the banner on the right from where the player drags a worker the app displays key info like money remaining (since placing a worker costs at least one unit of money).

I found the AI players all pretty easy to beat, working my way up from a two-player game against the easiest AI opponent to a five-player game against the two strongest AI players and two more from the next level of difficulty. The primary problem is that the AI players can’t detect a human player’s long-term strategy – an issue evident in other apps and one I expect to see in the upcoming implementations of Agricola and Le Havre. The simpler the game, generally the simpler it is to program a strong AI, either because it can pursue an optimal strategy that’s hard to beat or because the tree of potential human-player moves isn’t that wide.

The lack of in-game information is the other flaw here, one that creates a steeper-than-necessary learning curve for new players. The rules and tutorial show you how to use the app more than they show you how to successfully play the game. Buildings aren’t marked on the board; their icons are unique, so a player can look in the building directory in the left-hand sidebar and try to match them up, but allowing a player to tap any building and see its identity would be an easy addition. The app will also allow a player to select a favor that s/he can’t afford, with no opportunity to undo it as a player would have when playing the physical game.

For $4.99, I’ve already gotten my money’s worth from Caylus, spending close to three hours total across all games I’ve played so far. I’ll still play it occasionally, but they’ll need to offer a better AI for this to be something I continue to play regularly without GameCenter (and since I play on planes, that’s a key issue for me). The weaker AI makes the app more of a Caylus tutorial, or even an advertisement for the physical game – albeit a very slick, easy to use one, once you figure out the rules, which you might have to do outside of the app. It’s really well done, and if they can offer a stronger AI player down the line, it’ll join that top tier of boardgame apps.

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→ November 15, 2011
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Tigris & Euphrates app.

Codito is the development group behind Tikal, Puerto Rico, Medici, and Ra, solid offerings but none earning top marks from me. Their latest offering, Tigris & Euphratesicon, is their best boardgame app yet, adapting a classic 1997 boardgame from Reiner Knizia in an attractive format with a strong tutorial and (I think) very solid AI opponents. It went on sale today for $5.99.

I haven’t played the physical version of the game or reviewed it here, so if you haven’t played it, here’s an overview of the game, ranked 13th overall on Boardgamegeek. Tigris & Euphrates uses an unusual tile system where players are represented on the board by icon rather than color – that is, every player has a red leader, but each player’s red leader has his unique symbol on it. Players build “kingdoms” of adjacent tiles in each of four colors (red, green, blue, black) on a board that includes land spaces and river spaces, the latter along two rivers representing those of the game’s title. Players acquire points by placing leaders on the board and then placing regular tiles in those colors in the same kingdom as their leader(s). For example, if you have a black leader in a kingdom and place a black tile anywhere within that kingdom – contiguous with the leader tile – you earn a point in black. Players earn points in each of the four colors, and the winner is the player with the highest low score. In other words, the score that matters most is your worst score across the four colors.

You can also earn points by making a 2×2 square of tiles of the same color and converting it into a two-color “monument” that produces one point per turn in each of those two colors, awarded to the leaders in the same kingdom. And you can earn “treasures,” wild-card points that can be added to your score in any of the four colors, which the app automatically assigns to your current worst color.

On each turn, a player has two actions, which can include placing a tile, placing a leader, swapping any of the tiles from his hand for new ones, or placing one of two “catastrophe” tiles that destroy the tiles (not leaders) on which they’re placed.

Of course, there’s conflict as players compete to control various kingdoms with their leader tokens. You can place one of your leaders on a kingdom with another player’s leader in that same color, triggering a “revolt” that is resolved by the use of red tiles on the board and from your hand, regardless of the color at stake. Conflicts also arise when kingdoms are merged through tile placement; the leader with the most tiles of the same color currently in its kingdom, supplemented with tiles from that player’s hand, wins the conflict. The loser of either kind of battle removes his leader from the board.

I’ve glossed over a few details, but the key takeaway if you’ve never played the game is that each player has to balance a number of different variables: boost your lowest score, protect your existing leaders, build your hand tiles (you get six at any time) to attack an opponent, watch opponents’ lowest scores and try to sabotage them, and so on. It’s very rich, and once you play a game or two, actually quite simple to play despite the seemingly long list of rules. Knizia’s games are often subtly complex yet very intuitive on the surface, and Tigris & Euphrates qualifies as well.

The app is outstanding. The board is extremely clear and easy to navigate on the iPad; the icons on tiles are very clear, and it’s easy to see what you have available to you at any given time, as well as the percentage of the tile stack remaining. Leaders are labeled with a number indicating their current strength. Conflict resolution is straightforward and the game includes optional confirmation dialog boxes for any move, which prevents you from accidentally tanking the game through an incorrect move. You can undo either or both of your previous moves before you end your turn, unless the move was a conflict that has now been resolved. (One quibble: When playing only AI opponents, you still can’t undo a resolved conflict; since playing AI players is more like training or an extended tutorial, this might be a nice feature to have so you can get a feel for the success rates of conflicts.) Most importantly, your point totals are clear and obvious, with your current low score highlight, and the app handles the treasures for you.

I’ve found the AI players to be strong enough to keep the game challenging. There are five difficulty levels, and after waxing two low-level AIs in my first game I dialed both up to four … and then lost seven straight times. (At least.) The eventual victory, followed by a victory against two level-five AIs, were quite satisfying. There’s some predictability even in the harder AIs, especially early in the game, but their strength is that they don’t miss obvious moves and don’t hesitate to attack via all three methods (revolt, merging kingdoms, catastrophes). I’d like to try this online, but as a standalone app it’s very strong because the AI players are so well-designed. The game also comes with one of the longest, most detailed tutorials I’ve come across, reminiscent of the one in Samurai, which would be my previous gold standard for app tutorials. It takes a while, but it’s worth it.

I’ve ranked boardgame apps without grading them, but I’d say the inner circle of apps – where the underlying game is strong; the app runs well, looks good, and plays easily; the AI players are strong; and online multiplayer works – would now include five games (links go to reviews): Carcassonne, Samurai, Battle Line, Ticket to Ride, and Tigris & Euphrates. This most recent addition is the most complex of the five for those of you looking for a more hardcore experience, but plays reasonably quickly, with three-player games against two AI opponents taking me 15-17 minutes. I highly recommend it if you’re slightly obsessed with these games, as I am.

Full disclosure: I received a free version of this app from the developers prior to its release. Also, would anyone object to me including T&E on the forthcoming updated board game rankings, even though I haven’t played the physical game?

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