online games

Top 15 iOS boardgame apps.

I’ve been promising this for a while, and kept delaying it to buy and review more apps, but I think we’ve reached a brief lull in major boardgame app releases, so here’s a ranking of the 15 that I’ve tried so far. All but two are iPad compatible – several are iPad-only, in fact – and all are adaptations of existing physical boardgames. Most include multiplayer through GameCenter and I believe I’ve highlighted (and downgraded appropriately) those that don’t.

If I’ve reviewed an app in full, I’ve linked to that review in the game’s name. The link on the price goes to iTunes for you to purchase it (yes, I get a 5% commission if you click through and buy).

One extra bit of awesome from all these games, at least for me, has been playing some of you – not coincidentally, all four of the games where I’ve played readers appear in the top five.

(EDIT, 12/26/11: One app that came out after I produced this ranking that I also recommend is Tigris and Euphrates, which I’d rank fourth, just after Ticket to Ride.)

(EDIT, 3/30/13: I’m due for a bigger update, but I also recommend Caylus, Le Havre, and Stone Age, with the last one just releasing an iPad version this week.)

1. Carcassonne. ($9.99) The best boardgame implementation on iOS happens to be of one of the best boardgames, period, although its ranking here is based more on how incredible the app is. The graphics are superb, the toughest AI players are very good, the easy AI players are still enough of a challenge for rookies, and the game offers networked play that works easily and smoothly. It’s the most expensive app on this list ($9.99 for a universal app) but absolutely worth the cost.

2. Samurai. ($4.99) Seven of the ten apps on this list are adaptations of Reiner Knizia games, led by this one. It’s classic Knizia – a simple concept leads to complex game play: Players compete to control specific hexes on the board, with special pieces that allow players to steal hexes at the last second. The AI player is also very good and despite the small board the game is very playable on an iPod Touch.

3. Ticket to Ride. ($6.99) Days of Wonder, the publisher of Ticket to Ride and Small World, put a tremendous amount of work into their apps, which are clean, bright, and robust. Ticket to Ride falls short of the two above here because the AI players are so weak, but DoW linked GameCenter multiplayer to their own thriving online multiplayer community, so finding games is easy at all hours of the day. They currently offer three in-app expansions as well, of which I’ve purchased one, the essential 1910 expansion.

4. Battle Line. ($2.99) A two-player card game from Knizia where players compete to capture five of nine flags (or three adjacent flags) laid out in a line between them, using poker-line hands of three cards at each flag. It’s simple and quick, made better by the use of tactics cards (you have the option to play without them, but you should use them). The AI player could be a little stronger, but the randomness of the cards tends to flatten out the game to make the AI more competitive. Note: The linked review was before a major software update that all but eliminated crashing, added GameCenter multiplayer, and added much sharper graphics.

5. Puerto Rico. ($7.99) A good implementation of a complex (and very, very good) boardgame, with competent AIs and functional multiplayer, including a two-player variant that makes it a little easier to get a game going. The screen is fairly busy and I imagine the app would be confusing to someone who’s never tried the boardgame, so the in-game tutorials are a must. You can beat the AIs pretty regularly with a shipping strategy (corn/harbor or corn/wharf), but if you eschew that you get a tougher challenge.

6. Ingenious. ($2.99) A simple two-player game on a hexagonal board where the victory condition calls for a lot of counterintuitive play. Also by Knizia.

7. Small World. ($6.99) Another Days of Wonder app, without multiplayer but with a somewhat better (but not great) AI player. The app only plays two players (the physical game plays two to five), but with a clever tabletop mode that allows the players to sit across from each other without having to move or rotate the iPad. Graphics are superb, although an “undo” option would be nice considering how easy it is to drop a token in the wrong spot. A multiplayer option would bump it up the list, but if you’re looking for a really slick two-player game you can play with someone who’s sitting next to you, this is a great option.

8. Through the Desert. ($1.99) I really like the underlying game and the graphics on this app are strong, but it doesn’t play that well on the iPod and the glitch where you can’t see the bottom of the screen in four-player mode on small devices still isn’t resolved. The AIs improved noticeably after the last update. It’s another board-control game with lots of opportunities to sabotage other players, if that’s how you roll, and at $1.99 for the iPad version it might be the best value on this list.

9. Tikal. ($3.99) After a recent update this moved up out of the cellar, and while it’s available for all devices the small graphics play much better on the iPad. It’s a solid strategy game with aggressive AIs that play fairly predictably despite multiple difficulty settings; GameCenter integration was a big boost.

10. Wabash Cannonball. ($1.99) A no-luck, auction-driven, train game where players compete for shares in railroads that they then develop across the map from the eastern seaboard to Chicago. This app, adapted from the boardgame Chicago Express, gets the award for the cleanest presentation of in-game information, of which there’s a lot. However, the app is designed for iPhone/iPod screens, not for iPad, and really needs online multiplayer. Give me those two things and I’ll rank it higher.

11. Medici. ($2.99) And another Knizia game, this one built around auctions of sets of goods on ships where players compete to ship the largest quantities of specific goods.

12. Zooloretto. ($3.99) One of the best-looking games on here, with fun sound effects and an unlockable (free) in-game expansion … but the lack of networked play is a real handicap. It looks to me like the developers have walked away from this one, which is a shame since it functions properly and looks so good; better AIs or networked play would help. I did discover a strange bug as well, where the in-game expansion somehow relocked itself after I didn’t use the app for a few months.

13. Catan. ($4.99) The AIs improved with the Seafarers expansion, but they’re still not very tough. It’s a good introduction to Settlers of Catan if you’ve never played the physical game and want to try it out before investing, but once I had defeated the AIs in every level I didn’t feel the need to go back to the game. The first major update improved the graphics, but the AIs still aren’t great, although it added multiplayer through GameCenter.

14. Kingsburg: Serving the Crown. ($4.99) This app looks great, runs smoothly, includes what I think are competent AIs, offers GameCenter multiplayer, and takes absolutely forever to play. I’ve never played the physical version, which probably doesn’t help matters, but one of the things I look for in a good boardgaming app is the potential to bang out a quick game, whether solitaire or online. The game is currently iPhone/iPod only, although an iPad port has been promised as “coming soon” for several months.

15. Ra. ($3.99) I’ve never reviewed this game here, mostly because I didn’t care much for it. It’s another Knizia game, with an auction component but way too many moving parts and an AI that I beat the first time out despite not knowing what I was doing. Medici takes a similar concept and executes it better.

Puerto Rico (game).

Hat tip to Matthew Leach, who covers the Cardinals for mlb.com, for pointing out that The Roots’ new album, How I Got Over, is just $5 as an mp3 download on amazon.com (through that link). No idea how long it will last – the Arcade Fire sale was supposed to last one day but amazon extended it at least through the end of that week.

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I’ve been promising a writeup of the game Puerto Rico for about six months now, but up until a few days ago didn’t feel like I’d played it enough to offer an informed take. The significance of the last few days is that I discovered the site Tropic Euro (two points to anyone who gets the reason for that name), a very slick Java-based application that allows you to play Puerto Rico against bots or live opponents. With a three-person game involving two bots running about 11-12 minutes for me, it’s been a nice way to take a quick break from packing as well as a way to get more familiar with why BoardGameGeek users rate Puerto Rico as the #1 board game of all time.

The goal in Puerto Rico is to amass Victory Points* by producing and shipping goods from your “island” back the mother country and/or by constructing buildings, especially one of the five large buildings that provide bonus points at the end of the game based on what else you’ve accomplished. Your island is a board with spaces for twelve plantations and twelve buildings; the plantations, which are free, can grow one of five crop or house a quarry that reduces the cost of any building by one doubloon. Corn is the least valuable crop, with a trade value of zero, but doesn’t require a processing building; coffee is the most valuable crop for trading but you can’t produce more than two units per turn.

*One thing you have to get used to when playing German-Style board games is that even a fairly concrete game concept, the goal is nearly always the abstract victory points. Completing certain tasks, building specific buildings, or shipping goods earns you points, but the assignment of points to deeds can feel a little arbitrary. I’ve just learned to accept it for each game and move on.

Buildings come in three types: Production buildings, for processing any of the four crops beyond corn; small buildings, each of which grants you a few victory points and some special privilege on every turn; and large buildings, which offer no in-game benefits but can provide significant bonuses after the game ends. Every building and plantation must be manned by a colonist, but their supply is limited, especially early in the game.

In each round, each player chooses a role, with options including the mayor (obtaining colonists), the settler (choosing plantations), the builder (obvious), the craftsman (producing goods), the trader (each player can put one good on the trading ship, as long as another good of that type isn’t already there), the captain (shipping goods for points), and, in larger games, the prospector (take a doubloon). Every player gets to utilize the roles chosen by other players, but the player who chooses a specific role gets an extra privilege, such as producing one additional good of his choice. Roles that go unselected are worth an extra doubloon in the next round.

The complex and slightly crazy part of Puerto Rico is that shipping round. There are five goods that players can produce, but there are only three ships available to take goods to the mainland, and a ship can only hold goods of one type. When a player chooses the shipper, all players must ship all of their goods; if there’s no room, most of their goods spoil and are lost with no compensation. (There are large and small warehouses that a player can buy and man to protect some of his goods.) The ships empty at the end of a round and only when they’re full.

Every good shipped is worth a victory point, and in the later rounds a player could easily ship five goods or more in a single shipping phase, especially if he’s the shipper and can place his goods first. Since points from shipping can easily be around 40% of a winning score, possibly more, there are a host of considerations behind the set of decisions of what goods to produce, how much to produce, and when to ship them, and those decisions also include considering what your opponents plan to produce and what they have on hand. A well-timed decision to choose the shipper role can grab you six points while spoiling goods for several of your opponents.

That’s what makes Puerto Rico a great game, and I’m going to assume it’s why the geeks over at BoardGameGeek have it at the top of their rankings: The decisions each player has to make are rich and complex and depend on potential future moves from both the player and his opponents. Just choosing a role means weighing four or five variables – money, colonist supply, the shipping situation, production potential, and what your opponents will do with this role if you choose it … or what someone else will do with the role if you don’t. Given the game’s complexity, it’s surprising that it works as smoothly as it does, and I think the only truly difficult part of Puerto Rico is setting the game up and putting it away.

It is, however, the most complex game I’ve reviewed on the dish so far, so I can’t just tell you that, say, if you love Settlers of Catan or Stone Age, you should try Puerto Rico. It would be more fair to say that if you’re looking for a more involved game than those two – both among our favorites – you should try Puerto Rico, not just because I recommend it but because the consensus of the boardgaming world is that it’s the best game out there.

Back to Tropic Euro, I’ve found that the software works very well; I’ve had occasional trouble logging on, where the main window was blacked out, but closing and restarting the app solved it. It offers PR expansions, swaps the prices of the Factory and University buildings (per the original boardgame’s designer’s suggestion), and the AI moves quickly and pretty logically, enough to punish me for making rookie mistakes. The app’s author, Chris Gibbs, says on the site that there will be a “hard” AI option available in the next week or so.

I’ve previously reviewed San Juan, the card game variant of Puerto Rico; while it’s consistent with the theme, it is a massively simplified game. I enjoy San Juan in its own right, but it’s just a different experience.

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Posting here will be sporadic over at least the next seven days as we pack and await the moving vans. I should have at least one ESPN chat either this week or next, and both ESPN and dish blogging will become more frequent by the week of September 20th. If you’ve emailed me or asked me a question in any forum without receiving a response, I apologize, and I hope you understand.

Top 15 iOS boardgame apps.

Puerto Rico (game).

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