As a very chess-like game with an obvious mathematical underpinning, Santorini, which I reviewed in 2017, was an obvious candidate for a port to digital platforms. Roxley Games did so earlier this year and the adaptation is very successful, so much so, however, that it reminded me of why I stopped playing the tabletop version and dropped it from my top 100.
Santorini is played on a 5×5 grid, and each player gets two workers to move around the board and build towers of up to three levels. On a typical turn, you pick one of your workers, move it to any adjacent space (orthogonally or diagonally), and then build on a space adjacent to the new one. Workers can move up one level at a time, or down any number of levels. You win the game if you get either of your workers to the third level of a tower. You don’t own the towers you build, so you can climb or build further on a tower your opponent started. You can also put a dome on top of the third level of a tower, which makes it impossible for any worker to move there for the rest of the game. In my limited experience, you want to set up a trap of sorts where you have a worker on a two-level tower who is standing between two three-level towers, or who is next to a three-level tower to which your opponent can’t get a worker adjacent to put a dome on it.
That’s the base game, and I think it works quite well in the vein of chess-like two-player games, with zero luck, a fair amount of thinking ahead and envisioning what your opponent will do and how the board will change. However, game and the app both come with a set of “gods” that give players unique powers, creating a huge number of possible combinations to give the game plenty of replay value. The app seems to come with 34 gods up front, which would mean you have 561 combinations in the base game, with 25 more available through in-app purchases of 5 gods apiece for $1 or $2, or all 25 in a pack for $8, giving you 1711 combinations. (Combinations and permutations always gave me fits in school.)
This is about where Santorini loses me: these gods are just not well-balanced, and some feel too close to unbeatable. The fact that the game is so mathematical means the AI players always seem to make the optimal moves, and I’ve had numerous experiences where I quit a game against the AI because I could see that I was 3-5 moves from a guaranteed loss with no way out. And there are god combinations that skew heavily towards one or the other. Pan is the most annoying one I’ve encountered, as he’s one of the gods with a second win condition – in Pan’s case, the player wins if one of its workers can move down two levels, which means you have to prevent their workers from ever getting to the second or third level of any tower, ever.
The app implementation is really strong, though – the variety of gods and the skill levels even of the easier AIs are indicative of the quality of the app itself. The fact that it reminded me that I don’t like the game is probably a sign that the developers did their job. The graphics are bright and mostly clear, while the animations work well and all user moves are intuitive. The board itself relies on the three-dimensional perspective; in the app, you can spin the board around and view it from the top, but I still often find it hard to discern whether there’s one level or two on buildings that I can’t see from the front, and it’s definitely too easy to click the wrong space unless you move from the isometric view to the bird’s-eye one. You can undo a move if you click the undo button within about two seconds, before the AI makes a move, but of course that may be before you realize you erred.
The app comes with local and online options as well as a campaign mode called Odyssey, which is useful for letting you experiment with several of the gods, although the options for working through it are rather limited and that’s where I ran into some of the god matchups I thought were unbalanced. Given how many combinations there are in the game, though, it’s probably a better way to get introduced to some of them than going with trial and error in the local mode.
I’d compare this to Race for the Galaxy, another game I don’t love but that was implemented incredibly well in its app, although I’d take that one over Santorini because I think the game lends itself to more open-ended strategies. I’d recommend this if you like the original Santorini, or enjoy games like chess or Tak or Go that involve very little luck and reward long-term thinking. It’s $4.99 for iOS or Android.