Istanbul won the Kennerspiel des Jahres in 2014 and was one of my favorite new games of that year, ranking only behind Splendor on my personal list. Although the basic mechanics of individual turns revolve mostly around set collection, gathering items you can trade for rubies (required to win the game) or for money you can use to buy rubies, the real heart of Istanbul strategy is critical path modeling: figuring out the best way to move around the variable board to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible with your turns. Because the board itself is built each game, with a basic ‘short paths’ setup but millions of potential arrangements of the 16 tiles, you can master the concept but can’t go into a game with a set plan.
Acram Digital has now introduced a port of Istanbul for iOS and Android, and it’s excellent right out of the chute, with just minor flaws even at its first release. The app particularly helps the novice player by making it hard to forget options you might have to enhance your turns; if you have earned a special ability or have the right to play a card that might help, the app reminds you of this, sometimes with a dialog asking if you’re sure you don’t want to use that ability, sometimes just with an icon right on the screen that puts the option in front of you. That makes game play much easier against the AI and more fair if you’re playing online against more advanced players.
In Istanbul, each player is trying to be the first to collect five rubies, anywhere on the board. You can buy them with combinations of goods, with gold coins, by upgrading your ‘wheelbarrow’ three times (a total cost of 21 coins), or by buying both upgrades at the small mosque or the great mosque. The catch with all of those tiles, other than the wheelbarrow upgrade, is that the cost increases each time someone uses the tile, so getting there early can be beneficial … but it costs you the change to acquire upgrades that might make it easier to collect rubies later in the game. You move around the 4×4 board of tiles with your merchant and a stack of ‘assistant’ tokens; when you land on a tile and want to use it, you must leave one assistant there, or, if you’ve been there before and left an assistant already, pick that one back up. Once your stack is out of assistants, you can move but can’t take an action unless you pick an assistant back up or return to the Fountain tile and bring ’em all home. I reviewed the game in full for Paste back in 2015.
The app is pretty much spot on; I had just one little glitch, found some spelling errors in the tutorial, and would like harder AI opponents, but that’s a modest list of criticisms for a brand new release – and it has yet to crash on me through dozens of plays. The app offers four board setups, including the semi-random setup described in the physical game’s rulebook, and lets you play one to four human or AI opponents, with three difficulty settings for the latter. The game’s icons are simple, but sometimes the function of a card or a mosque upgrade isn’t immediately clear; you can click on any of those and hit the (i) in the upper left corner to get a full description of what it does. There’s a tiny lag sometimes when you complete an action before the app gives you the icons to move to the next screen, not a serious problem but something that threw me off the first few times I played.
The app also includes the ‘neutral assistants’ variant, where each player starts the game with one assistant in his/her stack that doesn’t belong to any single player, so if you go to a tile with a neutral assistant on it, you can pick it up and take the action even if you didn’t leave the token there in the first place. It’s definitely worth the $7 as is, although again, I think the hard AI players need to be stronger; I’m no expert at the game but can beat them more than half the time even on the harder boards.
