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Dune: Imperium.

Dune: Imperium is one of the top-rated games of all time on Boardgamegeek, currently ranked 6th with an overall rating of 8.4 out of 10 despite having nearly 50,000 ratings, a really unusual degree of agreement on a site where, in my experience, people give in to some of their most pedantic tendencies. The game came out in 2020, in advance of the first Dune film from Denis Villeneuve, from the publisher Dire Wolf, who have also now put out a digital version of the game that is just as superb as the tabletop game itself. (It’s available on Steam, iOS, and Android.)

Dune: Imperium is a worker placement and hand management game with a dash of deckbuilding, and it has a ton in common with Clank!, which is also published by Dire Wolf and comes from the same designer, Paul Dennen. Where Dune: Imperium differs from Clank! is in its higher degree of player interaction; you don’t compete directly with opponents in combat, but you compete to send the most forces to the conflict in each round and are fighting for valuable spaces on the board. There are also asymmetrical player powers and some resource management involving spice and water, giving the game a strong mix of mechanics that blend into one outstanding whole.

In Dune: Imperium, you play as one of several leaders, such as Paul Atreides, and you will play two cards from your hand to place your two agents on the board, activating the spaces to gain resources or another reward, and then use your remaining cards to either buy new cards or to supplement your troops in the conflict in the Reveal phase. Each round has a unique conflict with its own rewards for the player who contributes the most, second-most, or third-most strength to fighting it, with strength coming from troops and cards.

The various spaces on the board allow you to gain water, spice, coins, or troops; to gain influence with one of four Houses, such as the Fremen and the Bene Gesserit, for rewards and victory points; and, in one-time use spaces, to gain a third agent (so you can place three per round, rather than two) and to gain a seat at the Council to boost your purchasing power by 2 in every round. Placing an agent requires playing a card with the correct symbol on its left side, after which you also gain the reward shown on the top row of the card’s lower half.

Once all players have placed their agents, you move to the Reveal phase, where players reveal their remaining cards and use the values on the bottom row for purchasing power or for more strength in the conflict. You might only buy eight to ten new cards over the course of the game, typically one per turn but occasionally two, with the powerful The Spice Must Flow cards worth one victory point apiece. You may also dedicate any attack strength on these cards to the current conflict. The game ends when any player has reached ten victory points, or when the ten-card conflict deck is empty.

As in many such games, like Clank! and the Lost Ruins of Arnak, the cards in your starter deck are not terribly useful, although there’s nothing as useless as the Stumble cards in Clank! are. Upgrading your deck as you play is important, but I would argue that how you use the cards in your hand each turn is at least as important as what you add to your deck, especially later in the game, since you might not even see a card you buy in the last round or two. You do want to build a deck that will maximize your turns – two and then three to play agents, and the remainder for the Reveal. There are a few cards that have the draw power, and there are a few opportunities to trash cards, and those are extremely powerful in a game with just ten rounds at most.

The digital implementation is outstanding – not a surprise, as Dire Wolf is probably the best digital board game publisher out there, and this is one of their own tabletop designs. There’s a great if long tutorial to introduce the game, and during the game it is always clear what moves you may or may not make, along with when you have no choice but to pass to the next phase. It frees you up to focus on the game itself, and, in my case, to trying to finish anywhere other than fourth. The app comes with three levels of AI difficulty, two AI modes, and challenges where some basic rules of the game are altered, just in case you manage to beat the AI on its basic mode. (I was so close to beating the first challenge mode in my first game, and lost 11-10 on the final move. I won the second time.) I actually owned a physical copy of Dune: Imperium, but sold it for charity away after playing the app – I have too many games as it is, and that one wasn’t getting to the table any time soon anyway, while the app is more than enough to scratch that itch.

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→ October 19, 2021
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Fox in the Forest app.

The Fox in the Forest is a great trick-taking game for two players in a small box, working primarily with just a small deck of 33 cards, numbered 1 to 11 in three suits. Odd-numbered cards have special powers that can upend the traditional trick-taking rules – you must follow suit, and if you can’t, one of the suits is the trump and you can win the trick by playing that suit instead – such as by letting you swap a card from your hand for the card that determines the current trump suit, or letting you start the next trick even if you lose. You also have to try not to win too many tricks or you’ll be “greedy” and get zero points for the round; your opponent has to win at least four of the tricks for you to score anything. Play continues, with points awarded in each round, until one player amasses 21 points for the victory.

We now have a beautiful new app version ($4.99 for iTunes, Android, and Steam.) of the game from Dire Wolf Digital, the studio that has created a whole string of outstanding adaptations of tabletop games, including Root, Sagrada, and Lanterns. As you might expect, the graphics and animations here are superb, and there’s a small challenge mode for solo play. The AI player is a little disappointing, however, as even on its hardest setting it still misses some easy strategies like deliberately losing all remaining tricks to make you Greedy and thus leave you with zero points.

The app’s setup is clean and easy to see even on the small screen of a phone. Your cards are laid out at the bottom of the screen, and you can drag and drop one to your play area on the left when it’s your turn. You can see a card’s effects with a simple tap and hold on the card, although the text may still be a little small for some players (I didn’t need my glasses, but I at least thought about it). The animations and sound effects were similar to those in Lanterns – they don’t specifically add to game play, but they’re fun and short enough that they enhance it without slowing anything down.

The AI player isn’t great – I’ve had no trouble beating it on hard mode, usually by a fair margin, as the focus seems to be on winning the next trick more than a holistic strategy that considers all of the ways to win in Fox in the Forest. The challenges are also a mixed bag – some are great, like the one that adds a fourth suit or another that requires you to win the treasure points you get when you win a trick with a 7 in it, while some are silly, like the one that randomizes all of your card values after each trick.

Online play wasn’t available until release day (October 18th), so I haven’t been able to test those out, but the local version doesn’t include a pass-and-play option, which I think would be a huge addition for a two-player game like this – it’s perfect for passing the phone back and forth on a plane or in the car (preferably while neither of you is driving). Dire Wolf says that feature is under consideration for the future, and I’d put that at the top of my wish list. In the meantime, it’s a fun distraction for solo play, and I hope an improved AI is coming as well – Dire Wolf did tighten the AI in their Raiders of the North Sea app after release – to give the app more replay value.

The victory screen
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→ October 30, 2020
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Root app.

Root is one of the top 100 games on Boardgamegeek’s rankings, which skew heavily towards more complex games, especially those with very little luck or randomness, and it now has a gorgeous digital port from the heroes over at Dire Wolf, who have never missed on any of their adaptations of tabletop games (in my opinion). If you like Root, or wanted to try it but didn’t have the mates to make a game of it, this is absolutely for you. That said, I’ve cooled on Root since I first reviewed the game a few years ago, as I found the rules for each individual faction too fiddly, taking a lot of the fun out of the play.

Root is an asymmetrical game with four factions in the base game for players to try out. Each faction has unique rules, and a unique setup, so playing one gives you very little insight into how to play the others. The four represent forest creatures who function differently in the woods, and whose goals differ from each other’s. Two of them rely primarily on area control, but the cats start out controlling most of the board and try to hold on to it while building three building types in clearings they control, while the eagles start with just one well-defended clearing and score by gradually taking over more clearings and building further roosts. The foxes – I think they’re foxes – are more like a populist guerrilla army, and probably are best served making friends with one of the first two factions and fighting the other by sowing dissent in specific clearings. The vagabond, a raccoon in the physical game, is a lone wolf – no pun intended – who rarely benefits from battles, faring better by running around the board and trading goods with the other players (who can’t decline, but do gain from it). There are expansions to the physical game with even more factions to try.

The digital adaptation looks incredible. Dire Wolf used the art from the original game but makes the app look like a cartoon, and the animations are clever and fun, especially as the animals run from clearing to clearing (or, in the vagabond’s case, to hide in the forest). The app makes it extremely easy to see what you can do on a turn through sensible highlighting and good color contrast, and in general the app will present you with an option if it’s available to use, such as cards you might play at the start of a battle. I would like to see an option to turn off some of the animations – it takes too long to resolve battles, for example, and the smoke that appears when a clearing changes hands isn’t all that helpful – but they’re at least visually appealing.

The one aspect the app is missing is a stronger undo function. You can reverse some actions, but not others, like undoing a move from one clearing to another, and it’s unclear what the difference is. Experienced players would probably feel this lack less than I did.

Screenshot of the Root app, playing the eagle faction.

The app also comes with an outstanding tutorial that lets you play as each of the four factions, starting you off in each mini-game and then letting you finish them off by yourself. The rules of Root are fairly involved, and the tutorial focuses on the big picture rules, with the more detailed text rules available through the main menu. It also does a solid job of getting you acclimated to the screen and layout, which is like the physical game but with a slightly isometric view. All of the potential moves and the cards you have are displayed on the screen at all times, and you can click on your faction card to see the moves you can make each ‘day’ and how your faction scores. Moves available to you are highlighted in the lower right, and grayed out once they’re used or unavailable.

The problem I have with Root is that the more I play it, the less I enjoy it. There are way too many situations where you’re prevented from doing something because of an arcane rule – you don’t have a card matching that specific type of clearing, for example, although there were situations where I thought I had the right card with the right symbol and still couldn’t use it because I have no idea why not. One of the most frustrating experiences for any game player, regardless of skill level, is to be unable to do something obvious, like defend yourself in an attack, or build something you need to continue to play. Root is full of moments like that. I suppose adherents would say you have to plan accordingly so you don’t end up in those situations, but in the app, it’s even harder to keep track of what’s what. In the Steam version, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to zoom out to see the whole board, although I imagine that’ll be obvious on tablets; either way, it made planning harder because I could never figure out what cards I had to keep – and, unfortunately, you can lose cards to other players in Root. The best laid plans of mice and cats and eagles often go awry in this game. Whether that’s your cup of root tea (a card in the game) is really for you to decide.

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→ December 16, 2019
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Yellow & Yangtze app.

Yellow & Yangtze is Reiner Knizia’s update to his all-time classic Tigris & Euphrates, which still sits in the top 100 on Boardgamegeek and pioneered the “highest/lowest score” mechanic, where you score in multiple categories, and your lowest score is the one that’s compared to your opponents’. Both are abstract games of area control that are well-balanced so that it rewards strategy but also has mechanisms for preventing runaway winners or leaving someone totally in the dust. Dire Wolf Digital just released an app version of Y&Y that I think is incredibly strong, including quality AI players (on the hard setting), great graphics, and intuitive game-play, and it’s kind of selling me on picking up the original game at some point too.

Yellow & Yangtze makes several major tweaks to the rules of T&E, using hex tiles instead of squares, introducing a fifth color of tiles that you can use like a wild color, needing three tiles rather than four to build a pagoda, and giving each of the other four colors of tiles a unique power. You get six tiles at a time in your hand, plus a ‘leader’ in each color. On a turn, you get two actions, most of which will involve placing two leaders or tiles on the board. You must place a leader next to a black tile. When you then place a tile of the same color as a leader in the same cluster of tiles, you get one point in that color. If you make a triangle of three hex tiles of the same color, it becomes a pagoda, and then gives one point per round to the player whose leader of that color is in the same cluster. Each cluster can only have one leader in each color, but it can have leaders from different players.

The conflicts between players are similar to the original. If two kingdoms (the game’s name for clusters) are connected, there’s a war, and it’s settled by players with leaders in each kingdom contributing red tiles from their hands. If you place your leader into a kingdom that already has a leader of that color, it’s settled by both players contributing black tiles. When you place a green tile, you get to choose your replacement from the display of six tiles; otherwise, you get new tiles after your entire turn, and they’re random. When you place a blue tile, which may only go on a river or shoreline space, you can continue to place more blue tiles for free as long as they’re all adjacent. If you have blue tiles, you can also destroy any tile on the board in a “peasants’ riot;” you blow up a black tile with this and then any leaders adjacent to it are also removed if they aren’t still adjacent to another black tile. Yellow tiles are wild; you get points in the yellow category, but at game-end, those points are distributed to your other four scores to always raise your lowest score.

The app is just great. It looks fantastic, with very bright, clear colors, so that there is no confusion between tiles or about what’s been placed where. The screen shows you your tiles and as much or as little of the board as you want, with smaller indicators for which opponents still have their leaders in hand (five dots under each opponent’s name, with unplaced ones lit up) and what six tiles are on display for players who place green tiles (a ring on the lower right). Your scores are in the lower left – you can’t see opponents’ scores – and if you have an active pagoda that score has a flickering flame behind it, which makes it much easier to track. The easy AI is just tutorial level, the medium is just modestly challenging, but I have a hard time beating the hard AI when I play against two of them. The hard AI loves to use that peasants’ riot feature, which is probably good strategy but feels extremely personal.

The app is $9.99 right now, on the high end for board game adaptations, although with the cardboard game over $40 it’s good value for the game play provided. Dire Wolf Digital does great work, with this their second outstanding app release of 2019 (along with Raiders of the North Sea) and their Lanterns another favorite of mine for its animations; you can add Y&Y to the list, as I think it checks every box for an app, with challenging game play, great graphics, and high ease of use.

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→ November 26, 2019
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7 Wonders Duel app.

7 Wonders Duel is my #2 pure two-player game, just behind Jaipur, and that makes it perfect for a port to the digital space – apps are great for pass-and-play or for playing against a single AI opponent. The 7 Wonders app, released about two years ago, turned out to be quite good, just a little tough to follow because of the size of the cards and the speed (which you could adjust) of the AI’s moves. The 7 Wonders Duel app has all of that, pro and con, although with just one opponent to track it’s much easier to follow, and some non-intuitive features that made it a bit harder for me to learn, but the AI seems fairly strong and outside of one crash the first time I used the app both on my phone and my iPad it’s been quite stable.

7 Wonders Duel is a real reimagining of the original game, which plays 3 to 7 and is best with at least 4, ditching the card-drafting mechanic for card tableaux where some cards are face-up and some face-down at the start of each round, with players alternating choosing cards. You may buy a card or, if available, take one for free because it has no cost or because you have a precursor card; you may take a card and discard it for 3 coins; or you may take a card, discard it, and build one of your four wonders. Once the seventh wonder has been built between the two players, the eighth one is destroyed. There are three rounds called eras, with cards becoming more expensive and more valuable as the game progresses, and there are purple guild cards worth variable bonuses in the third era just as in the original game. It’s a model for taking a multiplayer game and turning it into a two-player experience that forces direct interaction between the two players.

For straight play, the app is solid. There’s only one AI level, but it’s good enough for me; I’ve played the original game maybe a dozen times but wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at it. One of the most important strategies in 7 Wonders Duel is to choose cards that limit your opponent’s choices on their next turn, and it’s frequently possible to set up a move that forces your opponent to pick a specific card that makes two other cards available to you on the next turn. The AI player is programmed to do this, possibly above all else, and knowing that makes planning a counterstrategy a bit easier.

Using the app is much easier if you know how to play and what the icons on the tops of the cards mean; they’re clear enough to see even on the phone, although I find spotting the symbols on the side that tell you what precursor card might get you that card for free isn’t easy even on the larger screen. I found the way you choose to build a wonder so non-intuitive – you have to click on your wonders to pull up a separate box, then drag a card from the tableau over the wonder you wish to build. Since you play a card to your space by dragging it there, and discard one for coins by dragging it to your money pouch, dragging it to your wonders should give you the choice to build.

The tutorial in the app is really not very good, and there’s no way (that I can find) to directly access the rules within the app. Some of the card descriptions look unfinished; if you click on a science card, for example, it just says it counts for the symbol shown, without explaining how science cards score. There are three victory conditions in the game – more points at game-end, advancing to your opponent’s end of the military track, and collecting six different science icons (there are 7, two of each in the deck, although you omit three cards from each game) – and the app at least labels the first two differently as Defeat and Supremacy, but I lost to the AI once without any indication of why. It wasn’t military supremacy and the game wasn’t over; if it was the science icons, nothing told me so and I don’t think that was true from what I saw on screen. There’s also no undo function, although in this game it might not make sense, since so many card choices will reveal at least one face-down card.

I’m picking the app apart a little bit, but the underlying game is really great, and the app does work – it’s more that it’s rough around the edges, and maybe the AI could be a little smarter about its choices of cards. I’m still playing it a lot, though, and would recommend it at the $4.99 list price.

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→ February 11, 2019
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Morels app.

Morels was the first game I reviewed for Paste, over four years ago, and crossed my radar because it was a brand-new, purely two-player game with some positive early press. It’s a great, quick-to-learn set-collection game that was only the second title I’d come across to use the now-popular rolling market mechanic, where you can take the first card or few cards in the display for free, while taking cards further from the start of the queue costs you something. There’s also a push-your-luck element to choosing which sets to collect and which to discard for twigs, the game’s currency, as well as trying to deduce what your opponent might be collecting and deciding whether it’s worth using a turn to grab something they need. It’s been on every iteration of my all-time board game rankings and my top two-player games rankings since I first reviewed it.

Late last year, an app version of Morels appeared for iOS and Android devices, using the original artwork and featuring strong AI opponents – at least, I think they’re pretty strong, since I can’t beat the hard level more than about half the time – for a very strong app experience. If you’ve been looking for a new two-player game and want to try Morels before buying the physical game, or just want a new game app that plays well as a solo vs AI experience, I strongly recommend this.

Morels is a game of mushroom collection, which means a few of my closest friends are already predisposed to hate this game. The deck includes cards of nine different mushroom types, each with a different point value and value in twigs. You can ‘cook’ any set of at least three mushrooms of one type to gain the points shown on those cards by turning in the mushroom cards with a skillet card; if you turn in four, you can boost the value by 3 with a butter card, and if you turn in five, you can boost the value by 5 with a cider card. Basket cards increase your hand limit. You can turn in two cards of any mushroom type to gain twigs, which you then use to grab cards from the market that are beyond the first two (free) spots. The market moves one space to the right on every turn, and if the rightmost card wasn’t taken, it falls into a pile just off the market that can hold up to four cards, which you can also take for free; if that pile reaches four and no one has taken the stack, they’re all discarded for the remainder of the game.

Morels app screenshot

There are two special card types in the deck. Destroying Angel cards are deadly, of course, and if you take one your hand limit is cut in half for several turns. Night cards show the same mushroom types as the regular (day) cards, with the exception of the most valuable cards, the morels, and Night cards are worth two cards of the displayed type – so you can turn in one Night card for twigs, or you can cook one Night card and one Day card of the same mushroom type for points. The catch is that Night cards show up face down, so you take one without knowing which mushroom type you’re getting (there’s one Night card for each non-morel mushroom). Game play continues until the deck is exhausted.

Decisions in the game are quick, but they’re not always simple; you’re working against the constraints of your hand limit, the finite supply of skillet cards, and the hard end to the game – you don’t get a last shot to cook once the deck is finished. I learned more strategy from playing against the AI than from playing against anyone in person, since the AI player nearly always does what it can to grab Night cards, even if it means using all of its twigs, and will generally try to stop me from collecting enough high-value mushrooms – particularly morels and chanterelles – to cook. The hard AI also seems to have good deck awareness, knowing what’s left and also managing end game well enough that I found I had to change how I played to keep up.

I’ve played the app dozens of times with just occasional glitches, and no complaints about game play or the AI. I wish it kept track of total wins/losses against each AI level, but that’s a minor quibble. The graphics are bright and clear, and you don’t really need to be able to read the mushroom titles to play it as a result. Everything you need to know to play the game well is on the main screen, and the challenge is more one of keeping track of things in your head (or I guess on paper, if you want) rather than one of the app making this information harder to find. At $4.99 for iOS or Android it’s an easy recommendation for me.

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→ November 21, 2018
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Indian Summer app.

Game designer Uwe Rosenberg has managed to make a reputation for himself with two very distinct genres of board games – very complex, low-randomness games of worker placement and resource collection, often with rulebooks running twenty pages long; and light puzzle games that ask you to fill out your personal board with Tetris-like pieces while achieving certain side goals. I’m not a huge fan of the former, other than his original Agricola, but I like the latter quite a bit, including the first one, the two-player Patchwork. He’s followed that up with the “puzzle trilogy” of Cottage Garden, Indian Summer, and this year’s Spring Meadow. The first two now have app versions – I presume the third is in development – and, since I have the physical version of Cottage Garden, I decided to start with the app version of Indian Summer (android • iOS), and report that it’s pretty good across the board.

The basic move in Indian Summer is to place one of five tiles in your personal queue on to your 8×9 board, which is divided into six segments. The tiles can cover three, four, or five spaces at once, and every tile has a single ‘hole’ in it that allows anything printed on the board to peek through after you’ve placed the tile. When you place tiles to cover an entire segment (12 spaces), you then gain any treasures that appear through the holes in those tiles – berries, nuts, mushrooms, and feathers, each of which grants you some special ability. When one player fills out his/her entire board, that becomes the final round, after which players will get one more chance to play their nuts (#phrasing) before the scoring. You get one point for every space covered, up to 72, and then one bonus point for every nut you have left over.

The treasures are the key to the game, of course. Playing a feather lets you place an additional tile on the same turn. Playing a mushroom lets you place the first tiles in the queues of any two opponents. Playing a nut lets you place a squirrel tile, covering a single space, anywhere on the board. Playing a berry lets you refill your queue from the main supply before the automatic refill that occurs when your queue is empty. You can also trade up that chain at a 2:1 ratio, such as two berries for one nut, or down at a 1:1 ratio, such as one feather for one mushroom.

If you create certain three- or four-hole patterns with the tiles you place, you can place a bonus animal tile that matches that pattern and then score the treasures a second time. Since every board has just one feather on it, this is the obvious way to score a second feather – place tiles in a way that the feather is visible and part of a pattern matching an animal tile. There are even four animal tiles that come with a treasure of their own, one of each type, of course.

The app has run extremely well for me so far and provided sufficient challenge with the AI players to keep me playing. The tutorial could be better – it’s goofy, but didn’t make all the rules clear, especially not with the animal tiles – but I figured out the rules with some trial and error as well as one check in the online rulebook. The colors are fantastic, and using the app to move and rotate or flip pieces is intuitive. You can also easily click to see opponents’ boards, but the app is smart enough to give you a tiny thumbnail so you can see at a glance how close each opponent is to covering all 72 spaces.

The AI skill levels seem to vary by the amount of time the app gives itself to decide on its next move; the hard AI players can easily take ten seconds to decide on a move, which is weird but actually reassuring in a way, as (I assume) the AI player is running through a huge list of potential moves before settling on one. I can beat the hard AI players about half the time, but the main challenge is finishing the board first because the AI players clearly favor that goal, with adding animal tiles their second criterion. It’s easy to get the shaft because an AI player filled out its board and triggered end-game, especially if you were the first player to go, since then you don’t get to place any other pieces beyond the one-space squirrels. I’ve noticed more than one instance where an AI player could have ended the game (I think) but chose not to do so, which seemed suboptimal when it happened – not for me, though, as I appreciated the extra turn.

The app has a great undo function that rolls everything back to the start of your turn, which is great for trying different scenarios out to see what has the best outcome. It seems to follow strict and not entirely necessary rules about using those optional actions; for example, if you’ve played a berry to add tiles to your track, you can’t then decide to play a feather to place two tiles on this turn, which doesn’t make much sense to me. That also means you can’t place a tile, play a berry, then place another tile.

I think I still prefer Patchwork as a game for its simplicity and the pure two-player experience – Indian Summer plays two to four – but this is very solid, and it’s a bit simpler than Cottage Garden too. My lone complaint with the game, rather than the app, is that the scoring is so tight that it does feel like the winner is often determined by the randomness of the draws, both what board you get and what tiles appear when. Since you can’t win if you don’t fill out your board, it’s a bit of a race as well. I’ll keep playing this one but I don’t think it’ll replace Patchwork for me any time soon. It does mean I need to pick up Cottage Garden’s app, though.

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→ November 15, 2018
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Hardback app.

The game Hardback, now available as an app for iOS and Android, is a quirky combination of Scrabble (or perhaps Boggle) and deckbuilders like Dominion, where players draw hands of five letter cards, play them to form the most valuable word they can, and use the coin values on their cards to buy more powerful letter cards from the table. It’s probably much better as an in-person experience, because playing the AI means you’re going up against a dictionary, but I will say even thinking of it as a solo game, since there’s little interaction between players, makes for a fun puzzle to try to maximize your score by building the best deck possible. (Hardback is a prequel to another game, Paperback, that I haven’t played or seen.)

The game is almost as simple as what I described above. Basic cards grant you either one point or one coin. You use coins to buy better cards from the scrolling market; such cards cost 2 to 9 coins, and grant you more coins and/or points as well as all kind of special abilities, some of which are only triggered if you have two cards of the same “theme” (color) in your word. These can include more coin/point bonuses, doubling the value of an adjacent card, “jailing” a card from the market for you to buy later, trashing a card from your hand for an immediate payment of one or two coins, and more. Thus building a deck requires some planning so that you concentrate your purchases in maybe two colors.

You can also flip any card over to its other side and use it as a wild card, representing any letter you want. You get no return for the card (unless you have an adjacent special card that lets you gain a card’s bonus even when it’s wild), but you’re going to do this often so you can complete words, and often make longer ones. You can use coins to buy ink, which lets you draw one card per ink unit – but the catch is that you have to use drawn cards in your word without flipping them unless you happen to gain ink remover from green special cards. So there’s some risk to drawing cards, although the app lets you peek at what’s in your deck, just not the order. Since your deck will tend to be small, you can play the odds a little.

The app is good with a few issues. One is that the hard AI player is just too good, because it’s using obsolete, archaic, and sometimes questionable words (I’ve seen a proper noun or two slip by). There are also many things in the game that should have an undo option – for example, if you buy one ink, then realize you’d rather buy a card, there’s no way to back up in that phase – but I can’t see an undo option for anything. Some actions shouldn’t have it, but some clearly can because revoking them doesn’t affect the game state or subsequent options. Also, once you hit Submit, if the word is invalid the app won’t accept it, but if it is valid, you’re stuck with it, so there is no testing to see if a word is valid or not, even against the AI.

I have beaten the hard AI players a few times, but generally lose while they play words I’ve never seen before. I don’t mind as much, however, since you barely know the other players are there until the final scoring – there is just one quirky ability, called Timeless cards, that lets you interfere a little with other players’ strategies, and it’s very small – so I’ve found it’s easier to think of it as a solo challenge where I’m just trying to build the best deck I can by anagramming the best words and making good buys. I’m at least intrigued enough by the app to check out the physical game at some point now.

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→ September 25, 2018
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Kahuna app.

Kahuna is on the old side for a Eurogame, debuting in 1997 under another name and appearing in its current form in 1998, making it one of the earliest titles in what is now known as the Kosmos two-player series, which includes Lost Cities, Targi, and Jambo. Kahuna hits a lot of the right notes for a two-player game, requiring a lot of interaction between players with a nice balance of strategy and luck, as the players compete to control areas of a map with twelve islands on it by playing cards that allow them to build bridges between islands or to blow up the other player’s bridges. Kahuna got the app treatment earlier this year from USM, the same publisher behind some of the Catan implementations, and it’s a great-looking version of the game that could use a much stronger AI opponent and a simple undo function to make it great. The iOS version appears to have come out first, with an Android release in August; both are $2.99.

The Kahuna board has the aforementioned dozen islands, with names that start with each letter from A to L, and various links connecting them on which players can build bridges. If you play a card with the name of any island, you can place one of your bridges on any link that has one end on that island. If you place your bridges on a majority of the links from any island – ranging from three to six total links depending on the island – you gain control of it, placing one of your stones on the island, and then removing any opponents’ bridges that connected to that island. You may also play two cards matching the islands connected by an opponent’s bridge (two of the same island, or one of each) to destroy it, which may in turn cost your opponent control of one or more islands. You can play any number of cards on a turn, but you are not required to play any cards at all, so you can stockpile cards up to your hand limit of five and then drop as many of those as you’d like for a power move that might, for example, blow up an opponent’s bridge and then steal control of one or more islands in one fell swoop.

The game has three rounds, and at the end of each round you compare the number of islands controlled by each player. Each round ends when the draw deck – there are 24 cards total, with three on display at any time – is exhausted. The leader after round one gets 1 point, after round two gets 2 points, and after round 3 gets a number of points equal to the difference in number of islands controlled, so a player can drop the first two rounds and still make a furious comeback in round three (although I don’t recommend this as a strategy).

The app version ran very smoothly for me through a few dozen plays, and the graphics are bright and clear, with just a minimum of text required to play (you just need to be able to identify the islands by their first letter to follow the game). The UI is simple: to play a card, you tap it once, and the screen shows you your options for building; tap a second card and it will show you any bridges you can destroy by playing both. You draw a card from the three face-up options or the top of the deck with a single tap. There’s no undo option for anything, however, which is dangerous when an errant tap can make your move, or if you tap something to try to see your options and end up playing a card instead.

The tutorial is pretty thin, and the app forces you to play through about a dozen AI opponents of increasing difficulty before you get to the hardest opponent, which I could still beat regularly despite coming into the game with zero playing experience. I think it took me three tries to beat that AI player for the first time, after which I’d win 80-90% of the time (not counting draws, which aren’t uncommon in my experience). The app should allow players who know the game to jump directly to the hardest AI opponent, and it looks like even that hardest AI player often misses opportunities to take cards that would give it control of certain islands in the center of the board. It’s aggressive, just not aggressive enough in a game that seems to require it. If the developers improve that hardest AI opponent and give some kind of undo function – especially when you draw a face-up card, which effectively ends your turn – I’d give the app a top rating. For now, it’s a fun diversion, but I’d have to use the online multiplayer option to get more out of it.

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→ July 19, 2018
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Istanbul app.

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.

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