→ May 31, 2018
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Might and Magic: Elemental Guardians.

Might and Magic was one of the most important and influential of the earliest wave of computer RPGs, debuting in 1986 and continuing through the tenth installment in the series in 2014. Along with Bard’s Tale (my personal favorite), Ultima, Wizardry, and the Gold Box D&D games, M&M became both a major driver of the popularity of RPGs in the 1980s and early 1990s and helped lay the foundation for later waves of RPGs on the computer, including the Baldur’s Gate and Elder Scrolls series.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to see the M&M name on an entirely different game with today’s release of Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians (iTunes • Google Play), a free to play game that dispenses with most aspects of traditional RPGs and strips the game down to character upgrades and battles – lots and lots of battles. If your favorite aspects of dungeon crawls were the waves of enemies you had to defeat, then this is perfect for you. I always preferred the storylines and puzzles of the RPGs I did play, so I tired of Elemental Guardians sooner than other players might, but I will say it was mildly addictive for the way the game constantly dangles new achievements or goals in front of you while raising the bar slightly for each battle in sequence.

The main idea of Elemental Guardians is that you’re some sort of mage who will collect and train various creatures to do all the fighting for you, leveling them up and arming them with “glyphs” that increase their powers. Each creature has a main attack skill and two special attack or defense skills unique to that creature type and that can only be used once every few rounds in battle. Some allow the creature to heal itself or another creature in the party; some focus an attack on one enemy and may paralyze or stun it; some spread the attack against all enemies; and so on, with the game giving you enough creatures that you can pick and choose to form your ideal parties.

The battles involve waves of enemies – three waves in the main track that starts with the tutorial, five waves in some of the separate areas with greater potential rewards – that you must defeat without resting to heal your creatures. Part of the trick of Elemental Guardians is figuring out which enemies to attack first in each wave; because of the weird way the game handles initiative, you’re always better off killing one enemy at a time than spreading the attack too thinly across all enemies. When it’s one of your creatures’ turn to attack, an arrow appears over each of the enemies in green, yellow, or red, indicating if that creature has an advantage or disadvantage when attacking that specific enemy. You can also turn on ‘auto’ mode and let the AI do the actual fighting for you, which isn’t as bad an idea as it might sound because later battles against higher-level enemies can get a little long and monotonous.

Aside from battles, upgrading your creatures is the main task in the game, and one I found a little convoluted. Creatures level up automatically from gaining experience points, although you can also spend potions (which aren’t super plentiful) to level them up more quickly. Each creature can wear six of those glyphs I mentioned, and you can spend more energy points to upgrade the glyphs from level one to at least level 12 (that’s as far as I got), although each time you try to upgrade them you run some unknown risk of failure. You also get a bonus if you put three glyphs of the same type on a creature. When a creature maxes out its levels, you can bump it up a rank, from rank one all the way to five, but to do so, you have to destroy other creatures in your troupe, so I found I was adding and leveling up creatures for the sole purpose of destroying them later to level up my main fighters … which is kind of distasteful if you think about it too much. If you collect enough rare artifacts, you can even ‘evolve’ your creatures, but I think doing so would require playing the game for dozens of hours and I never got close to that point.

You can earn points for completing Missions or reaching Achievements, most of which are things you’ll do routinely just by playing the game and fighting battles, and you earn certain points and rewards every 24 hours anyway, so unless you’re playing this eight hours or more a day you’re not likely to run out of the resources you need to keep playing. There’s also an Arena if you want to battle other actual players from around the world, although I popped in there once and found that the potential opponents were levelled up way beyond any of my creatures, which meant it was sort of a waste of time to try to fight them.

The base game is free to play and Ubisoft pledges to keep it that way, but they do allow you to pay to speed up some of your upgrades or to buy what you’d need to play it for even longer stretches. This isn’t quite the Farmville model, where you’re spending money without a point; it’s more like the game is free for a few hours a day, and if you want to play it even more, or to skip the most basic levels, you can drop a few bucks to get to the harder material.

So that’s a long way of saying that Might & Magic: Elemental Guardians isn’t really my cup of tea, but it’s a good game for its style. Some people just love hack and slash dungeon crawlers, and this game distills the RPG experience to those elements: you fight, you get stuff, you level up and trick out your fighters, and then you go do it all over again. The battles are largely about brute force, and using your special powers every time they become available again, so it’s more about bulking up than any kind of strategy in battle, and the story laid on top of the main path of battles is just window dressing. There are also some areas of the battle map that are greyed out for future expansions, so I imagine they’ll continue to increase the difficulty as players max out their creatures’ strengths. I think I’ve played this one out for myself, though.

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→ February 27, 2018
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Abalone.

Abalone is an abstract two-player game from 1987 that looks a bit like Chinese checkers but plays with much more complexity thanks to a short list of very narrowly defined potential moves. It got a digital release late in 2017 from Asmodee Digital that offers a variety of starting boards and has a mostly superb interface, although they might need a harder AI player for a future update. It’s available on iTunes and Google Play for $2.99.

Abalone is played on the central, shared area of a Chinese checkers board, a hexagon with nine rows ranging from five spaces on the exterior to nine spaces in the center row. Each player begins with 14 marbles, black or white, and must try to push six of the opposing player’s marbles off the board to win. The potential moves are:

1. You can move one marble one space in any direction, as long as the space is empty.
2. You can move two or three marbles in a line forward, as a unit, one space. If the next space has an opposing marble in it, but your group has more marbles than there are opposing marbles in the same row, then you can push them one space backwards. So you can move two marbles, one behind the other, to push a solitary opposing marble into an empty space beyond it, and you can move three marbles in a line to push two opposing marbles.
3. You can move two or three adjacent marbles on the perpendicular, rather than moving them in a line (moving them like you’re sweeping them with your hand), but can’t push any opposing marbles that way.

The game requires players to consider offense and defense; setting traps is a huge part of Abalone, and avoiding them by setting up lines of three marbles when you can is just as important, but with 14 marbles (a number that will decline as the game progresses), that’s not easy to do. You have to watch the edges to make sure you don’t lose sight of a marble that’s in danger of being pushed off the board on the next turn.

The easy AI player is really just a tutorial/newbie opponent, while the hard player is good but I think a bit too beatable. The hardest AI will take advantage of pieces on the edge, but its trap-setting capabilities are a little weak, and I have seen it fail to take the occasional risk-free ejection. (Sometimes you can eject an opponent’s marble, but doing so always puts your marble in the vacated space, and thus you might be giving your opponent an easy push.) I’ve lost to the hard AI player, but I beat it more often than I lose, needing as few as 63 moves to win and as many as 199.


The nicest starting arrangement in Abalone.

The app comes with more than 30 starting boards; some players think the official, classic board is “solved,” or at least confers too much of an advantage to the start player, although given the sheer number of moves required, the game being “solved” would still require you to memorize a ridiculous number of steps. There’s also a chance of a stalemate, especially with the AI players, where both players end up repeating a loop of steps indefinitely, until one player chooses to make a more aggressive move instead. I do think the various “Daisy” boards – the app includes four – present a better challenge, reducing the chances of a temporary stalemate, and as I quickly learned, they also give the start player a great opportunity to do something very stupid at the beginning.

I’ve never been a huge fan of chess, because the game requires more study and more forward planning than I like in a game – it’s a serious intellectual challenge, but begins to feel more like work, and mapping out the potential scenarios creates a fairly large decision tree in my head. (I’m also not great at discarding moves – I think the best chess players can prune those trees because they know their opponents will make a specific move in response to each of their own moves.) Abalone has that chess-lite feel that I love in games – yes, there are lots of potential moves, but the tree is limited because you only have one piece type, and it’s definitely easier to figure out your opponent’s likely next move.


I won this game rather nicely.

The app is very easy to play even on the small screen, and lets you undo any move before confirming it. You can also see the last move with a rewind feature that’s very useful, and at game end it tells you how many moves the game took and replays the entire thing from the beginning. One minor quibble is that when you leave the app for a while, resuming a game requires you to enter the menu to start a new game and then hit the Pause button in the upper right, the only thing in the app that felt non-intuitive. The tutorial is also excellent.

Abalone was briefly on sale for 99 cents, and I imagine it will be again at some point; I’ve found it quite addictive even as I’ve gotten to be good enough to beat the AI more than half the time (which I interpret as a weak AI, not that I’m some skilled player). It offers a pass and play mode as well as networked play, which might be the better option if you’re looking for a more serious challenge instead of a minor brain teaser. I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth from it already.

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→ January 13, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 1/13/18.

No new Insider content this week, as MLB appears to still be asleep and I was working on the top 100 prospects package, which is scheduled to start running on January 22nd. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

My latest board game review for Paste covers Pandemic: Rising Tide, a standalone spinoff of the original Pandemic, this time pitting players against rising waters threatening to flood the Netherlands, so players must build dikes and pumps while trying to complete four hydraulic stations to win the game. We liked it, as it gives a new twist to the now-familiar cooperative mechanics of Matt Leacock’s various games.

Feel free to sign up for my email newsletter, which costs you nothing and totters somewhere between occasional and infrequent. And, of course, thanks to everyone who bought Smart Baseball for themselves or as a Christmas gift, or as a Christmas gift for themselves.

And now, the links…

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→ January 3, 2018
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Race for the Galaxy app.

I’ve mentioned previously that I don’t share the broader tabletop community’s love for Race for the Galaxy, a very popular deckbuilding game that ranks in the top 50 on BoardGameGeek, for two reasons – you need to know the deck rather well to play the game at even a competent level, and there’s one strategy (produce/consume x2) that is superior to others (military, trade). That strategy isn’t entirely dominant, but you are also somewhat restricted in your choice of strategy by the ‘home world’ card you’re dealt to start the game; if you get New Sparta, you almost have to use the military strategy, for example.

So it might surprise regular readers to hear me offer a strong recommendation for the Race for the Galaxy app ($6.99 on iTunes or Google Play) given what I’ve said before about the game itself. Those problems still hold true in the app, of course – this is a faithful implementation of the physical game. The app, however, is just about perfect in how it implements the game, with strong AI players (on the hard setting), and because it’s so fast to play, you can start to learn what’s in the deck a little faster to get yourself up to speed.

In Race for the Galaxy, players must build out their tableau of cards, representing worlds, ships, or people in their empire, using specific action types each turn – drawing cards, spending them to play cards, producing goods on cards that have that power, trading goods for more cards, or trading goods for victory points. Cards you play also carry victory point values of their own for the end of the game, and some award bonuses based on what else you have already played. You start with a home world card that, as I said above, kind of dictates your strategy for the game – some home worlds are ideal for trading, some for the military, some for the produce/consume strategy.

On a turn, each player chooses one of the available seven actions, and then the choices are all revealed simultaneously. Every player gets to take all of the actions chosen in that round, but you get an extra ability when taking the action you chose, such as building for one card less than the normal cost, or getting to keep two cards of the ones you draw instead of just one. Turns are fast, and players can usually do their turns at the same time. The game ends when one player has built (played) 12 cards to the table, or when the communal pool of victory point chips is exhausted.

The app is nearly perfect, and it helps reduce the time new players might spend learning what’s in the deck and what cards are useful (or even essential) for certain strategies – for example, if you are trying the military strategy, getting the cost-6 development card New Galactic Order, which gives you one victory point per unit of military strength on all your cards, is critical. The AI players move very quickly, and the actions chosen by each player are clearly visible twice, once at selection, then during the round in a bar on the left side of the screen that highlights the actions in use for the round. You can see the details on any card – the app uses the graphics from the physical game – with a double-tap, which is necessary to play it on a small screen, and you can see key details, like cards or VP tokens remaining, easily on the right side. You can also see how many cards your opponents have played and what goods they have available without expanding their tableaus, so you have ample warning if the game is approaching its end. There’s an undo button on the right-side menu for just about every action you can take, and the app requires your confirmation of certain actions, like discarding cards or trading multiple goods. The trading/consuming mechanism isn’t quite obvious – when that phase starts, cards with a trade or consume function will be highlighted, and you must click the card you wish to use, then drag the good(s) you wish to trade/consume off into the blank area next to your tableau.

I did mention above a few times that the produce/consume x2 strategy, where you alternate turns producing goods and selling them for victory points with bonuses, tends to be the optimal strategy, but the first time I beat two AI players in the app came via a military strategy. I started with New Sparta and blitzed my way through to twelve cards before either AI player could really get rolling with production and consumption:

You’re damn right I’m proud of that one. So it can be done, but it requires a bit of luck and leaves you no margin for error – which I think is more evidence that the hard AI players are up to snuff.

The app comes with the New Worlds mini-expansion, and the Rebel vs. Imperium and Gathering Storms are available as in-app purchases.

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→ December 29, 2017
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Lotus.

The new board game app for Lotus (itunes) • android), a 2016 title from designers Mandy & Jordan Goddard, comes from the same studio that brought us the wonderful Lanterns app last year, and the game has a very similar look and feel from the graphics to the animations to the sound. The game itself is quite simple and should lend itself well to the app format, but there are a couple of problems with the implementation that keep me from recommending it yet.

On each turn, a player has two actions, which can include placing one or two petals from his/her hand to a single flower, trading in cards for others from the player’s own deck, or adding a ‘guardian’ with his/her symbol to a flower already underway. Each petal card has a specific color and shows one or two icons of your own symbol; when a flower is finished, there’s a bonus for the player who had the most symbols on the flower, whether from petal cards or guardians. When your turn ends, you can refill your hand from your deck or take ‘wild’ flower cards from the table, which have a specific color but no player symbols, and thus are useful for finishing a flower but not for gaining control of it.

When a flower is finished, there are two bonuses handed out. The player who finishes a flower gets one point per petal on the flower, from three (purple) to seven (pink). The player who had the most tokens on the flower, whether from petals or from guardians, gets a second bonus, which can be five points regardless of flower type, or can give the player one of three special abilities for the remainder of the game: a hand size limit of 5 instead of 4, the ability to play three or more petals to one flower in a single action, or adding a guardian with double the influence. The first two are extremely valuable if you get them early, but I’ve had minimal success with the bigger guardian and prefer to skip it for the five points.

Lotus app screenshot

Lotus largely devolves into a game of chicken, where you’re trying to force other players to play petals so that you can finish off one or more flowers on your turn, especially the higher-valued pink or white flowers. There’s always the five-point bonus you get when you have the most petals/guardians on a flower someone else finishes, but even that is subject to change if an opponent plays wisely. If you finish the most flowers, you’ll probably win, even if you weren’t working too hard on maintaining control via your symbols – you’ll get a few along the way regardless. So often players, even the AI players, will trade cards to burn off an action in the hopes that someone else will place cards that make it easier to finish a flower next time. It’s a bit of a drag, and also boosts the luck factor because you need to get the right cards at the optimal time.

The app is gorgeous and runs smoothly, but I have two real issues with it, one of which is that the AI players are not very good, even on the ‘hard’ setting. I had never played this game before I downloaded the app, but can easily beat the hard AI when playing one or two opponents, and usually win or come in second with three. The AI players just don’t utilize the added abilities well enough to compete with a decent human player. The other issue is the lack of an undo function. You have two actions on your turn, and thus should be able to undo the first one before you’ve taken your second one. This is a simple enough function for the programmers to include and I think it’s a necessary one for a board game app that isn’t real-time or involves revealing information with each action. So while the game itself is pretty and pleasant to play, I think both of this issues need to be addressed before I can recommend it.

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→ December 2, 2017
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Stick to baseball, 12/2/17.

My Insider post on Shohei Ohtani is finally up, with a scouting report compiled from aggregating opinions of multiple scouts who’ve seen him hit and pitch, and thoughts on what MLB’s rigging of the rules against him really signals. Between the lack of significant activity in the hot stove and the fact that I got quite sick in the middle of the week, that’s been my only baseball content since Thanksgiving. I did hold a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste, I reviewed the train game Whistle Stop, a mid-weight title that’s among the best new board games I’ve played this year. My ranking of the top ten games of 2017 will go up the week of December 10th. EDIT: My first piece for Ars Technica is up now – a look at a beta version of Catan VR, an upcoming digital port of the global bestseller from Asmodee Digital.

I’ve taken an unintentional hiatus from my free email newsletter, but will resume this week. The holiday, PAX Unplugged, and that virus I had have all conspired against me, I swear.

Smart Baseball is out now in hardcover, e-book, and audio formats, perfect for your holiday shopping! Buy one or forty copies, your call.

And now, the links…

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→ November 15, 2017
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7 Wonders app.

7 Wonders has been one of my top 2 all-time boardgames since I first played the tabletop version back in 2011 (here’s my original review), and after a bit of a layoff – which happens given all the new games I need to try for Paste and Vulture – I got back into it this summer and found it hasn’t lost a thing for me. It’s just a brilliantly designed, fast-playing game that rewards long-term thinking, has a lot of interaction among players, and leaves players with very little downtime. All that was missing was an app version of the game, which had been promised at least as far back as early 2015 but seemed stuck in perpetual beta.

Well, I have good news: The 7 Wonders app is here, for iPads at least, with an Android version due next month, and it is great – if you already know the game, at least. The AI players are solid, the app itself is easy and intuitive to use, and there’s a lot of info crammed on the screen. I have some questions about whether this would be so intuitive to someone who’s never played the game, given what isn’t shown on the screen, and feel like there is room for some added features before the developers deliver the promised Leaders and Cities expansions.

7 Wonders is a card-drafting game with set collection elements, working much more quickly than most card collecting games do. There are three rounds, and in each round, players will get to buy (or just take) six cards to place on their tableaux. The unique mechanic of 7 Wonders is that you start each round with a hand of seven cards, choose one to play, and then pass the remainder of your hand to an adjacent player. Once you’ve played a few times, you know what cards are in each age, but you can never know what cards will be available to you in a specific game. In a game with six or seven players, the cards you pass will never come back to you; in a game with fewer, you’ll at least get something back from your original hand, but you can’t predict what it’ll be.

The cards themselves typically cost resources to acquire, but unlike many resource collection games, 7 Wonders doesn’t come with bags upon bags of little wood and stone tokens. Instead, you get resources every round from cards you’ve played that produce those, and you can buy resources from your two neighbors for 2 coins per unit – if the neighbors actually produce them. Many cards also give you the right to play specific cards for free in later ages, which can be a very powerful way to rack up points without producing a ton of resources yourself.

There are multiple avenues for scoring points, and while there’s a lot of debate over an ideal strategy, I find they’re all fairly balanced, and often the best strategy is just the one that no one else is pursuing. You can gain military points if you have more military symbols than each of your neighbors at the end of each age. You can rack up science points by acquiring green cards with three different symbols in sets. Blue cards simply give victory points. You can also discard cards to build stages of your Wonder, usually three different stages, each of which confers some benefit in resources, points, gold, or sometimes extra actions. And the purple guild cards in the third age can lead to huge bonuses.

The app version of 7 Wonders looks fantastic, and the developers have managed to get all the relevant info for you on to one screen, with most of the real estate occupied by your tableau and your hand, and with two smaller sections on the left and right sides to show what your neighbors have. Because card play is simultaneous, when you drag a card from your hand (bottom of the screen) to your tableau, your opponents’ moves happen at the same time, and you’re immediately given your new hand of cards.

Each card in your hand will be outlined in green, yellow, or red, with an indication in the lower left of the cost to play it. Green-outlined cards are either free to play or are already covered by resources you produce or cards you have. A check mark in the lower left says you’ve covered the cost; a chain link symbol means you have a card that gives you this one for free. Yellow outlines indicate you’ll have to pay at least one coin to buy resources from neighbors to play the card. Cards you can’t play are outlined in red, and if you try to play them anyway, you’ll get a Not Enough Resources message. You can click and hold any card to see a text explanation of its effects, including cards your neighbors have played. You can also see your neighbors’ current military strength, money, and wonders (including whether they’re completed) at all times.

The app moves fast – I can rip through a game against AI players in about five minutes – which might be confusing to new players. There isn’t a speed setting, although you can turn on an option to require move validation, which would at least make it feel slower. It would be incredibly useful if you could click and hold a card to play and see what its point or gold value would be at that moment, even though it could change later in the age or the game. The game-end scoring screen shows you how many points each player got from each scoring method, but switching back to the game at that point shows you the cards without further explaining the scoring breakdown, which I think would also be useful for new players.

I found the AI players to be sufficiently challenging, and surprisingly agile – they clearly respond to what you’re doing on the military side, which requires you to react in turn – but after a handful of plays over the last 24 hours, I’m finding my winning percentage approaching 50% already. I have won with military, with blue bonus cards, and with racking up guild points, but have yet to win with science – although once I lost to an AI player with 48 science points, which I think is a good sign I just wasn’t paying attention. (If you’re curious, that’s three cards with one science symbol, three cards with another symbol, the wild-card scientists’ guild, and two cards with the third science symbol.)

The app has online play and what appeared, on day one, to be an active lobby of players, although today on day two I haven’t been able to connect via the app. You need at least 3 players, on or offline; the 2-player variant isn’t included here, although I’ve never loved that rules tweak anyway. It is not available for smaller screens like iPhones, and while I’m sure that’s disappointing to a lot of users, I can understand why given how much information is required and how busy the screen gets by Age III even on the iPad. I’m completely hooked at the moment, and unless/until I start killing the AI players regularly this is going to be one of my go-to boardgame apps. I’ll update this post when the Android version is out, but if you have an iPad, go get this app.

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→ November 13, 2017
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Eight Minute Empire.

Eight-Minute Empire is pretty much what it sounds like – a Civilization-style 4X boardgame that plays in just a few minutes, promising 8 to 20 minute playing times on the box depending on the number of players (from two to five). The tabletop version came out in 2012, followed by a standalone sequel game, Eight-Minute Empire: Legends, that doubles the playing time by adding another layer of rules, which sounds to me like it might defeat the original’s purpose. I missed the physical games, but did pick up the new app version of the original Eight-Minute Empire, which is out for iOS phones and tablets and Android devices for just under $5, and it’s pretty fantastic. The tutorial is great, the app has some in-game tips for newbies (which you can later turn off), and you can rip through a whole game against 3 or 4 AI players in just a few minutes.

Eight-Minute Empire starts with all players on the same region on a map of multiple continents, with each player getting three military units on that space. On a turn, each player will choose one of six available action cards, which cost from 0 to 3 coins to purchase, and which determine the player’s action on that turn: Recruit new troops, move troops on land, move troops on land or via sea, build a city, destroy one troop anywhere on the board. Different cards allow different numbers of troop movements or additions. Building a city gives you the ability to recruit troops to that city as well as to the start region. Each card also has a symbol of one of the game’s six trade goods on it; collecting more of one type can gain you 1, 2, 3, or 6 points, depending on how many cards with that symbol you acquire.

The game lasts seven to ten turns, depending on the number of players, and while the app shows scoring in-progress, there’s no intermediate scoring – the game is only scored at the end. You gain one point for each region you control (more troops than any other player, with a city counting as +1 troop); one for each continent you control (whoever controls the most regions); and various points for the goods you’ve collected. Some cards have wild-card goods tokens, and the app will automatically place those wherever they’ll gain you the most points. If two players tie, which happens fairly often in my experience with the app, the winner is the player with the most coins remaining.

Eight-Minute Empire distills most of the best parts of map/exploration games to keep it simple for players. Everyone starts with the same number of coins, and you can’t get any more during the game. Turn order starts with open bidding; you can bid one or two coins to get to set the turn order, and there’s an advantage to going later rather than going first because you get to make troop movements after other players are done, thus ‘stealing’ another region or even a continent. Conflict is limited to the handful of cards that let you destroy a troop, which the AI players will use if you have one unit alone on a continent (which gives you control of that region and the continent, so beware). There are no actual battles in Eight-Minute Empire, no trading, no theft. You thus focus on where to put your units, where other players might choose to move theirs, and taking the action cards that will help you with units and/or goods while also potentially taking cards that might help your opponents.

The app comes with three levels of AI players, and I’d say the hard AI players are quite capable, strong enough that I needed many plays to beat them and still don’t do it consistently. (The randomness of card draws helps smooth gameplay out too.) It also offers clearer iconography than the printed version of the game, and the only drawback I see in the presentation is that with over 3 players you can’t see everyone’s points/goods status at once. The base game has two maps, the original (pictured) and a “sister continents” map, with several other maps available for $1.99 each or in a pack for $4.99; there’s also an IAP for the Mountains expansion, which was a free print-and-play addition to the base game, available for $1.99. I’m enjoying the two base game maps so far but I have a feeling I’ll eventually spring for others just to add some variety – the configuration of continents alters game play in a significant way, since the cards that allow movement by sea are rarer than those that only allow movement on land. Eight Minute Empire also plays very well on the smaller screen of my iPhone, which makes it a great little time-waster when I’m stuck somewhere without a book. I give it a very strong buy recommendation.

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→ October 26, 2017
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Tokaido.

Tokaido came out in 2012, the third hit title in three straight years from designer Antoine Bauza (7 Wonders, Takenoko), and like those previous two titles, it combines elegant rules and beautiful artwork into a short game time that allows for frequent replay. This year brought a Tokaido app (iOS • Android) that has fantastic animations and a solid tutorial, although I did hit one glitch in one game.

The Tokaido was the most important of the Five Routes of the Edo period in Japan, all government-regulated paths for travel and trade, with the Tokaido connecting Edo (now Tokyo) to the imperial capital of Kyoto. In this boardgame, each player takes on a specific character of a Japanese traveler who will move along a straight track that includes various stops where the player can take a specific action, as well as four inns where the player can buy a meal for victory points. The order of the stops varies along the track, and the player who is furthest back on the track gets the next turn. There are six distinct types of stops in the game: gain 3 coins; take one “encounter” card (which gives you something good at random); donate to the temple for one point per coin; buy one or more souvenirs; take a hot springs card for either 2 or 3 points; take the next card for one of the three panoramas in the game. The souvenirs come in four types, and cost 1 to 3 coins each; you gain points for each different type you collect in a set, 1 for the first card, 3 for the second, 5 for the third, 7 for the fourth, so potentially 16 points for each quartet you collect. The three panoramas are all different lengths, and you gain points for each card you collect; the longest is five cards, and you’d get 15 points for completing it (1+2+3+4+5).

At each inn, you can choose to buy a meal, each of which is worth six points. Some cost 1 coin, some cost 3, and the first person to reach the inn thus gets first choice of all of the meals for that round (you draw one card per player plus one more). If you get there last, you get the last choice, and may have to pay more, but you will be the first to leave the inn for the next round. You can’t buy the same meal twice in the same game, however.

There are also seven bonus cards for 3 points apiece. The first player to finish each panorama gets a 3-point card. The player with the most encounter cards, the most meal cards, the most hot springs cards, and the most souvenir cards at game-end gets a 3-point bonus card for each as well. The temple gives bonuses to the most generous players, 10 to whoever gave the most over the course of the game, then lower bonuses to each donor below that.

The nature of the game means blocking other players can be an effective strategy, especially given the way the scoring rewards players for hitting the same destination type (or color) repeatedly. I think it’s more valuable in 2- or 3-player games, where only one player can occupy any stop on the track at a given time, than in 4- or 5-player games, where some track locations have a second spot for another player. You may wish to stop another player from finishing a panorama, or keep a player who’s low on cash from hitting the 3-coin space. That said, even in a smaller game, I wouldn’t use this as a primary strategy; there’s a big opportunity cost to skipping spaces if you’ve visited that color type earlier in the game.

Although you can move as far along the track as you want on your turn, in reality, your best move is nearly always to take the next open space. Skipping spaces can give other players additional turns before you get to go again, so until the fourth section (the last set of spaces before the game ends), you’ll probably want to take the next space every time, maybe occasionally skipping just one space to get something specific, like moving to a yellow spot to get 3 coins if you’re out of cash. In the fourth section, it can make more sense to move ahead to complete a panorama or try to get the fourth souvenir in a set because those deliver higher points rewards than other moves. Those will depend on what you’ve accomplished earlier in the game, and sometimes what others have done – there’s a 3-point bonus for being the first to complete each panorama, and end-game temple bonuses depend on who donated the most – will alter your choices.

The app, by Funforge’s digital division, looks fantastic. Rather than simply implementing the boardgame as a 2D experience, they’ve animated everything, so you see the board from an isotropic view and the player-characters jog from space to space. There’s also a line at the bottom of the screen that represents all the possible stops between inns, so you can see what’s coming up, and you can press there to select your next destination or you can scroll through the 3D view to get there. Each time you stop at any place that will require a decision, you get a fresh screen that shows you all of your options – for example, at the souvenir stand, you’ll see the three choices for you at that stop, and on the left side are the four symbols with numbers indicating how many of each you already own. (I played the iOS version.)

I did experience one bug in the app, just the second time I played it, and it hasn’t recurred since: one of the animated AI characters ran to the next stop but couldn’t quite get there and ended up sort of running in place. I had to kill the app and restart it to get out of that. There’s only one level of AI player, but I’ve found it to be perfectly competent, enough challenge for me as a relative newbie to the game.

Bauza’s got quite a track record of successful designs, and I’d rate Tokaido behind three of his better-known titles – 7 Wonders, Takenoko, and the two-player game 7 Wonders Duel – but ahead of the Spiel-winning coop game Hanabi or 2016’s Oceanos. My daughter, now 11, loved it right out of the box and picked up the strategy pretty quickly, so I’m comfortable recommending it as a good family game that you can easily play on a school night given its 30 to 40 minute playing time.

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Asmodee Digital app sale.

A bunch of the best boardgame apps out there are on sale right now courtesy of publisher Asmodee Digital, and since there are too many to squeeze into a tweet or FB post, I’m going to list my favorites among them (they have over 20 titles on sale) here with links to my reviews and to the iOS/Android stores.

Ticket to Ride ($1.99): Review, iTunes Store, Android version

Splendor ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Pandemic ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Small World 2 ($1.99): Review, iTunes Store, Android version

Jaipur ($0.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Ticket to Ride First Journey ($1.99): Review, iTunes store, Android version

Also, I have only played Twilight Struggle ($1.99) on Steam and haven’t reviewed it, but it’s also on sale for iPads and Android tablets. It’s a two-player game that I think requires a lot of playing experience to play it well because you must be familiar with the cards in your deck.

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