→ January 18, 2011
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Catan app.

My latest column for mental_floss, a conversation with prolific board game designer Reiner Knizia (the man behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities), went up today.

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Settlers of Catan remains the top board game on my rankings, even though it requires at least three players; it’s a great game that has simple mechanics, requires players to plan and have a strategy, includes mechanisms to reduce the odds of one player routing the others, and has helped forge a new segment in the U.S. board game market. You can’t overstate its value.

The Catan iOS app costs a reasonable $4.99, with colorful and slightly goofy graphics and an AI good enough to help you learn the game or pass the time, but no AI player strong enough to challenge an experienced player on a consistent basis. The app allows you to play two or three AI players, or to play another person who’s sitting with you, but lacks an online play option. The developers just released the first in-game expansion, Seafarers, today, and I purchased it but have yet to download it.

The Catan app itself works well if you fine tune the options to speed up the graphics and reduce the fake chatter from AI players. The app provides statistics on dice rolls and resource gains for all players, so you see for yourself that the computer wasn’t cheating when it made you roll a 7 when you had 13 resources and were about to build two cities and win the game. The map itself is extremely clear even with the colors and textures on the various tiles, and you can zoom as needed.

On your turn, once the die roll occurs, you click a somewhat-hidden menu buton on the right side of the screen to pull up your options: Build something, buy or use a card, initiate a trade, go to settings, or pass the dice. Building is straightforward, and only items you can build are highlighted, although it would be simpler if it snapped right to the first thing you can buy. Buying a card is simple, but using one requires scrolling to the right until you find the card you already have, at which point the question mark (for a description) changes to a check mark.

The trading engine is simpler to use, and AI players do make frequent trade offers. There’s also an option to decline all trade offers until your next turn, which can be useful when you’re receiving a slew of offers for a resource you know you won’t trade at any likely price. The trade engine screen presents all five resources in a row in the center, and you slide up or down depending on whether you want to give or receive a certain resource in the trade.

The game comes with a half-dozen or so AI players that vary in overall skill and in style of play, some aggressive, some focused more on building internally. But no AI player does much in the way of blocking the human player’s strategy, and they all have a tendency to hold resources too long – I’ve won a few times when the AI players each had 9-13 resources, and there had to be something they could have built with those resources to gain some points.

The Seafarers app doesn’t seem to have added any new AI players, and the game requires that you play a few of the basic scenarios before unlocking the Seafarer ones, even though I’ve played the First Island numerous times before buying the expansion. I’ll report back on that once I’ve had a chance to play it a few times.

I’d recommend the Catan app to anyone who’s been listening to me rave about the board game for years but hasn’t had a chance to try it, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking to improve his play. For me – and I am far from an expert at Settlers – it’s more of a fun diversion, not as challenging as some other apps I’ve tried but still fun, probably because I enjoy the underlying game so much. The fact that they’ve issued a major expansion also gives some hope that they’ll continue to develop for it, adding new features and maybe other expansions or AI players along the way.

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→ December 31, 2010
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Ingenious app.

I’m starting to feel like the president of the Reiner Knizia Fan Club, as I’ve raved about two games he designed, the card game Lost Cities and the Samurai app (an adaptation of a board game he published in 1998). I’ll now do the same about (the app for Ingenious, another award-winning board game that is a perfect candidate for adaptation because the machine can ensure the scoring is done accurately. And since Ingenious plays very quickly, it’s become my go-to app when I know I have just a few minutes for a quick game. At $1.99 for iPhone or $3.99 for the iPad, it’s a steal given how often I play it.

Ingenious is an abstract game, meaning there’s no theme or graphics, just a large hexagonal board made up of smaller hexes, with six per side. Each vertex is filled with a single color, each color unique (that’s six colors for the Jack Morris voters in the audience). Players place two-hex pieces on the board – most contain two colors but some contain two hexes of the same color – and receive points for placing them adjacent to the same colors on the board, including any pieces beyond the immediate piece that extend out in a straight line from the piece the player just placed. Points accumulate in each color, so each player has six separate scores.

The twist, however, makes the game … well, I’ll call it clever. The winner is the player with the best “lowest” score among his six. If you neglect one of the six colors, you’ll lose. There is some benefit to maxing out a color at 18 points, as you get a bonus turn after doing so, but chasing 18s may leave you too unbalanced and you can absolutely win a game without reaching 18 in any color even if your opponent does.

For example, in that screenshot above, the player has a tile with red on one half and purple on the other. If he played that tile in the one open space on the top right with the purple side at the top, he’d get four points in purple (adjacent to two tiles, each of which extends out in a straight line for one more tile) and four points in red (adjacent to the top-left red tile, adjacent to the tile below that plus two more extending down and to the right in a straight line). And since red is his lowest color, that’s probably his best play.

The Ingenious app plays just two players and has no online component, but the AI has three levels and is very competitive, with the hardest level considering what you need in late-game moves and blocking you if possible. There is a solitaire mode which I haven’t played (I’d much rather play an AI opponent than a modified game for solo play).

My only real criticism of the app is that rotating tiles can be a little tricky. To move a tile into place, you just drag it, which works fine, but to rotate it, you have to make arcs around the tile, which only works well if the tile is well away from the bottom edge. If you’re placing it towards the bottom of the board, it’s better to press and hold on the tile until it pops to the foreground, rotate it there, and then drag and place. It’s a minor nuisance overall for a very simple but consistently challenging app.

I’ve never played the original board game Ingenious, which appears to play up to four players, but would be curious to hear any of your thoughts on it and how it differs with more than two players.

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→ December 24, 2010
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Reiner Knizia’s Samurai app.

It’s up about $20 from yesterday, but The Wire: The Complete Series is still over half off at $96.49 on amazon.com.

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I mentioned the other day that I’ve become extremely addicted to another iOS app, Reiner Knizia’s Samurai, by the prolific designer behind my favorite two-player game, Lost Cities. Samurai is based on a board game ranked in BoardGameGeek’s top 100, but I’ve never played it (I’ll be buying it after the holidays) so my impressions of the app won’t include any comparisons to the original.

The board Samurai includes an island or set of islands representing Japan and broken up into hexes, some of which have one or more icons representing peasants, soldiers (helmets), or buddhas. The object of the game is to capture as many of those icons as possible, but the victory condition is more based on capturing a plurality of each icon type than on the overall total of icons captured – you can, in fact, capture more icons than your opponent in a two-player game and still lose if he captured more in two of the three categories.

You capture an icon by surrounding it with tokens that influence it in your direction, placing one regular (“slow”) token per turn. Your slow tokens include peasant, soldier, and buddha tokens of varying strengths (1 to 4 points) and samurai tokens that influence all icons. You also receive “fast” tokens, of which you can place several each turn in addition to your one slow token; the ronin token is worth one influence point and goes on land, ship tokens are worth one or two points and go on sea hexes adjacent to land, and special tokens allow you to replay a slow token you’ve previously played or to switch two icons on the board to snatch one out from under your opponent’s thumb. When a hex bearing an icon is surrounded on the land side, it is captured by the player whose adjacent tokens exert the most influence. The game ends when all tokens of any single type are captured, or when four tokens are surrounded but uncaptured because of a tie in influence.

Samurai plays very differently as a two-player game versus a three- or four-player game. In the two-player game, it’s much easier to set up your next move or try to force your opponent to make a specific move, as well as to deduce some of your opponent’s strategy. With three or four players, your degree of control is so much less that your moves are more turn by turn rather than part of a larger game-long strategy, since it’s harder to predict what two or three opponents will do before your next move, leading to shorter setups for captures and more thought required in how your one move will push your opponents to do (or not do) something specific. It’s a simple mechanic that plays out in complex ways, yet with short turns still moves very quickly.

The iOS implementation has outstanding graphics and a very clear tutorial to get you started. I’ve found the AI to be very strong, especially in two-player games; in three-player games I’ve run into the occasional less-than-best move (unless I just didn’t understand what the AI was doing) but would never say I’ve had an easy win. Knizia is a mathematician by training, so his games are highly mathematical in nature, and I think that lends itself to stronger AIs because the programmer can model the game more easily. In Samurai, not only does that lead to more optimal moves by the AI, it also means the AI won’t miss a complex opportunity to end the game early by capturing the final icon in one category.

How addictive is Samurai? I had to leave my iPod Touch uncharged at one point to stop myself from playing the game when I should have been packing for our trip. I can’t seem to put it down unless I’ve won at least one game, because often I know I lost because of just one wrong move. I’ll have to pick up the board game, but I have a feeling this will be a top ten board game for me, maybe top five, given how phenomenal the app is. And I’m not the only ESPNer to think so – Jorge Arangure tweeted that he’s a fan too.

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I may post again this weekend, but if I don’t get back before Saturday, Merry Christmas to all of you who celebrate it, and please be careful if (like me) you’re out on the roads.

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→ December 22, 2010
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Carcassonne app.

My wife bought me an iPod Touch 4G for Christmas – we exchanged gifts early because we’re visiting family for the actual holiday – and, as you might imagine, the first thing I did was load it up with board game apps. I’ve already mentioned the incredible adaptation of Carcassonne (EDIT: my #1-ranked board game), which I purchased for my wife when she got her own iPod Touch a month ago, but they’ve tweaked the app since then and now offer a higher-resolution version compatible with the iPad as well. If you’re a fan of the original board game, or if you’re interested in all these games I discuss but haven’t had a chance to try any, this is an outstanding app to buy.

Carcassonne itself is a tile-laying game with no actual board; players build the board tile by tile as the game progresses. Players take tiles one by one and place them, with no stored tiles in anyone’s hand. Each tile contains some combination of road, city, and farmland, and the player must place it adjacent to one or more existing tiles while ensuring that any shared edges line up – if the new tile has a road on one edge, it can only be placed next to a tile with a road on the shared edge. Players earn points by placing “meeples” on cities, roads, and farms; city points are doubled when the city is closed (that is, the city walls are complete), while farms only earn points based on how many closed cities they abut. The catch is that you must have the most meeples on any city, road, or farm to earn points for it. The majority of the time that won’t be a problem, but a player can force a merger of two or more structures to try to take over the points that another player might have earned from it.

The iOS implementation is phenomenal. The graphics are dead-ringers for the board game, but also bright and clear for easy reading on the small iPod Touch screen. Placing tiles is intuitive – slide into place, tap to rotate, click and hold to relocate. Any legal placement for the tile is shaded so you can survey your options much more quickly. Once you’re happy with where you’ve placed the tile, click on the meeple in box on the right, after which you’ll have the option to place the meeple in any legal spot on that tile. Areas on the board that can’t be filled by any remaining tile are covered with a large X. Most impressive is the easy screening – the zoom level will change automatically as the board expands, and you can modify it manually if you want to see more or less of the board.

The app comes with nine different AI players – two each at easy, hard, evil, and “weird” levels, plus a simple AI I haven’t tried. There are even local ELO scores, so you can watch yours increase if you beat either of the hard AIs. The easy players are not awful or stupid and won’t make moves obviously against their own interest, but aren’t quite as aggressive about trying to horn in on cities and farms you’ve already created. I’ve found the hard players to be an ideal challenge – beatable, but only with effort, which is all you can ask from what is essentially a spreadsheet and a decision tree. And the game’s mechanics, with tiles appearing in random order, mean that playing the same AI doesn’t get old as quickly as it might in other games.

The app also includes multi-player capabilities, both locally and over the Internet, as well as a solitaire version I haven’t tried. The only thing it’s missing right now is the ability to play with any of the board game’s numerous expansions, but the developers have said for some time now that they intended to work on adding those as in-game purchase options once this month’s major update (including iPad compatibility) was released. I imagine the AIs will require some tweaking for certain expansions that alter or enhance the point-scoring rules, but either way look for the game to continue to improve over the coming months.

I’ll review some more apps over the next week, but the next one will be a Reiner Knizia game, Samurai, that has proven similarly addictive and is faster to play than Carcassonne. And apparently my colleague Jorge Arangure is just as hooked.

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