The iPad app version of Forbidden Desert is absolutely stellar, one of the best adaptations of any physical boardgame i’ve seen to date, and I can verify that the game is highly addictive – in some ways even more so than the strong app version of Pandemic. Forbidden Desert just could use a little more fine-tuning to help it run more quickly, but the app is stable, the graphics are bright and clear, and the game – which I gave a fairly positive review when it first came out – showed itself to be more difficult than I’d realized after a couple of plays of the physical game.

Forbidden Desert is from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock, and the mechanics are similar to those of Pandemic and Forbidden Island. Two to four players, each with a specific role and power, play team members stranded in a desert that’s represented by a 5×5 grid of 24 tiles plus a central dust storm. On each turn, one player takes four actions, which can include moving to an adjacent tile, flipping a tile over to reveal what’s underneath, or clearing one sand token from atop the tile. You can only flip a tile once there’s no sand on top, and you can’t occupy a tile with more than one sand token on it; if you’re on a tile that ends up with two or more sand tokens on top of it, the tokens are also on top of you and you must clear all but one before you can move. After each player’s turn, the team draws two to six cards representing the progress of the storm, which may move the central storm and add sand tokens, increase the number of cards drawn each turn, or show the sun beating down on players, reducing their water supplies. The goal of the game is to find the four pieces of the escape vehicle and get all players to the launching pad before any of the various loss conditions occurs: one player dies of thirst, the supply of sand tokens is exhausted, or the storm level reaches the end of the track.

The app plays beautifully: Everything is clear, there’s a great undo function (although you can’t undo a tile flip or a storm card), and the app makes it immediately evident what you’re allowed to do. Cooperative apps are easier to develop than competitive ones because you don’t need to create AI opponents; the opponent here is the clock, so to speak, but the developers did hit just about everything else you’d want to see. I did have two minor complaints with the app. First is that some indicators end up covering others temporarily, such as the location of a vehicle piece covering up the indicator that a tile contains a tunnel, in which players can hide from the effects of the sun beating down. The second is that flipping a Storm Picks Up card causes a needless delay to show the board shaking, an effect that players should be allowed to turn off. They’re both pretty minor, really.

Indeed, any issues I have with the app are really issues with the game, like the need for a few more role choices to give more diverse options for replay. The game comes with six, and while I did beat the app without the Water Carrier, the challenge is more reasonable when you’ve got a Water Carrier (who can retrieve more water during the game than other players and can pass water to other players more easily) among your team. Even just adding a role similar to Pandemic’s Generalist, who has no special powers but gets a fifth action each turn, would help boost replay value. I probably played the app 40 times on the normal setting and only beat it four games, way below my typical rate on Pandemic, so I have to think this game is much more challenging than I originally thought.

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Two other apps of note: Reiner Knizia’s The Confrontation originally had a Lord of the Rings theme in the physical version but has been rethemed (sort of like The Shinning) for the app version, which treats the two-player game to a hybrid board/videogame treatment. It’s an unbalanced two-player game where the victory conditions differ for the two players, and conflicts between pieces are resolved in a separate screen that adds animations to the battles. I thought it was well-done and the hard AI was appropriately hard but not unbeatable, but I own an iPad 2, which is below their recommended hardware levels, and the app does run too slowly on my device for me to play it often. When I eventually upgrade, I’ll likely play it a lot more, since I think I like the game and generally enjoy Knizia’s products.

Tsuro: The Game of the Path is a very simple boardgame for two to eight players where the goal is to build a path that keeps your token on the board the longest. On each turn, you place one of three tiles in your hand, mostly trying to keep yourself on the board, but also trying to limit your opponents’ options late in the game and occasionally even getting the chance to run an opponent’s token off the board or, most fun, making two opponents smash together, eliminating both at once. It’s a basic game and there is a lot of luck involved as well as a disadvantage for the first player – if everyone manages to stay on the board till the end, the first player to play will be the first eliminated.

Steam: Rails to Riches was itself a reimplementation of an earlier game, Age of Steam, both by designer Martin Wallace, the man behind the game Brass … which, like Steam, was also just adapted as a an app for tablets. The Steam: R2R iPad app (no Android version available) had an early bug issue to work out, so I played and reviewed Brass first and tried Steam last week. Like Brass, it’s a solid implementation if you already know the game, but the AI players could use some work and the tutorial isn’t very thorough. Unlike Brass, Steam still has a few glitches to work out, particularly if you change your mind while doing something on the screen.

Steam: Rails to Riches (just “Steam” from here on out) came out in 2009, shortly after the release of the third edition of Age of Steam, cleaning up some flaws in the first game’s mechanics and starting what appears to be a long debate over which version of the game is superior. Since Steam is the one we have in app form and I’ve never played or even seen Age of Steam, I’m going to pretend that debate doesn’t even exist and will focus on the app.

Steam is a train game, but rather than just connecting cities and building routes as in Ticket to Ride, Steam players have to raise funds, lay tracks, and then ship goods along the tracks they’ve laid (and sometimes tracks opponents have laid) to earn either recurring income or one-time victory point bonuses. The base game’s map covers the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, with various cities already placed on the map as stations with cubes representing the different types of goods in five colors.

For each round – the number of turns varies with the number of players – there’s an auction to determine the turn order, which also determines which special ability or benefit each player gets in that round, which can include the ability to turn a town (marked on the board) into a full-fledged station, to add goods to a city on the board, or to increase the player’s locomotive power, which determines how far that player can ship a goods cube. After the bidding ends, each player gets three actions: one to build tracks, and two to ship goods. Each player can use a shipping action to upgrade his/her locomotive power. Each stop on a track – a station or a non-upgraded town – counts as one segment, and a player can only ship a goods cube along a number of segments equal to or less than his locomotive power. The maximum locomotive power is six, so obviously getting to that mark and then shipping as many goods as you can along six-segment paths of your own tracks is the optimal strategy. You can ship a good along another player’s track segment, but that player gets the bonus point or boost to recurring income.

Once upon a time there was an engineer…

Of course, building those perfect routes is difficult with other players chasing the same goal and frequently blocking your path or stealin’ your goods. The AI players in the Steam app are good enough to teach you the game, as they all tend to build delivery loops – tracks that appear to be convoluted but provide 5- and 6-point plays for shipping cubes. (There’s no reward for efficiency here; if anything, inefficient delivery networks are key to racking up points.) But they’re often not aggressive enough in bidding for turn order, and they appear to struggle with creating enough options for big-point deliveries in the final round or two. I went from having never played the game to consistently beating the best AI options in 3- and 4-player matches – only by a few points each time, but never losing, even once in a game where I accidentally borrowed $0 in round 2 (which meant I could do almost nothing that entire round).

That’s the main issue with the app, but not the only one. The tutorial is too simple and probably wouldn’t suffice to teach anyone the game if s/he hasn’t played it before; I didn’t understand the rule around building through undeveloped towns (and how that could be beneficial – it adds a segment to a line between two cities). Turning a track tile to orient it properly is a little more finicky than it should be, and the app itself often “guesses” wrong with its initial orientation after you drag a tile on to the desired space. I also ran into frequent graphics glitches if I started to drag and drop a track hex from the array at the bottom of the screen to the map, but changed my mind and tried to return it – the image would remain in the middle of the screen unless I backed up to the main menu and resumed the game. The app also will let you take the City Growth action even if there are no more cubes to add to cities on the board, which makes it a wasted move. Tightening up the AI players should be the top priority, but I’d like to see these other hiccups addressed before fully recommending the app for solo play.

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There’s a new, free, official Dominion app available today for iOS and Android tablets, but the early comments on Boardgamegeek’s post are overwhelmingly negative. It doesn’t seem to work well, and in-app purchases of expansion decks are $15 a pop. I love Dominion, but this sounds like a pass for now.