September 13, 2011  ·  11 comments

Top 15 iOS boardgame apps.

I’ve been promising this for a while, and kept delaying it to buy and review more apps, but I think we’ve reached a brief lull in major boardgame app releases, so here’s a ranking of the 15 that I’ve tried so far. All but two are iPad compatible – several are iPad-only, in fact – and all are adaptations of existing physical boardgames. Most include multiplayer through GameCenter and I believe I’ve highlighted (and downgraded appropriately) those that don’t.

If I’ve reviewed an app in full, I’ve linked to that review in the game’s name. The link on the price goes to iTunes for you to purchase it (yes, I get a 5% commission if you click through and buy).

One extra bit of awesome from all these games, at least for me, has been playing some of you – not coincidentally, all four of the games where I’ve played readers appear in the top five.

(EDIT, 12/26/11: One app that came out after I produced this ranking that I also recommend is Tigris and Euphrates, which I’d rank fourth, just after Ticket to Ride.)

(EDIT, 3/30/13: I’m due for a bigger update, but I also recommend Caylus, Le Havre, and Stone Age, with the last one just releasing an iPad version this week.)

1. Carcassonne. ($9.99) The best boardgame implementation on iOS happens to be of one of the best boardgames, period, although its ranking here is based more on how incredible the app is. The graphics are superb, the toughest AI players are very good, the easy AI players are still enough of a challenge for rookies, and the game offers networked play that works easily and smoothly. It’s the most expensive app on this list ($9.99 for a universal app) but absolutely worth the cost.

2. Samurai. ($4.99) Seven of the ten apps on this list are adaptations of Reiner Knizia games, led by this one. It’s classic Knizia – a simple concept leads to complex game play: Players compete to control specific hexes on the board, with special pieces that allow players to steal hexes at the last second. The AI player is also very good and despite the small board the game is very playable on an iPod Touch.

3. Ticket to Ride. ($6.99) Days of Wonder, the publisher of Ticket to Ride and Small World, put a tremendous amount of work into their apps, which are clean, bright, and robust. Ticket to Ride falls short of the two above here because the AI players are so weak, but DoW linked GameCenter multiplayer to their own thriving online multiplayer community, so finding games is easy at all hours of the day. They currently offer three in-app expansions as well, of which I’ve purchased one, the essential 1910 expansion.

4. Battle Line. ($2.99) A two-player card game from Knizia where players compete to capture five of nine flags (or three adjacent flags) laid out in a line between them, using poker-line hands of three cards at each flag. It’s simple and quick, made better by the use of tactics cards (you have the option to play without them, but you should use them). The AI player could be a little stronger, but the randomness of the cards tends to flatten out the game to make the AI more competitive. Note: The linked review was before a major software update that all but eliminated crashing, added GameCenter multiplayer, and added much sharper graphics.

5. Puerto Rico. ($7.99icon) A good implementation of a complex (and very, very good) boardgame, with competent AIs and functional multiplayer, including a two-player variant that makes it a little easier to get a game going. The screen is fairly busy and I imagine the app would be confusing to someone who’s never tried the boardgame, so the in-game tutorials are a must. You can beat the AIs pretty regularly with a shipping strategy (corn/harbor or corn/wharf), but if you eschew that you get a tougher challenge.

6. Ingenious. ($2.99) A simple two-player game on a hexagonal board where the victory condition calls for a lot of counterintuitive play. Also by Knizia.

7. Small World. ($6.99) Another Days of Wonder app, without multiplayer but with a somewhat better (but not great) AI player. The app only plays two players (the physical game plays two to five), but with a clever tabletop mode that allows the players to sit across from each other without having to move or rotate the iPad. Graphics are superb, although an “undo” option would be nice considering how easy it is to drop a token in the wrong spot. A multiplayer option would bump it up the list, but if you’re looking for a really slick two-player game you can play with someone who’s sitting next to you, this is a great option.

8. Through the Desert. ($1.99) I really like the underlying game and the graphics on this app are strong, but it doesn’t play that well on the iPod and the glitch where you can’t see the bottom of the screen in four-player mode on small devices still isn’t resolved. The AIs improved noticeably after the last update. It’s another board-control game with lots of opportunities to sabotage other players, if that’s how you roll, and at $1.99 for the iPad version it might be the best value on this list.

9. Tikal. ($3.99) After a recent update this moved up out of the cellar, and while it’s available for all devices the small graphics play much better on the iPad. It’s a solid strategy game with aggressive AIs that play fairly predictably despite multiple difficulty settings; GameCenter integration was a big boost.

10. Wabash Cannonball. ($1.99) A no-luck, auction-driven, train game where players compete for shares in railroads that they then develop across the map from the eastern seaboard to Chicago. This app, adapted from the boardgame Chicago Express, gets the award for the cleanest presentation of in-game information, of which there’s a lot. However, the app is designed for iPhone/iPod screens, not for iPad, and really needs online multiplayer. Give me those two things and I’ll rank it higher.

11. Medici. ($2.99) And another Knizia game, this one built around auctions of sets of goods on ships where players compete to ship the largest quantities of specific goods.

12. Zooloretto. ($3.99icon) One of the best-looking games on here, with fun sound effects and an unlockable (free) in-game expansion … but the lack of networked play is a real handicap. It looks to me like the developers have walked away from this one, which is a shame since it functions properly and looks so good; better AIs or networked play would help. I did discover a strange bug as well, where the in-game expansion somehow relocked itself after I didn’t use the app for a few months.

13. Catan. ($4.99) The AIs improved with the Seafarers expansion, but they’re still not very tough. It’s a good introduction to Settlers of Catan if you’ve never played the physical game and want to try it out before investing, but once I had defeated the AIs in every level I didn’t feel the need to go back to the game. The first major update improved the graphics, but the AIs still aren’t great, although it added multiplayer through GameCenter.

14. Kingsburg: Serving the Crown. ($4.99icon) This app looks great, runs smoothly, includes what I think are competent AIs, offers GameCenter multiplayer, and takes absolutely forever to play. I’ve never played the physical version, which probably doesn’t help matters, but one of the things I look for in a good boardgaming app is the potential to bang out a quick game, whether solitaire or online. The game is currently iPhone/iPod only, although an iPad port has been promised as “coming soon” for several months.

15. Ra. ($3.99) I’ve never reviewed this game here, mostly because I didn’t care much for it. It’s another Knizia game, with an auction component but way too many moving parts and an AI that I beat the first time out despite not knowing what I was doing. Medici takes a similar concept and executes it better.

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September 9, 2011  ·  2 comments

Ticket to Ride app.

Ticket to Ride, reviewed here, is one of our favorite games to break out with friends who haven’t played many of the German-style boardgames we like because a new player can learn how to play in a few minutes and the game is long enough for a new player to start to catch on to strategy before it’s through. The publisher, Days of Wonder, has operated a very successful online site for several of their games for several years, and their Ticket to Ride app for iOS (or for Android devices) is fully integrated with the online site, so you get a robust community of experienced players right out of the chute.

The app is close to perfect if you’re playing online. The graphics are exactly those of the physical game and are very easy to navigate on the iPad’s screen. Route cards go in the lower left; you can cycle through them by clicking once, and completed routes get a solid-colored outline and a punch mark on the left side, with a count of total routes and incomplete routes next to it.

Your train cards display in the bottom center, and when you have enough to complete a track between two cities, you click on the relevant cards and drag them to the track, waiting until the right track is highlighted (both city circles start to glow as well) before releasing. That’s a little trickier than it sounds, and my wife and I have each once incorrectly placed trains; a setting allowing players to insert a confirmation option would be helpful, but right now the only confirm/cancel option appears when you select new route cards.

Opposing player icons sit at the top with number of trains remaining, number of train cards in hand, number of route cards in hand, and number of points all clearly visible. You can see an online opponent’s ELO rating (at least, I assume that’s an ELO system) and “karma” by clicking on the player’s icon.

The app itself runs very quickly with only a few unnecessary animations that didn’t unduly hinder play. Online play may lag due to slow connections or slow players, of course, and you can turn some of the animations and the entirely harmless music off.

Online play is the game’s strength. Players can log in via GameCenter or via the Days of Wonder site, and can create games or join existing ones in the “restaurant” accessible two clicks from the main screen. Open games are identified by different icons that indicate whether you are eligible to join the game and which board and cards are in use – the 1910 expansion, the Europe board, and the Swiss board are all available as in-app purchases. Players also tend to describe games as fast games or no-blocking games where applicable, although that’s on the honor system. So far, I’ve only played on the US board with the 1910 expansion and have found online opponents tend to go hard after the long, cross-country routes (sensible) and are obsessed with getting the longest route (potentially counterproductive). Then again, I think I’m at two wins in five or six games, so perhaps my opinions on strategy hold as much water as a plastic sieve.

The app has two flaws that put it below the standard-bearer in the space, Carcassonne. One is the aforementioned potential for a misplay that would be solved by a confirmation dialog. The other is that the Ticket to Ride AI players are horrible – they play linearly and won’t present any kind of challenge to even a novice player. It’s also less than ideal for pass and play because you can see other players’ routes too easily unless you’re sitting rather far apart. I did have one unexplained crash that hasn’t recurred.

However, if you like playing online opponents, it’s very strong and I’ve found the half-dozen or so games I’ve played to move very quickly. And if you’ve never played any of the boardgames I’m always yammering about here, on Twitter, or in chats, this is one of the best places to dip your toe in the water of smarter, better games that also play well for socializing.

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September 2, 2011  ·  4 comments

Tikal boardgame & app.

Winner of the 1999 Spiel des Jahres (Boardgame of the Year) award, Tikal has two to four players exploring a Mayan jungle, uncovering temples and discovering treasures for points, but with the added twist that you can steal control of temples or forcibly trade treasures with your opponents to maximize your point scores.

On a turn, a player draws the top hex tile from the stack and places it wherever s/he wants on the board as long as it is accessible from a hex that’s already placed. The tiles include temple tiles, treasure tiles, and empty tiles. A temple tile is worth points to the player who has the most worker tokens on it at each scoring round, and temple tiles can increase in value as players “uncover” higher levels, ultimately worth one point per temple level each time it’s scored. The treasures on temple tiles are “discovered” by workers and come in six types, with points per treasure increasing as you add more examples of each type – one point if you only have one treasure of that type, three points if you have a pair, and six if you collect all three. The empty tiles are useful primarily for a player’s ability to place one of two new base camps on one (or on a treasure tile from which all treasures have been collected), allowing the player to place new workers closer to unclaimed temples and treasures.

Once a player has placed a tile, he has ten action points to use on his turn. Actions include placing a new worker or his one leader token for one point; moving a worker to another tile for one point per “step” between tiles; uncovering a temple level for two points; collecting a treasure for three points; trading treasures with an opponent (in which s/he has no choice) for three points; placing a base camp for five points; or guarding a temple, thus protecting it for the player for the remainder of the game, for five points. Uncovering temple levels, gathering treasures, guarding temples, and scoring points for temples all require the use of workers, so placing and deploying them constitutes the critical decision in the game.

In those scoring rounds, players score for treasures as described above and for controlling temples. When multiple players have workers on a temple tile, the points go to the player who has the most workers on that tile, counting any leader tokens as three workers. But each player takes a turn in the scoring round before counting up his points, so before you score, you get to move workers around to control as many temples (or dig up as many treasures) as possible. And since the three scoring rounds before the final one are somewhat randomly timed, each player has to keep one eye on his positioning for the next scoring round – both how well he’s defended temples he’s controlled and how quickly he can move workers and/or his leader around to grab control of another temple. Guarding temples does help, but a player can only guard two temples per game, and when guarding a temple the player loses control of all workers on that tile for the rest of the game.

One other constraint covers new temple levels: Uncovering a level requires placing a small square game piece with the next level number on top of the highest current level. If all game pieces with the next level number have been used, that temple can’t get any higher.

Because there are multiple scoring rounds and the types of tiles revealed vary as the game goes on, Tikal almost plays like a game with two halves, similar but far from identical. In the first half, players are primarily uncovering temple levels and guarding their highest ones, but as the game moves on to the second half, the inability to uncover new levels means players use more action points on stealing control of temples and/or swapping treasures. Of course, the first half can set up the second half, such as controlling temples that are remote from the rest of the action, thus guaranteeing the player a few points without having to spend action points or workers to shore up his defense.

The main flaw in the boardgame is the length of time between a player’s turns. With each player given 10 action points and an ever-widening number of options on the board, a single turn can take several minutes as the player maps out a plan to use up all 10 points in the most efficient and effective way possible while also setting himself up for the next turn. The compensation for this is that the tension created by the knowledge that the other players are likely to screw you out of some points, so while nothing good is going to happen while it’s not your turn, you will want to watch to see just how badly you get screwed. I’ve also seen the suggestion on boardgamegeek that players use a timer to limit just how long each turn takes, which isn’t the worst idea for a four-player game.

Tikal players two to four players, but the board size doesn’t change, so with two players there’s somewhat less interaction or need to steal from other players. With four players, you’re fighting for smaller pieces of the same pie, and there’s more movement and intrigue involved.

One final positive on the game is the box, which is well-designed for easy cleanup given how many different tokens and tiles there are in the game.

Several other commenters at BGG compare Tikal to El Grande, saying the latter game uses a similar mechanic with a better implementation. I’ve never played El Grande, but I’m sure many of you have and am curious whether that should be an upcoming purchase and whether it plays reasonably well with just 2-3 players.

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The Tikal app for iOS received some pretty tough reviews when it was first released because it was a buggy mess, very crash prone, hard to decipher on screen, with really weak AI players; I bought it early and had all of those problems, but heard about a forthcoming update and decided to sit on a review until that update arrived. The update has made the app much more stable, cleaned up the UI significantly so it’s easier to follow what’s going on, and I think the AI players are a little better – but not a lot, making it more of a training app if you’re not going multiplayer through GameCenter (which I haven’t tried). At $4.99, it’s definitely worth the trial run if you have an iPad and want to try Tikal before you purchase the physical game. One comment I’d offer is that the game graphics are different from the boardgame, including trucks instead of workers, and the screen is a little dense on an iPod or iPhone. On the plus side, however, the AI moves pretty quickly, so you can run through a solo game without dragging, and the animations make it clear what the AI players are doing.

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August 22, 2011  ·  1 comment

Puerto Rico HD app.

Puerto Rico was, for several years, the top-rated game on Boardgamegeek, and I’d argue it still deserves the top spot, as it’s just two-hundredths of a point behind a more obscure game, Twilight Struggle, that has only one-third as many votes. (That is, there’s something of a self-selection bias here: People who don’t like long, complex games like Twilight Struggle won’t try it, and won’t put low ratings on it, whereas Puerto Rico is popular enough that far more players have tried and rated it.) I’ve recommended a very good if unauthorized online version of Puerto Rico called Tropic Euro, but about two weeks ago the first official Puerto Rico app (currently on sale for $7.99) was released for the iPad, and after some weird non-recurring issues the first time I played, it’s been stable and fairly easy to play.

The gist of Puerto Rico, if you haven’t played the board game, is that you are trying to settle a new island by filling it with plantations, producing crops, and using the proceeds to build up your island, while also accumulating points from shipping crops back to the mainland. In a round, each player chooses one role to play and earns a particular benefit from it; any unused role earns extra money for the player who is next to select it. Roles allow players to add plantations or buildings, occupy them with colonists (they’re useless until occupied – but this is why one friend of ours calls Puerto Rico “the slave game”), sell goods, or ship goods. The rule that states that players must ship all available goods during the shipping phase despite limited space on the cargo ships, with unshipped goods discarded entirely, is the key differentiator in the game – timing shipping is critical, and you can really boost yourself and/or screw an opponent by picking the shipper role at the right moment. The game involves almost no luck or randomness – it’s all player selections.

The app itself squeezing everything into a pretty brisk game, and the screen layout has improved since the earliest screenshots were released; it’s not intuitive, but after a game or two it’s pretty easy to figure out what you need to do. Descriptions of buildings are easily available with one click, and the app offers a hint feature that I’ve found gives solid advice, although it’s a little too skewed toward the Prospector role (one free coin but no action). The music and story animations are cute but I had to turn them off after the first game because they slowed everything down. You can control AI and animation speeds to keep things moving along.

The big negative is the screen itself; Puerto Rico’s mechanics are simple, but the game’s pieces and setup are complex, and there’s just a lot of stuff on the screen. Your island and plantations are in a column, stacked next to all of the other players’ islands, even though your icon and score are on the opposite side of the screen. You can’t tap on a building to identify it, but have to tap the question mark in the lower right and drag it across the screen to drop it on a building to get its name. The use of lit windows/doors in buildings to indicate when they’re occupied by a colonist is clever, but those lights are a few pixels tall and therefore it’s not immediately obvious whether a building is occupied. (Plantations are much clearer – they get a tiny icon if they’re unoccupied, but the square fills up once it is.)

One other minor negative is that the AIs are fairly easy to beat through a shipping strategy, primarily because (like most AIs) they’re not reactive. (Carcassonne is one of the few apps with an AI that clearly seems to be out to get you – and I consider that a good thing). I try to avoid the shipping strategy most of the time I play the Puerto Rico app because it’s a bigger challenge to try to win through development, and using multiple AI opponents with different strategies mixes things up to the point where I’m often forced to change plans even though the AI players aren’t specifically trying to block me. On the plus side, I’ve never caught any of the better AI options doing anything stupid or suboptimal. But they’re not enough alone to keep me playing for long – I’ll either use the multiplayer feature or I will end up backburnering the app behind ones that offer stronger single-player experiences, like Carcassonne or Samurai.

If you like the board game and expect to utilize the Game Center multiplayer options, I’d recommend the Puerto Rico app. It would also serve as a good introduction to the game for anyone who’s never played the board game version before, since that’s just over $30 and requires a minimum of three players. I’m just not sure this will have staying power for me beyond multiplayer because the AI players just aren’t strong enough, even though I’m nowhere near an advanced player.

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June 28, 2011  ·  5 comments

7 Wonders.

New post for Insiders on interesting guys in this year’s Futures Game.

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The Spiel des Jahres award, the most prestigious (and commercially important) prize in the boardgame industry, has now been split into two separate awards; one retains the old award’s name, but focuses on simpler, more mainstream games, while the other, the Kennerspiel des Jahres (roughly the “Connoisseur’s Game of the Year”), goes to more complex strategy games. The inaugural Kennerspiel des Jahres award was handed out yesterday, and the winner, 7 Wonders, is more than worthy of the honor.

7 Wonders hits the sweet spot of German-style boardgaming: The structure is complex, but game play is simple, with a three-player game taking about 25 minutes after our first abortive run through it. (The rules could be written more clearly. A lot more clearly.) That combination means that gameplay is pretty rich, with many different strategies and no clear path to victory. And one quirky mechanic manages to go a long way to balance out the randomness that is inherent in almost any game that revolves around a deck (in this case, three decks) of cards.

In 7 Wonders, each player has a home city representing one of the seven cities to house one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. During the three stages of the game, called Ages, the players build buildings that allow production or trading of resources, add military power, or just give the player victory points. These buildings come on cards, some of which may be played for free while others require expenditure of money or resources (although some of those become free if you’ve played another card in an earlier Age). Each Age has six turns, so a player can build up to six buildings; resource-producing buildings produce on every turn, and there’s no accumulation or depletion of resources. The ultimate goal is to finish the game with the most victory points, but with seven different ways to earn points there are many, many ways to win the game.

The one great mechanic of the game is the distribution of the cards. At the start of each Age, each player receives seven cards, and gets to play one of them, usually to construct the building on the card’s face. After that, the player passes the remaining six cards to a neighboring player, so the decision of what card to play depends on what suits the player now, what his/her neighbor might need, and, depending on the number of players, what cards might still be there when the hand comes back around. During each Age, six cards from each hand are played or discarded, and the last remaining card is removed from the game. So in each round of a game, you can be assured of seeing the majority of the cards at least once; in a 3-player game, you’ll see 18 of 21 cards, and with 4 players it’s 22 of 28. (The game is for 3 to 7 players, with rules for a 2-player variant included.)

There’s also a strong trading component in the game, as it’s very hard to produce all the resources you’ll need yourself. You can buy any resource you need from a neighboring player who produces it for 2 coins, which can be reduced to 1 by certain commercial buildings; those purchases can’t be refused, but don’t affect the selling player’s production, either. Therefore, you could choose not to produce a certain good, or to produce less of it, because you know your neighbors will have some available for you even if the price is steep.

In our handful of 3-player test games, we found gameplay to be far more straightforward than the rules, which are written more like a reference work than like a straight explanation of how to play a game from start to end. The mechanic that allows you to build one card free because you built another related card earlier is very powerful, while the mechanic that gives you points for building the three levels of your Wonder using any card from your hand (without considering what’s on its face) is the least powerful aspect, as none of our winners ever completed his/her Wonder. One facet that I thought was insufficiently explained in the rules was that you can only build production buildings for the seven resources in Ages I and II; by Age III, you’re just going for points. We didn’t find huge differences between the Wonders except for the Colossus of Rhodes, which has a military power that was worth 18 points if its holder made a few relatively simple moves to maintain that advantage, and in a game where winning scores were in the 45-55 range that’s a significant bump.

I can imagine that with six or seven players this game would get messy, and the luck factor in what cards you get to see starts to increase once you get past five players. For three players, however, gameplay is smooth with a hint of randomness but nowhere near enough to make the game frustrating, as great decision-making won’t be undone by rotten luck. I can see why it won the Kennerspiel and is ranked #12 overall on BoardGameGeek’s global game rankings, but if you do buy it, be prepared for a little confusion the first time you read the rules. The game isn’t as complicated as they make it sound.

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June 20, 2011  ·  1 comment

Small World app.

I have updated this post to reflect the 2013 upgrade to 2.0.

Days of Wonder’s game Small World is one of our favorite casual strategy games, one that presents players with a small number of complex decisions, relies much more on strategy and skill than on chance, that replays well, and that looks great. They’ve now released Small World 2 for iPad (not for the iPod or iPhone, though); it looks great and has the best live two-player experience we’ve found so far, although I’d still say Carcassonne is the best overall boardgame app.

The concept in Small World is one of constrained resources. The map is small and its territories will be rapidly filled up by the two players. The players each select a race & skill combination from the table (one is free, others cost from one to five coins) with which to conquer territories, but those races don’t come with many tokens, and since you must have at least two to take over an empty territory and have to use one token to hold a territory you’ve taken, you run out quickly and must put your civilization into “decline” so you can select a new one. You earn a point for every territory you hold at the end of your turn, plus various bonuses. And the decision on when to decline your current race skill/combination will also be based on when your opponent declines or is about to do so, on what options are available on the board, and on how many points you’re still getting from the last civilization you declined, which will most likely disappear when you decline a second one. (For more on the boardgame itself, you might want to read my review of it from last July. The issue I raised about the Diplomatic skill has been solved in the iPad version by eliminating that skill altogether.)

The game’s best feature, by far, is the mimicking of the tabletop by allowing for two players to face each other on opposite sides of the iPad; the player control bars appear on the top and bottom (viewed lengthwise) and the board doesn’t rotate. Pass-and-play isn’t really a hassle, but this is much easier, and given how much the iPad cost I feel a little better about just letting the thing sit on the table while we play. The game also allows you to choose a start player or have it determined randomly, and even lets you choose background music from your iTunes library.

Play is mostly intuitive, with simple drag-and-drop moves and clearly marked buttons for things like redeploying tokens or declining (click on your main race card and it gives you Info and Decline options). Instructions and key details on races and skills are easily available in-game. It offers no undo option if you should drag-and-misdrop, however, and the game doesn’t allow you to save certain skills (like the Sorceror’s ability) till the end of your turn, automatically moving you to redeployment if you’ve used all of your tokens. The graphics in Small World are outstanding, crystal-clear replicas of the physical game pieces, with even smaller tokens easy to discern.

The AI player is adequate, but no great shakes. It avoids stupid errors and usually chooses its race/skill combination well, but would probably be better served with a more aggressive attacking mode and faster recognition of impending doom (I’ve found that the right race/skill combo can wipe the AI off the map, depending on who the AI chose in the first place.) Like that of most AI players in other games, its short-term thinking is better than its long-term thinking. But if you’re just learning the game or enjoy a quick game even though you’re about 80-90% likely to win, it does the job.

In 2013, Days of Wonder upgraded this app significantly to add maps for three to five players, online multiplayer, and several in-app upgrades (new skills and races). They also raised the price to $9.99, but it’s well worth the cost given how much you’re now getting for your money.

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April 17, 2011  ·  3 comments

Wabash Cannonball app.

Wabash Cannonball ($1.99) is the app version of the boardgame more commonly sold as Chicago Express (which I’ve never tried), and it’s a very clean implementation of what seems to be a strong, smart game. Outside of the lack of networked play, the Wabash app is outstanding.

If Wabash Cannonball was a Hollywood script, I’d call it Acquire meets Ticket to Ride but directed by Reiner Knizia. It’s a luck-free train game with an economic component that also reminded me of Power Grid. Players buy shares in four railroad lines in an auction, then can use their turns to extend those railroads west across the country toward Chicago. The map is covered in various kinds of hexes, with different hex types providing different bonuses or recurring income amounts to railroads that cross them, with city hexes giving the biggest boost.

On each turn, a player can choose one of three options for his move: auction, build, or develop. In an auction move, the player picks one railroad and one share of that railroad goes up for auction; each railroad has a small, fixed number of shares, and it’s also possible for a player to choose the auction but then decline to auction off any shares (the ‘null’ play). The build move allows the player to choose one railroad and lay tracks on up to three tiles, as long as the railroad still has tracks remaining. Developing certain hexes raises their income or provides a one-time bonus to the railroad(s) occupying it. Because each player will hold shares in multiple railroads, and railroads will be owned by multiple players, choosing your action will depend not just on how much you’ll benefit from the move but on how to minimize the benefits to other players, or perhaps even block another railroad if that’s in your best interests.

When the first of the four initial railroads reaches Chicago, that railroad receives a sizable one-time dividend, and a fifth railroad, the Wabash (gray) line, opens up, with an immediate auction of the first of its two shares. The railroad’s home city is actually Fort Wayne, so within a few turns it can expand to Chicago (triggering another one-time dividend to its shareholders) and Detroit, the two most profitable cities on the board.

A round ends with a General Dividend, meaning payments to all shareholders, when two of the three turn options (auction, build, develop) are exhausted for that round; at each General Dividend, Detroit is developed automatically, increasing its income by $1. The game ends when one of four conditions is met, with nearly every game I’ve played ending because three of the railroads have no more shares available for auction. At game end, there’s a final General Dividend, after which the player with the most money is the winner.

The app’s design is very clean and plays well on the small iPod Touch screen. You can access several screens of information on the players, railroads, and progress toward game-end conditions in a popup window that you can minimize when you need to see more of the game board itself. The AI players are solid, playing intelligently and even using some strategic moves like the null play, with a particular strength in the auction. The AI’s weak spots are a lack of offensive play – they never block or otherwise sabotage other players – and a strange conservatism around the Chicago line, perhaps due to an incorrect valuation of its shares.

The game’s developers told me there are plans for networked play, but no release date for it yet. Beyond that, my criticisms of the app are minor – the “Chicago or bust!” popups are annoying, and it doesn’t save all the player settings from game to game – and I’ve had just one crash, the first time I used the app, which never recurred. For $1.99 it’s an excellent value with plenty of replayability.

Next up, I’ll do a ranking of my favorite boardgame apps. As for books, I bailed on Le Carre’s A Perfect Spy, but ripped through Ann Patchett’s underrated second novel, Taft.

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April 6, 2011  ·  11 comments

New ESPNU show + Through the Desert app.

As you might have heard on Wednesday’s podcast, I’ll be appearing on a new studio show on ESPNU called College Baseball Live, every Thursday night at 7 pm EDT/4 pm PDT from now until May 12th. (There’s one more show on May 19th but I had a scheduling conflict.) The show will cover college baseball in general, with an emphasis on the SEC, as well as a modicum of draft chatter, and will be followed by an SEC game of the week, beginning this week with South Carolina vs. Tennessee. I’ll appear again on a brief postgame show.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I’ve also signed a new contract with ESPN, which has made much of this year’s extra content across all media possible. I have always appreciated the comments from readers who ask me if I’ll join their favorite team’s front office, but this is where I want to be right now, not least because life on the media side has always worked better for my family.

My weekly Tuesday column yesterday was on some rookies who were surprising Opening Day roster additions.

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Reiner Knizia has been as aggressive as any game designer in licensing his games for iOS app development, producing a few of my favorites so far (notably Samurai and Battle Line). His two- to four-person boardgame Through the Desert is now available in a beautifully rendered app, but on the iPod Touch there are some implementation issues that have made the game trickier to play.

Knizia’s Through the Desert ($1.99 for the regular game, $2.99 for the iPad/HD version) is played a board of hexes with several oases and watering holes scattered more or less evenly throughout it. During the setup phase, each player places one camel in turn, with players rotating until each player has placed all five of his starting camels. (Players begin with five camels, each a different color.) After the setup, players place additional camels (drawn from a communal pool) adjacent to those they have already placed, building “caravans” that can accumulate points in three ways:

* By abutting an oasis, which is worth five points.
* By crossing a watering hole, which is worth three points for a large hole and one for a small hole.
* By fully enclosing an area within the caravan; between the caravan and the edge of the board; or between the caravan and the small, impassable mountain range within the board. The player receives one point for each enclosed hex, plus any bonuses for surrounded watering holes.

The only restriction on placement is that a player cannot place a camel next to a camel of the same color placed by another player.

There are also game-end bonuses of ten points apiece for the longest caravan (most camels) of each color. The game ends when there are no more camels available in any of the five colors.

The game offers a lot of decision-making with zero randomness involved. I’ve found the bulk of my thinking during the game is spent trying to anticipate each opponent’s next move or two, both to see if I can block anyone and to make sure I’m not going to end up blocked. The problem is ultimately one of resource constraints – you can only place two camels per turn, your number of turns is finite (but not known exactly), and your number of possible moves is restricted by the board and opponent placement – with the board big enough that the game is different every time, especially with three or four players.

The app itself is perfectly stable, but the way the developers implemented the game has proven frustrating. For one thing, there’s no way to tell whose turn it is, and there’s no way to see the current score of any player other than the one whose turn it is. In the four-player game, the bottom row of hexes on the board is obscured by the silly waving carpet at the bottom of the screen, and I couldn’t figure out how to place a camel there. I’ve also found the hard AIs to be a little light – in at least a dozen games, I’ve only once had an AI player make a move to block me, and that came in a four-player game where one of the other AIs was about as challenging an opponent as a sack of hair.

The AI problem isn’t a huge deal since the game allows for network play, and the hard AIs are good enough to make the game a nice diversion. It’s just not as challenging as it could be, and the lack of any kind of scoreboard or indication of who’s up is annoying and completely avoidable. I’m hoping at some point there will be an update to at least fix the bottom-row glitch and provide a score option, although the AIs probably are what they are for the long term. I’d recommend the game if you’ve already grabbed the two I mentioned above as well as Carcassonne and Ingenious and are looking for a change of pace; if I see any improvements come down the line I’ll repost with a stronger recommendation. And if any of you should try the iPad version, let me know if any of these issues are resolved.

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March 25, 2011  ·  4 comments

Reiner Knizia’s Medici app.

Chat today at 3 pm EDT. New draft blog post on Dylan Bundy is up. I’m back on the Baseball Today podcast today; we just finished recording slightly before noon Eastern, so I expect it’ll be posted at that link shortly.

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The iOS game Medici is just 99 cents until April 4th and since it’s another Reiner Knizia game there was a zero percent chance I would let that sale go by. It’s worth far more than that, a clever auction game that in typical Knizia fashion uses simple game play to create complex results. The scoring is a little trickier than other great Knizia games like Lost Cities or Battle Line, but after botching my first game I was able to grasp the concept.

Each player represents a trader in Renaissance Italy, bidding on lots of goods to fill up the five spots on his ship in each of three rounds of scoring. There are six goods available; on a player’s turn, he selects a box from the right side of the screen, after which it’s opened, revealing one to three goods in any combination, with each good carrying a value of 0 to 5 (or, for gold, a fixed value of 10). Players bid on the set of goods in a single-round auction, with the player who selected the box getting the final bid. Bidding can be fierce early, but as players’ ships fill up, players can score bargains later in a round … or they could be stuck with goods that don’t help as much in the scoring.

That scoring is the one slightly difficult part of the game to understand, at least from the in-game rules (I’ve never played the physical board game), but it’s also what makes the game brilliant. You earn points in three ways:

* The ship with the most value in each round earns 30 points, with declining bonuses after that depending on the number of players; the player with the least valuable ship receives no bonus at all, but all other players receive at least 5 points. A ship’s value is merely the sum of the values of each of its five goods, but those values are only applicable to this type of scoring. They lose all meaning when it comes to shipping goods.

* After ship values are scored, players ship their goods other than gold, which is only counted towards the total ship values. The player who has shipped the most of any specific type of good up to that point in the game receives 10 points; the player who ships the second-most of that good receives 5 points; everyone else gets zero. That is, the scoring for the quantity of, say, dye shipped is cumulative. Players tied in goods shipped split the available points, rounded down.

* Players who have shipped at least five goods of a specific type get a five-point bonus in each scoring round. Six goods shipped yields a ten-point bonus, and seven goods shipped yields twenty points. These bonuses are not split in case of a tie.

The ideal strategy, of course, is to ship lots of goods that no one else is trying to ship, which is harder to do the more players you involve in the game. (Medici requires three players with a maximum of six.) There’s also an inherent strategic conflict between acquiring goods with high values to grab that 30-point ship bonus and acquiring goods to ship to try to rack up points and bonuses for shipping one or two specific types of goods. Balancing those two goals when you can’t control what goods come up for auction while competing against other players who might want the same goods makes the game interesting and highly replayable.

The implementation on iOS looks good and works reasonably well with a few small hitches. The scoring pyramids where numbers of goods shipped are displayed is quite small on an iPod touch, and selecting boxes from the right side of the screen doesn’t always work on the first try. The app comes with nine AI players with different strategies and difficulty levels; I’ve found the top three or four to be challenging but the ones below that are best left behind once you’ve learned the game. There’s no online play option at the moment.

The mechanics make this game well worth the purchase, and it’s a solid implementation that has proven very stable for me across multiple plays and interrupted games. It also plays very quickly given how many players it can have and how much is going on behind the scenes, and I find the more I play the more I’m getting used to the tiny scoreboard for goods shipped.

I’m still testing out another Knizia app, Through the Desert, that recently came on the market; my initial impression is that it’s a great game but one best suited to the iPad (and there is indeed an HD version) rather than a smaller device.

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March 12, 2011  ·  3 comments

Alhambra.

Somehow the board game Alhambra has slipped through the cracks here on the dish, which I’ll blame on our move into the new house in the middle of last month. I’m hoping that now that we’re in (albeit far from unpacked) I’ll get back to more frequent posting here.

Alhambra won the Spiel des Jahres award in 2003 and looks like it should be a great game – players purchase castle tiles from a central “market” and try to earn points while building their own Alhambra-style castle. But the randomness factor is way too high for my tastes, particularly in the way it can leave one player in the dust from the outset if the cards/tiles don’t line up for him.

That central market has four tiles in it, drawn randomly from a bag as needed. Tiles come in six colors representing different types of rooms or building structures (like Towers or Gardens), each carrying a different potential point value, and with walls on anywhere from zero to four sides. You may place a tile only in a way that would allow a person to “walk” into that tile from your existing castle without having to hop a wall. There are three scoring rounds, coming roughly at the one-third and two-thirds marks as well as at game-end; each time, points are awarded to the player with the most tiles of each particular type, with smaller point gains available in the later scoring rounds for players with the second- or third-most tiles of each type.

The hitch, and it’s a big one, is how players acquire money to buy the tiles. The conceit is very clever: The masons you hire to build your Alhambra come from different countries and insist that you pay them in their own currency. The central market has four squares of different colors, and the currency required to buy a tile from the market is determined by the color on which that tile happens to sit. But you acquire currency from a separate currency market: Four cards, randomly drawn, that sit out for players to take in lieu of buying a tile. A player may take any single card from the currency market, or take any number of cards whose values add up to five or less. So the tiles you’re able to buy over the course of the game will depend on what color and value of currency cards are available to you when your turns come up.

On his turn, a player may buy a tile, take currency, or make a very small modification to his castle. The currency takes on added weight because of the rule that allows a player to take an extra turn if he buys a tile with exact change. (If you overpay, you’re out of luck – you don’t get the difference back.) The result is that there’s very little strategizing possible around tile purchase and placement; it’s all about your currency options, and while there is some turn-to-turn strategy there, in a four-player game the central market changes so much each time around that the value of good currency decision-making is severely curtailed.

My wife disagrees with me on Alhambra; she’s not bothered by a high randomness factor and places more value on visuals and production value. We have played the two-player variant, where you assign some tiles to a hypothetical third player, “Dirk,” and the game actually works a little better than it does with four people because the central market changes less between turns. But on the whole, I can’t see buying this game over other tile-based games like Carcassonne, which folds its randomness more seamlessly into gameplay in a way that actually enhances the value of good decision-making.

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Again, I’m hoping that’s the last long layoff on this blog for a while, and I apologize for neglecting it. I’m almost through with An American Tragedy and am planning a long music post for some time in early April, as well as reviews of some of the Dominion expansions we’ve acquired over the last few months. In the meantime, check out my post on UCLA star Gerrit Cole and listen for me on the Baseball Today podcast three times this week starting on Tuesday.

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