Category: Mobile Game Releases

By Ian Boudreau 05 Jul 2018

A digital edition of the excellent The Castles of Burgundy is currently in development and will be out next year. Digidiced, the studio behind mobile board game conversions of such gems as Le Havre: The Inland Port and Agricola, have announced that Castles of Burgundy is one of their next projects.

Berlin-based Digidiced is among the recipients of a new round of Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg funding, and they’ll be getting €70,000 to support the computerized version of Castles of Burgundy, per Gamesmarket. That’s great news for fans of Stefan Feld’s modern strategy classic, as Digidiced has a stellar record when it comes to producing digital versions of eurogames.

While Digidiced hasn’t formally announced which platforms they’re supporting with The Castles of Burgundy, the studio’s games have generally been available on both iOS and Android devices, as well as through the Windows store.

Look for the digital version of The Castles of Burgundy in 2019.

Image credit: Board Game Geek

By Ian Boudreau 04 Jul 2018

By Joe Robinson 03 Jul 2018

The Elder Scrolls: Blades is not quite the Skyrim port many perhaps would have liked, but it still looks to be an intriguing adaptation of the iconic franchise onto mobile.

If you’ve forgotten what it is (E3 seems like forever ago already), here’s the segment from Bethesda’s presentation:

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While you’ve been able to ‘pre-register’ your interest on Google Play since the E3 announcement, the game has just popped up on Apple’s pre-order list – with a tentative release date of September 1^st.

It’s free, so you won’t need to pay anything but it remains to be seen whether we really will see Blades that soon.

Welcome to the Weekender, your weekly look at the best new games, sales, and updates. It’s a big week with one of my most-anticipated games of the year hitting the App Store along with a couple tabletop to digital conversions. Oh, and a healthy dose of discounted games. Have a great weekend.

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind (iOS Universal) (Review)

King of Dragon Pass is an iOS classic. With elements of RPG, tribal management, turn-based tactics, and interactive fiction it plays like a really in-depth choose-your-own-adventure book. You operate at both a colony level, managing your tribe and its interactions with the world, and an individual level as the chieftain where you make decisions that have a big impact on the story. A sequel to this classic has been in the works for four years and this week we get to play it.

Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind is the spiritual successor to King of Dragon Pass and returns us to the rich fantasy world of Glorantha. Rather than playing as the Viking-inspired Orlanthi we take the reins of riders of the steppe, clearly meant to evoke the Mongols, and must steer them through a great migration and settling of a new home. Gameplay hasn’t changed much from King of Dragon Pass which makes sense: it wasn’t exactly broken. You still consult your circle of advisors and make important decisions season after season. You still worship a diverse and interesting pantheon of gods and seek their blessings and magic. You must navigate through diplomacy and war with other tribes, as well as domestic and economic concerns closer to home.

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The story is interesting, the choices are meaningful, and the artwork is once again top-notch. You should definitely read Matt’s 4-star review of the game if you haven’t already, but I’m happy to add my recommendation. It’s an easy pick for fans of the original and most RPG aficionados.

Card Quest – Card Combat Game (iOS Universal and Android) – Full review coming soon!

Dungeon crawler style, roguelike gameplay, an undead menace, and card-based combat…Card Quest has the elements of a good tactical game. You pick a character, customize your deck, and go battle the bad guys. The game was ported from Steam where it has a ‘very positive’ rating. I wasn’t able to play it, but it looks pretty promising and might be worth a look for those deck-building roguelike fans out there.

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Quarto (iPhone (?) and Android) – Full review coming soon!

Quartro is a pretty simple abstract board game where one’s opponents dictate their pieces, and therefore choices. You’re given a piece and must play it on the game board. The ultimate goal is the same as, you know, Connect Four, though there are four different piece characteristics (color, shape, size, and hollow or solid) which adds another dimension to the strategy. The digital presentation of the game is attractive and the game plays fast, making it ideal for quick games here and there. There’s a decent amount of strategy and the AI isn’t bad. Quatro is mostly a solo game against the AI, but there is a pass-and-play option for use by co-located humans. You can take on specific challenges to spice up the single-player experience, which is a cool way to introduce techniques and build expertise in the game.

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Istanbul Digital Edition (iOS Universal and Android) – Full review coming soon!

Istanbul either won or was nominated for a bunch of board gaming awards back in 2014 when it came out. Now, like many stand-out tabletop favorites, it gets the digital treatment. Istanbul: Digital Edition was converted by Acram Digital, the folks behind Eight-Minute Empire and Steam: Rails to Riches. The game plays the same as the physical version and sets up you the player as a sales team—one merchant and four assistants—in a busy roughly Medieval Istanbul bazaar. The goal is to collect a certain number of rubies earned through making wise sales choices. You can play a solo game versus the AI or online with others. The online game offers both real-time and asynchronous options.

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Hexologic (iOS Universal and Android)

A quick and clever puzzle game, Hexologic offers loads of challenging and fun levels for anybody that doesn’t mind a little simple addition. Hexologic puts a little spin on sudoku rules. Each level has several groups of hexes running horizontally, vertically, or diagonally each with an associated number. You must assign a value of 1 to 3 to empty hexes within these groups in order to sum up to the number. It’s just the right amount of tactical thinking for a relaxing game-play experience and I’d recommend it to puzzle fans.

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New Pre-Orders

Pre-ordering seems to be a thing now, at least on iOS. There’s two games this week we think you’ll want to take note of…

Pocket City (iOS Universal): $4.99

Long awaited Sim City-like city building sensation Pocket City is now available to pre-order, and we finally have an expected release date! The game that’s set to “re-imagine classic city building simulation gameplay” is due to release on July 31^st, and you can pre-order for $4.99 on iOS.

Battleheart 2 (iOS Universal): $3.99

The sequel to classic strategy game Battleheart is finally within our sights, although a few months later than we originally thought. You can pre-order for $3.99 and the game is expected to release on July 12^th.

Sales

Miracle Merchant (iOS Universal and Android): $.99 on iOS (Review)

Kicking off our sales today is one of the best games of 2017 and one of the better solitaire-style mobile games period. Miracle Merchant is the perfect game for short play sessions and is on sale for just a buck (although it’s free with IAPs on Android, if you’re wondering).

Dissembler (iOS Universal and Android): $.99 on iOS

Flip tiles to match and remove color groupings in the challenging puzzle game Dissembler. It came out earlier this year and is on sale in the App Store for the first time for just a dollar.

Age of Rivals (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 (Review)

Fantastic card-drafting, civilization-building game Age of Rivals is another of the best of 2017 and on sale for half off.  

Cat Quest (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 on iOS (Review)

It’s the best cat-based RPG ever made. Ok, and also of the better games of 2017 in its own right. It’s normally $5 and isn’t on sale often, if you’re an RPG fan and looking for a game to play now’s the time. 

Runic Rampage (iOS Universal and Android): $1.99 on iOS

Get your smash on and play a pissed off dwarf in Runic Rampage, an action RPG full of combos. It’s not as fun as Cat Quest, but gets the job done if you’re looking for more from the genre.

Civilization VI (iPad): $23.99 IAP (Review)

Firaxis’ 4X behemoth is a great port of the classic turn-based strategy game, and Aspyr have done a great job bringing it up to speed with its PC counter-part. If you’ve never been happy with the pricing structure, the ‘Full Game’ unlock is now at its cheapest ever price since launch.

Seen anything else you like? Played any of the above? Let us know in the comments!

By Collin MacGregor 29 Jun 2018

By Collin MacGregor 28 Jun 2018

Strategy and story have never been the happiest bedfellows. One benefits from obscurity, from twists and mysteries that propel you forward into the unknown. The other needs as much transparency as possible, so you can understand the effects of your actions and improve your plans. To service these requirements, stories have always had to emerge from strategy, not the other way around.

Six Ages: Ride like the Wind wants to set that straight. It wants to tell you a tale of gods and humans, of mysteries and the mundane while still taxing your tactics. It’s a bold goal and, while it doesn’t always work, the narratives that it weaves are unlike anything else in gaming. Except, perhaps, its predecessor. Almost 19 years in the making, this is the sequel to a very special game from 1999, King of Dragon Pass.

What’s partly responsible for the success of both games is their bizarre setting, Glorantha. It’s a fantasy world like no other, developed in depth from academic theories of anthropology and cultural studies. You command a clan of horse-riding barbarians in the game, but your encounters are often bizarre beyond expectations. Dwarves of literal stone, dark-dwelling Trolls who judge others by their flavour, bubbling freaks of chaos and more besides. And each with their own extensive culture and mythology.

Set during Glorantha’s early ‘Storm Age’ of warring gods, your goal is to guide your clan to wealth and prosperity. Through a series of screens and menus, you must direct the work and wealth of your clan. There must be farmers for the fields, warriors to protect them or raid enemies, shrines to please the gods and diplomacy and trade with other clans. As the game progresses you will become engaged with the greater events of the age. But at the start, mere survival is challenging enough.

On most screens you can ask your circle of clan elders for advice on what to do, although they often give conflicting opinions. You’ll choose to do something for that season: explore new lands, perhaps, or sacrifice to the spirits to learn lore. Sometimes the result is immediate, sometimes it may take several more seasons to resolve. 

Either way, it’s never quite clear why things work out the way they do. As you play, you’ll begin to intuit how things happen behind the scenes, but it’s a hard slog. And when you’re staring down disasters like a catastrophic raid or a demoralised clan, it’s frustrating not to know what choices will improve things. It does, however, result in a far more compelling narrative. One which encompasses failure as well as success, misery as well as triumph. There’s even a ‘Saga’ screen where you can view the ongoing tale of your barbarians in exquisite detail.

To flesh out this thin strategic skeleton, many seasons also see a random event. These help you learn more about Glorantha’s rich and detailed world as well as adding to the story. Mostly it’s a bunch of text and a series of options. Again, your elders will advise you if you want them. Again, intuition and your knowledge of the setting play a role but picking options can be a crapshoot.

Sometimes an event takes you through a series of choices before resolving. Sometimes, it will set in motion a chain of further events that will take years to play out. If your lunatic trickster-shaman decides to kidnap a member of a rival clan, your reaction will impact relations with them for the whole game. Taking in refugees from a mysterious culture causes their presence to bubble up in events from time to time, impacting your clan in various ways.

This essentially is the template for the entire game. There’s a battle system, but it’s similarly driven by narrative rather than clear strategy. Even then, unexpected events like the sudden arrival of a group of allies can throw things off the rails. Everything catches the player between the rock of opaque mechanics and the hard place of wonderful storytelling. It’s a wonderful place to be, if you can stomach the spirals and corkscrews of the ride. 

There’s no better illustration of this than Hero Quests. These are ritual re-enactments of myths from the time of the gods. It’s important for your religion to attempt one every few years, and the rewards can be colossal. But to succeed, you need to sacrifice to find the missing pieces of lore, and then literally, as a player, learn it. Your choices on the quest must be close to those of the god if you want the best benefits. 

Some strategy gamers will find this kind of forced immersion awful, others will lap it up. Fans of the original will already be familiar with it. They’ll discover a smoother interface and a new setting in a new culture. Forgoing the traditional control and power fantasies of strategic empire-building is a hard habit to give up. But for those that can make the sacrifice, Six Ages holds a wealth of wonders few other games can match.

A lot of people are probably trolling the app stores looking for a game just like Cartoon Craft–a mobile-focused simplified RTS with swords and monsters all built from gold and trees. Obviously, Cartoon Craft is a clone of Warcraft, with armies of orc and humans facing off in a fantasy world. The one thing Cartoon Craft does really well is to make the units super cute, like a high-school graph paper battle come to life. Everything else seems not quite finished.

It’s a standard humans-vs-orcs story, with zombies as a mutual antagonist that forces the two natural enemies to band together. Each mission has its own setup and slightly varying goal, but they all come down to surviving and killing the enemy forces.

Like Warcraft, first you have to build a base, sending workers to gather gold and wood, building farms to increase your unit cap, and building a couple of production buildings to pump out soldiers.

There are only five units the humans can build: worker, swordsman, archer, catapult, and flyer. There’s not a lot of difference between the units beyond being able to make ranged attacks or not. There’s not even a basic rock-paper-scissors circle of effectiveness. The catapult is significantly stronger than any other unit, which makes it the core of your army once you build the requisite production buildings. The orc side has similar units, but a strong melee ogre unit instead of a catapult. Each side also has a turret tower, which comes in incredibly handy both as a ranged defensive structure and a simple wall to keep the hordes of zombies out. Strategic decisions basically boil down to finding the correct time to shift your production from development of your resources to building a massive army.

There are a dozen missions you play in campaign mode, but there doesn’t appear to be any AI to speak of. There is certainly no global opponent AI. The missions are simply structured as automatic waves of enemies that must be fended off on a timer, and bases that have to be hunted down and razed. The enemies can be phenomenally dumb (to be fair, a lot of them are zombies) and will just let themselves be mowed down by your turrets and archers if there is a line of trees that keeps your forces protected. Your allies will also do nothing to protect themselves or build their forces.

Unit AI is also dumb. Worker units are particularly frustrating in how they cut trees. No matter what area of the forest you tap on, they will interpret it as an order to cut trees in general and beeline for the nearest tree to their position. This can be particularly problematic when the forests form part of the walls that protect you from enemy attack. They will also sometimes just stop cutting trees entirely, for reasons I could not decipher.

Poor AI is just one sign of a game that needs a lot more time to bake before its ready for sale. I hit a major bug halfway through. Supposedly, my human forces were supposed to ally with the orcish forces to fight off a zombie attack, but the mission opened with the two groups slaughtering each other. Apparently, my mission is to protect the remaining empty orc structures? Then the game just froze.

There’s no multiplayer, which is a real shame. Against a human, the game mechanics might offer a few hours of entertainment. There’s no skirmish mode, but that’s understandable seeing as the AI probably does not actually know how to build a base or develop an army.

The translation is painfully bad–so bad that I initially thought the writers were deliberately affecting caveman/ogre grammar to fit the theme. That’s not really very important since the story text is totally skippable and does nothing to impact the gameplay. Then I realized that there was a major typo on the title screen … in the title. (Unless the game was actually meant to be titled Catoon Craft?) It’s just another sign of how unpolished the game really is.

A cute, simple version of Warcraft for mobile isn’t a bad idea, but Cartoon Craft definitely isn’t it. There’s no meat to the game, and the lack of basic RTS features combined with the silly AI and bugs makes this one to avoid at any price.