Category: Game Releases

Digital board game ports are a wonderful thing, but they can be at times confusing. As an inherently license’-based activity (with one or two exceptions), it can create weird situations like what happened with the digital adaptation of Carcassonne.

There in fact two different versions of Carcassonne you can buy on the market right now, one developed by The Coding Monkeys that’s only available on iOS, and then a slightly shinier version that came later developed by Asmodee Digital, which is only available on Steam and Android. That’s about to change come March 1st, 2020.

The Coding Monkeys announced over the weekend that their deal with the Carcassonne license holder, Hans im Glück, is coming to an end and won’t be renewed. Their version of the game will be removed from the App store come March, and you won’t be able to buy it again. Here’s what you need to bear in mind:

• If you already own the game and it’s installed on your device, you’ll be able to play it beyond March 1st, 2020.
• If you already own the game but it’s not installed, in theory you should still be able to download it regardless but this can be an inconsistent principle at times – best to put it on a device for safe keeping.
• TCM have said they will keep their servers running for at least a year, so multiplayer will still work for a time. What happens after that will depend on whether the studio can afford to keep them running.
• Even if they turn off the servers, as far as we know the game didn’t need to connect to an online server to play so solo/pass-and-play should still work.

iOS users need not fear that they’ll lose access to Carcassonne forever – Asmodee Digital’s own port will finally be coming to the Apple App Store come March. I imagine this is something they’ve been wanting ever since they made their own version of the game a couple of years ago.

The Coding Monkey’s version of the game is held in pretty high esteem and is a poster-child example of board game ports on mobile. Asmodee’s version is fine and is in 3D, giving it more appealing visuals, but i’d be hard-pressed to say it was the ‘better’ version. Still, it’s probably better to have a single, unified app for things like this.

As a final farewell, The Coding Monkeys are running a sale on their version of the game plus everything else they’ve made to date, so be sure to check it out.

What are your thoughts on this and the two versions of Carcassonne? Let us know in the comments!

We’ve got a nice meaty update for you today. Couple of interesting new premium titles, as well as a few other other interesting movements in the free-to-play world. The industry is well and truly awake now, so expect more news, updates and releases coming down the pipeline over the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, in mobile gaming… 

Out Now

Maze Machina (iOS & Android)

As we noted last week, Arnold Rauers and TinyTouchTales have a new game, which was released earlier this week. Maze Machina follows similar veins to past works like Card Crawl or Card Thief, but there doesn’t appear to be the same kind of progression mechanics. Michael’s review will be with us ASAP, so keep an eye out for that.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F14-tmgeRdQ]

Pascal’s Wager (iOS)

This game attempts to answer the question “What if we made Dark Souls for mobile?”. Gritty, difficult, action-RPG are just a few words you could use to describe it. Depending on how much it actually is like Dark Souls, I’m sure you could use more vulgar words as well. It’s a pretty reasonable price for a game of this visual fidelity, and early indications suggest it works quite well on iOS devices right now. We’ll add this to the review list and get back to you ASAP. Android users, don’t despair – a port is due later this year.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eQE6_N2u70?controls=0]

If you liked Call of Duty’s mobile incarnation, it might interest you to know that another popular FPS title has made the jump the mobile as well – Warface has never really been seen a ‘true’ competitor to COD and Battlefield, but it’s been doing the ‘F2P Shooter’ thing for while now (it was first released in 2013!) and still going strong. The mobile version is called Warface: Global Operations and is available on both iOS and Android, still Free-to-Play.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBeXn8tAXUA?controls=0]

Last but not least, Space Grunts 2 is now out on Android, if any of you have been waiting for the Google Play version.

App Updates & News

What would you get if you decided to merge 100-Player Battle Royale and Auto Chess? Well, according to Ubisoft, you’d get Might & Magic: Chess Royale, which is a new game coming at the end of the month. I’m personally quite a fan of Auto Chess games, although I’m not a big Battle Royale player (Fortnite is fun enough if you’ve got someone to play it with).

I don’t really understand how this can be a thing, but the press blurb claim matches won’t take longer than 10 minutes, so that addresses my main concern. We’ll find out more on January 30th.

Narcos is a Netflix you may or may not have seen by now (not really my thing, but I know it’s fairly popular) following the family-friendly saga of the rise of the cocaine trade in Colombia in the late 80’s. It had a surprisingly decent (if tragically flawed) turn-based strategy spin-off game on PC and Console and now it’s getting a mobile spin-off in the form of… an Idle Clicker game. Yeah. Check out this bad boy.

You might also be excited to know that Playdek’s latest board game port, Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001 – ? will be entering early access on Steam at the end of February. No word on a mobile version yet but we know Playdek will want to bring it mobile eventually, so it’s good to see progress being made.

In terms of individual app updates, there’s a few:

• Star Traders: Frontiers continues to be Best Traders.
• Santorini got a minor update
• Call of Duty: Mobile’s Third Season has started
• DOTA Underlords got a new balance/tweak patch
• Black Desert Mobile has got a new World Boss, as well as the Node War PvP mode we’ve spoken about before

App Sales

It appears to be another week where there’s nothing really to shout about in terms of sales, so I thought I’d take a moment to clarify how I go about populating this section.

Games go on sale all the time, but I tend to stick to the ones we’ve covered, or at least more obviously within our ball-park. Sometimes though you see the same games go on sale repeatedly, and they’re not always the best price. For example Klarus Victoria (Predynastic Egypt etc.) have all their games on sale again, but it’s the same price they always discount to.

Icewind Dale is also half price again, but that’s not the best price it’s been and there’s a couple others like this. We’ve covered all these games before and I do try to monitor whether a price is “good” price, as highly subjective as that concept it.

That being said, Beholder’s latest sale is the best price it’s ever been at $1.99, down from it’s previous typical sales price of $2.99. Maybe there are some of you who don’t own it yet who would like to, but again the older a game is the less relevant I feel it is at times in terms of discounts.

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