Dino Hunt Dice is a fast-paced, luck-pushing blitz from Steve Jackson Games’, which provides a variant of their popular Zombie Dice (also available for iOS), reskinned for the family market. For short form excitement, this is sure to be a big hit with parents looking for an easy, gentle game to play with their young boardgamers – as well as with older gamers sick to the back teeth with zombies…

Thanks for the help, T-Rex

Gameplay

As may be obvious by now, this is a game won by rolling dice (three of them at a time to be exact) and your objective is to be the first to capture twenty dinosaurs for your zoo. Of course, it’s not quite that simple because these are GIANT LIZARDS. Each of the thirteen dice are marked with a combination of dinos, leaves and footprints, respresenting different events that happen during your hunting expedition. When you roll a picture of a dinosaur, you’ve captured it! If a die comes up leaves, then the dinosaurs are hiding in the trees and you’re going to have to come back to hunt them later. Lastly, the footprints are the risk of getting stomped – roll three during your hunt and you won’t be scoring any points this round. The dice come in three colours, green, yellow and red, representing the challenges of hunting a particular species of dinosaur. It’s easy to hunt the common green Apatosaurus, but the red Tyrannosaur will stomp all over your hunting party.

Play consists of drawing three dice from the pool at random, after which you score dinos, tally your stomps and decide if you’re going hunting again, prolonging your stay and risking getting more points or losing everything. A turn will continue until you decide to call it quits, get stomped or run out of new dice to roll, if you run out you score the maximum points and the expedition has been a rousing success!

Don’t taunt me, T-Rex, I’m thinking dude.

The fun of the game comes entirely from pushing your luck and chancing defeat, but there’s also an element of numbers running too. It’s a hell of a lot safer to go hunting if you know the dice remaining are mostly green, or mad to go again if you’ve got one stomp and there’s likely to be all T-Rexs in the next roll. There’s a lot here akin to Yahtzee or Poker Dice, but faster paced and with more immediate feedback about how well you’re doing.

Implementation

Thanks to the game’s simplicity, Dino Hunt Dice translates to the iPhone rather well, although the UI could stand some small revisions. Despite the game featuring a rules explanation, it fails to mention that there is a finite and set dice pool, meaning that without looking online, players will have to figure the composition of the pool themselves. In a game where you’re trying to work out just how far you can push your luck, not knowing what the odds are makes for an unintended challenge that a better written manual could easily avoid. In all likelihood, the in-game manual is a direct port of the physical and assumes that you can just see the dice in front of you.

One other oddity with the UI to mention, while the interface clearly displays your current score and the results of the dice currently rolled, there is no indication which dice remain in the pool, furthering unnecessarily inconveniencing the player. These are fairly minor gripes, but it would be worthwhile making sure the people you play with are aware that the rules aren’t quite complete.

Achievements and leaderboards are available for GameCentre users, though online multiplayer is not, which is probably for the best. In a game so manifestly luck based and about the immediate pleasure of rolling dice and cursing your opponent for their luck, online multiplayer (simultaneous or asynchronous) would probably have been redundant.

I’ve still got 18 dinosaurs, T-Rex, I don’t need your validation.

Verdict

I’m not 100% convinced that games of pure dice rolling translate to digital, as much of their pleasure being in the tactility of rolling noisy cubes about, but for the incredibly friendly price of ‘free’, Dino Hunt Dice is a nice little pick up game to play when you’ve got five minutes of downtime or with younger gamers to play with. Dino Hunt Dice is available for iPhone and must be played in 2x mode on the iPad.

Dino Hunt Dice is mechanically identical to Zombie Dice, and if you’re just as happy hunting dinos as you are eating brains, Dino Hunt should be your choice, as the full multiplayer game is available free, while the Zombie Dice app restricts free play to single-player against the AI.

Gameplay

At its core, Bookworm Heroes has the same mechanics as every tile based word game since their invention by Alfred Mosher Butts (no, I will never get bored of that name). Players attempt to make words from their selection of lettered tiles, each of which has a point value determined by the frequency of the letters uses in the English language – rewarding the player best able to leverage their vast and mighty vocabulary. Unlike other genre games, when these words are scored their points don’t contribute to an abstract total. Instead, these points are converted into raw damage used to hammer the opponent’s health bar, giving the game the feel of being Street Fighter: Turbo Dictionary Edition.

The stars of the show are the eponymous Heroes, each with distinct personalities embodied in their powers – one of which they use passively every turn, the other being a once per battle super power that can turn the tide dramatically when properly deployed. At present, there are four available as player characters, though Popcap are missing a trick if they’re not already working on the release of the next batch of Heroes.

To complicate matters and  deepening the cerebral challenge, after your words are scored some of the new letters might be Gem Tiles – shiny letters with a multiplied score and special powers ranging from ruby health boosts to the highly coveted diamond, which doubles your score for the entire word and is able to act as any letter of your choosing. In Bookworm Adventures, the PC precursor to Heroes, these dropped when a suitably magnificent word was scored. The same may be true here, though it seems that to speed up the multiplayer experience the score threshold for drops has been lowered, making for explosive plays and startling comebacks.

Implementation

Bookworm Heroes is an absolute joy to play with your friends. Much of the game feels infused with Popcap’s signature mad joy and vitality. You don’t just score your letters and add them to some abstract total – you beat the ever-loving verbiage outta your foe amid flashing lights and beat-em-up audio. Heroes is a spectacular sprinkle of OTT magic onto the boggle formula and it’s almost perfect.

Occasionally – in between the bells and whistles and explosive joy – you can’t help but spot a bum note, a vague not-quite-right feeling about some of the features. Facebook integration. Pets. Pay-to-win. Oddly crass monetisation. Bits and pieces of the cold EA monolith, poking through the cracks in the adorable Popcap facade. Clues that the moneymen had an unwelcome hand in the game design. It’s never game destroying, but it does make you scratch your head at times. For example, the pets. Pets are paid-for content that grant the power of one Gem type on-demand, allowing a player willing to pay to tip the balance against their foes. Like all pay-to-win mechanisms, this feels lazy and does dampen the fun a bit. Losing is part of playing games, but losing because you didn’t pay a small fee can grate on some people. Alfred Mosher Butts would never have taken a kickback so you could get that ‘X’ you desperately need for ‘QUIXOTIC’, and neither should you EA/Popcap. For shame.

While I’m doing some complaining, it’s worth noting that this multiplayer game, though wonderful, is available to play online only. Tragically, Heroes can only be played while your iPad has an Internet connection and you’re going to need to buy two iPads if you want to play the person sitting next to you. As the previous Bookworm games have always proved a big hit with families, the exclusion of pass and play in Heroes seems poorly judged. This is, I’m afraid, another artefact of the EA free-to-play madness. Pass-and-play isn’t profitable because if they’re not connected to the central servers, you can’t charge people to play and social media integration doesn’t work if you’re socialising with people in the same room. Again, this isn’t game destroying, but it does evidence a willingness to sacrifice enjoyment of the game in the name of monetisation.

Despite all of this, I’m having a hell of a time with Bookworm Heroes. Oddities aside, the game is a wonderful challenge and it’s slickly animated – plus, the morning this review was written, a large patch was released addressing some of the more questionable design decisions and improving the free-to-play experience. It’s still not perfect, but the comprehensive patching seen so far can hopefully be seen as a good omen.

Verdict

As word games go, Popcap’s Bookworm Heroes has a great pedigree and this most recent offering provides a great multiplayer addition to the stable. There are some odd shonky bits and some missed opportunities here and there, but all that seems a bit less important when you’ve just hit your opponent with ‘DEFENESTRATES’.

Whilst MtG in particular was one of those perfect once-in-a-decade marriages of mechanics and design which made it an all-time classic, it remains to be seen whether SolForge can reach the same heights. However, first impressions from this preview release would suggest that — although the game has some interesting twists on the TCG genre — it is unlikely to cast as irresistible a spell as its predecessors.

Gameplay

As in most games of this type, gameplay revolves around a ‘duel’ between two opposing characters. Each starts off with a health of 100 and a deck of cards. These — true to convention — depict a mixture of fantastical creatures, allies and monsters; and one-off ‘instant’ style spells and sorceries.

The playing area consists of two opposing lines of five ‘lanes’. Each turn, a player is dealt five cards from their deck and can choose to play two: either placing them in empty lanes on their side of the playing area (or to replace a card already occupying a lane with one from their hand), or — in the case of instants — cast them on a relevant target.

Creature cards have attack and health attributes, which indicate how much damage they can deal out and take. Like MtG’s ‘summoning sickness’, creatures cannot attack on the round they are played, having to wait until the next turn to strike. Some creatures have special abilities (again, many will be familiar — such as SolForge’s ‘breakthrough’ ability, the game’s version of MtG’s ‘trample’).

Many cards — creatures and spells — have an effect on those already in play. Some will add bonuses to cards they are placed next to; some will reduce the opponent’s health rating; other effects will only be invoked when cards of a certain type are played in following turns.

Once cards have been played, the round moves to the battle phase, where creatures who are able to attack leap into action (metaphorically — this is a card game, after all). If a creature’s opposing lane is filled, the two cards will duke it out, each reducing the other’s health by their attack rating. Damage is carried forward across rounds, so even creatures with high health ratings will get whittled down and leave the field eventually.

Unopposed cards deal their damage straight to the opposing player — as you’d expect, the first player to reduce the other’s health to zero is the winner.

SolForge’s main distinguishing mechanic comes from the ability for cards to ‘level up’. Every card in the decks has three levels: each more powerful than the last. Either granting larger attack and health bonuses, or introducing extra abilities (or both), players with higher level cards have the best chance of winning a duel.

Each card in the deck starts off at level one: once it is played, a ‘levelled up’ version of it is created and placed back in the draw deck. Once a player has played a certain number of rounds, they themselves level up — giving them access to these more powerful cards in their decks.

Implementation

SolForge is great to look at. Each card can be magnified and studied with a tap of the finger, allowing you to appreciate the artwork — and flip between the card’s three levels. The play area itself is laid out clearly, and things are easy to grasp from the word go.

What is less easy to get a handle on from this preview release is whether the game will have the same devilish tactical opportunities as its forebears. In MtG, half the fun was from keeping a card back in your hand until you knew it was going to unleash a mighty chain of effects that rendered you invincible. Here, there’s less opportunity for that style of gameplay.

You know which of your cards have been levelled and therefore have a chance of being dealt next hand, but — as your hand is completely cleared and redealt each turn — your strategic options of holding on to a ‘killer combo’ are lessened.

Another potential issue is that it’s not always immediately obvious what’s happening. Battle rounds are played out automatically, with each combat occurring simultaneously. This not only reduces the thrill of seeing a powerful card stomp an opponent’s into oblivion, but can also result in too much happening at once — leaving you wondering why on earth your Lifeshaper Savant just vanished from the field; or why your mighty level 3 Volcanic Giant is now sitting there with one hit point left…

The style of SolForge is appealing — some kind of fantasy / technology hybrid setting, where robot vs angel battles are not uncommon. Music is suitably — yet generically — fantastical too, and sound effects accompany actions and battles. The whole thing has a high set of production values.

As the game is a ‘free’ preview (there is an in-app store allowing you to buy extra decks), some of the gameplay options are greyed out. Only single player games are available — although the full title will include online multiplayer and campaign modes.

Verdict

With a limited deck selection and some options as-yet unavailable, it remains to be seen whether SolForge will go on to become a classic of the genre. All the ingredients seem to be there — though it’s possible they may have been mixed together to create something which is more of a trading card game snack than a fully satisfying banquet.

Score (for this preview release): 6/10

Yes. Yes, I do.

There’s always a bit of fear when its announced a big name board game is going digital. Especially when the game announced is as physically large as Eclipse is. The analog version of Eclipse features over 700 components, every single one beautifully shaped and colored. There are technology trees, player boards, colony ships, fleet ships, star bases, resource tokens, damage counters, and more. Setup in the realm of reality takes quite a while, and tear-down even longer. The expectation that Big Daddy’s Creations would flop with this undertaking wasn’t completely unrealistic, especially considering the tactile nature of Eclipse. The cardboard version is gorgeous, after all.

Big Daddy’s Creations knew what they were getting into, though, and they delivered. The app starts with a video-game-esque animation, introducing the main races and their simpler, human counterparts. Fans of Eclipse the original will get giggly tingles as the game’s story is flashed onto the screen. It’s Christmas in spring, even for those not in Colorado.

Gameplay

Eclipse falls into the category of 4x strategy games, similar to the classic Sid Meier’s Civilization. Players take on the role of one of the seven species in the known galaxy, or as leaders from the Galatic Council itself, vying for control over the galaxy. By exploring, expanding, exploiting and exterminating, the four X’s of the genre, you and your competitors will grow your civilizations in an attempt to amass the most victory points.

At the skeletal level, Eclipse is a simple enough game that is easy to pick up and run with. Each of the four X’s  is trivial to learn on its own, but the balance between the four points, in addition to your relations with your neighbors, makes Eclipse a game that is difficult to master. The game is divided into nine rounds that can contain several turns, the number of which depends on each player’s available influence and wealth. On your turn, you’re allowed to take one of six actions, all of which fit into at least one of the main categories. They’re actions that are similar in a lot of 4x games and are explore, adjust influence, research technology, upgrade ships, build ships, and move ships. They’re all pretty straight forward, but indulge me.

The Explore action is the most obvious – it allows you to explore the sectors adjacent to those you already have influence over. Influence is denoted by a small symbol in the corner of each territory and affects how much money you need available at the end of each round. At the end of each of the nine rounds, you need to pay an upkeep cost for every sector you influence,  as well as for every action you’ve taken, according to a sliding scale. The number of actions you can take each round is therefore limited by your available money, which is in turn affected by the number of sectors you control. When you set off to explore new territories, you’re given some stats about the areas available nearby. These stats let you know the probability of finding planets of each resource type (money, science and materials), as well as any ancient races that might be present.

After you’ve selected the territory you wish to explore, the particulars about what you find there are revealed. You can accept or reject the sector, and if you accept it and no ancient races are present, you’re given the chance to establish your influence there and then establish colonies.

Colonizing planets in your sectors grants you valuable resources that you need to help expand your empire further. Also, sectors with more valuable planets tend to be worth more victory points at the end of the game for whomever holds them. Planets that produce money are always useful, and science and material resource planets can be useful, depending on your strategy. Science is used to research new technologies, most of which can be applied to the ships you build with the material resource.

There are four classes of ships that you can build to help exterminate your enemies, each with different default abilities. Some are more defensive, some are faster, some are stronger. The army you build depends on what you need it for, as well as which species you’re playing as. The Terran roles all feature the same starting statistics, but the alien species have unique abilities that affect which strategy is best for them. Some races are just more inclined to be militaristic, even if they may not have the resources available initially for that strategy. Which brings us around to the battles. Ah yes, combat.

Ships are grouped by type in the combat screen and each grouping of ships share the same initiative. In the case of ties, defenders are granted first crack at doing damage, which is dealt by the outcome of a D6. Sixes are automatic hits, and ones automatic misses. Aside from that, it all depends on what modifiers are present due to upgrades on the ships doing the firing and the ships under fire.

Regardless of the outcome, both sides of the combat receive victory points, though the victor does earn quite a bit more. If the invading army succeeds in overcoming the defensive forces, they also get a shot at taking out the defending player’s colonies and taking over influence of the sector.

Local play supports up to 6 players, and you can also play online through Big Daddy’s Creations private servers, which hints at cross-platform support later. Games against the AI are relatively quick at less than an hour, though you have to sit and watch their turns, with only the option to skip their battle scenes. The more AI players you place into the galaxy with you – each set to their own difficulty level, if you like – the longer the game will take.

Implementation

It’s no little task to take the number five board game from BoardGameGeek’s Top 100 Games List and shove it into an iPad screen. Eclipse in its original form takes up a decent sized table and most of an afternoon, something only dedicated fans of the game are willing to put up with more than once. Both the size and time of this massive undertaking needed to be shrunk down, and gracefully. To do this, Big Daddy’s Creations chose the route of off-screen drawers and a zoomable galactic map for the main play screen, a place you’ll spend most of your time.

The research and upgrade actions are tucked nicely away to either side, both accessed and hidden via a simple touch. The battle screen is the only  game screen aside from the main, and it only features the fight animation, attack and retreat options.

There are still a few kinks to iron out with the pinch zoom feature and the option to skip watching all of the AI players’ turns would be nice, but aside from these small points, Eclipse is the best game I’ve played on the iPad in a long time. The touch areas, though seemingly small, are easy to hit and very responsive. Everything is in a logical place and there is plenty of info text around the app. The tutorial is also thorough in explaining all of the main actions and features of the app.

Verdict

Big Daddy’s Creations has not only succeeded in what they set out to do with Eclipse, they’ve also raised the bar on digital board gaming. They’ve taken a highly rated board game and delivered a digital version that stacks up against both it’s predecessor and competition. With a rich interface, comprehensive tutorial, full local and online multiplayer support,  and excellent execution of the theme, the iPad version of Eclipse plays much easier and quicker than its analog counterpart. A game that used to only see the flat of my table once every blue moon will now be played several times a week, if the past seven days have been anything to go by. Eclipse is a game that I crave to play with my friends and now, thanks to Big Daddy’s Creations, there’s very little excuse not to. And for $6.99 to download? That is a steal, folks. I would be willing to pay twice that for a game this well delivered.

Very well done, Big Daddy’s Creations.

Gameplay

At its core (don’t worry, I make an obvious ‘heart’ pun at the end of the review…), Alice is a simple card laying game, using poker hands to build points which are used to defeat your opponent.

Played on a checkered grid, you are dealt a hand of five cards which you take it in turns to place on the board. Your aim is to make horizontal or vertical lines of at least five cards which form two-of-a-kinds, flushes and full houses.

The points for each scoring line (through clever card placement you can make more than one each turn) is added up and the total points are then deducted from your opponent’s hit points. As you’d expect, the first player who loses all their hit points is defeated.

Fortunately, there are a few more layers of complexity added to this fairly basic premise. Your player – or Ego – is able to be levelled up, giving them more powerful statistics, access to attack-boosting weapons and other bonuses which swing the balance of power. Special cards can also be won (or bought via an in-game store) which can be played during games to heal yourself or put your opponent at a disadvantage.

However, all of these associated bits and pieces don’t have a massive impact on the game itself: which comes down again and again to laying down playing cards in a kind of solitaire / mahjong / Match 3 mashup stylee which gets repetitive quite quickly.

Presentation

What it lacks on the gameplay front, Alice more than makes up for in presentation. The graphics and visual style are appealing, giving a Tim Burton-esque gothic tint to Wonderland and its inhabitants, with suitably sinister music to accompany the atmosphere.

Although the game is for iPhone only, the artwork is clear and colourful and you’ll not need to squint too much to see what’s going on. It doesn’t scale for iPad, leaving you with the choice of playing it in native window mode, or zooming it up to full screen. At that point, things become a bit pixellated, but not that offensively.

It’s possible to play the game without pumping real cash down the rabbit hole, which is a bonus; and the special cards, weapons and varied characters from Alice’s adventures you meet along the way are all well designed and satisfyingly off-kilter.

A multiplayer mode is available, matching you up with random players online or with your friends on Facebook. Special bonuses, achievements and awards are available in multiplayer, all of which can be brought back into the solo campaign mode.

Verdict

Skyview should be applauded for trying something a bit different. They’ve put loads of effort into the game’s presentation, which is rich with options, customisation and variety. Sadly, they’ve overlooked the actual guts of the game a bit: Alice’s heart is a little too repetitive to encourage you to take advantage of all the features which the developers have so lovingly surrounded it with.

Do we have to?

Score: 5/10

You may now mark your scorecards with you guess of how many positive things I have to say about Talisman Prologue HD, which not only features zero multiplayer functionality, but also lacks AI to compete against.

Gameplay

Talisman’s core gameplay can be likened to Dungeons and Dragons aesthetic interbred with the mechanical sensibility of Snakes and Ladders. This is a game of rolling dice, moving round a track and stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Like many of the loot crazed heroes that have populated damn near every AD&D campaign, you race around a fantasy kingdom murdering monsters, leveling up and completing missions for creepy old wizards in caves. A round consists of rolling the movement dice, picking which direction you’re traveling and then resolving the events at the location you find yourself. While classic Talisman uses this simple collection of rules and the players’ (plural) imagination to create an adventure, in Prologue this, sadly, is as deep as the game goes. Rolling a dice, reading a card and maybe rolling another dice – repeat.

Get used to this

In place of the sprawling, competitive fantasy slug-fest, Prologue offers five solo quests for each of the game’s ten characters, each quest introducing you to the ideas and mechanics of the game. Though the missions get progressively more challenging, every challenge can be bested simply by wasting your valuable free time grinding to level up. There’s never a sense of threat or fear that you might not complete the quest, because you can just cautiously limp away from the danger until you can get healed up. Try that in Talisman proper and you’re more often than not going to get jumped by a fellow adventurer looking to steal your boots and unicorn.

The problem here isn’t just that I’m used to playing this game with other people, the rot lies far deeper. Brace yourself… the mechanics of this app do not work precisely because of how faithfully Talisman has been reproduced. Many of the encounter cards can slow a player’s movement, make them miss a turn or transform them into a toad. If you’re up against three other players and look like you’re doing pretty well, suddenly discovering that you can’t hold all your shiny weapons because you’re two inches tall can be a bit a pain – especially when they get a murderous glint in their eyes and come haring after your piteously feeble amphibian head. Even if they don’t kill you, if they can get to the space you were transformed in, they can steal all your goodies for themselves. In Prologue, however, missing a turn is of zero consequence because every turn is your turn, and getting frogged is just an irritation as you grind those dice rolls to get back to the space you dropped your loot. All of the danger in Talisman came from the other players, without them even the iconic toad curse is just more of your time wasted.

Gameplaywise, what you’re actually paying for with Talisman Prologue is just an overly extended tutorial for the Talisman Digital Edition planned for release later this year. This is several hours of tutorials for a game that I’ve genuinely never seen take more than five minutes to explain all of the rules.

Implementation

Prologue goes out of its way to capture the essence of the physical product, which is as vicious a double edged sword as you’re likely to find. When reproducing of the art of both the cards and board Prologue excels marvellously and is a great advertisement for the production values you’d expect from a Fantasy Flight published game. Unfortunately, that’s where the positives of exact reproduction end. The Fantasy Flight miniatures, cooed over by board gamers around the world for their attractiveness, just look like misshapen grey sprites in the app – their glowing borders only serving to highlight the difficulty of sculpting models a mere inch high.

In cardboard editions of games, publishers have to strike a balance when costing their product, so they can provide a reasonably priced game to the consumer in a box weighing less than an actual party of adventurers. Obviously, this restriction disappears once the physical components are converted into electrical signals, as is the case in an iPad app. The decision to retain the these odd looking unpainted miniatures just contributes to the overall feeling of apathy on the developers part – an apathy  towards creating a product for anyone that does not already own and love a copy of the game.

What actually makes this sort of shoddy implementation all the more frustrating is that where Nomad Games have done their own thing, it’s smart as all hell – particularly in their use of screen real estate. Rather than attempting to render the whole of your character sheet as a separate menu screen, Prologue uncharacteristically realises that such skeuomorphism would be stupid. All of the pertinent information – stats, inventory space, followers, etc. – is tastefully arranged around the edge of screen, providing a neat little HUD.

Verdict

This is a terrible, terrible app.

Avoid like the plague. Avoid like charity doorsteppers with cholera. Avoid like open sewers, abandoned funfairs and the cracks in the pavement.

I really can’t stress this enough. Talisman is supposed to be an unbalanced, cackling romp with your friends ­– the perfect accompaniment to beer and pretzels. Talisman will take even the slowest learners mere minutes to learn. Talisman does not require a paid for tutorial and you certainly do not need to waste your money on Prologue.

This summer Nomad Games will release the full Digital Edition of Talisman, which will feature AI opponents; online and pass-n-play multiplayer; more characters; and, hopefully, the actual game of Talisman. If Prologue had been put out as a free teaser to whet our appetite, I’d have praised it to the high heavens; but asking consumers to pay for a demo is insulting and awful business practice.

In certain circles, the American Civil War is what is commonly referred to as a ‘sore subject’. I’m an Englishman, so literally any opinion I voice about it is going to be considered the start of a fight and may even result, as it did once on a Greyhound bus in Arkansas, with a well-meaning amateur historian informing me that America “kicked you limey scum out in 1776, we’d be happy to do it again”. I also don’t actually know a great deal about the war, except that Clark Gable was involved somehow.

With all this in mind, I’d like everyone to join me in pretending that The Bitstreamers’ game refers to a totally different, imaginary civil war in a country which is a bit like America. They’re probably fighting over who has the nicest uniform, eighties power ballads, or something.

This is always happens in a country’s growing pains, every now and then they fall apart. Your people need you tonight, they need you more than ever. It’s like living in a powder keg and giving off sparks. Once upon a time the country all fell in line, but now it’s only falling apart. Lots of men are going to die before Lee surrenders to Grant.

Gameplay

Civil War: The Battle Game is a traditional light-weight, turn-based, hex strategy wargame where two armies square off with the aim of capturing key locations on the battlefield or simply wiping each other out. There’s not a great deal here that will come as a surprise to veterans of the genre. Not that that’s a bad thing, in the same way there’s very little to surprise veteran chess fans when a new chess app is released. Of course, there was that weird, weird blip last year from Battle Vs Chess, but that’s best not dealt with here.

For those of you that haven’t been exposed to the hexagonal strategy world, allow me explain what I mean by this. These games take place on a map covered in hexagons, known as a hex map. On these geometric battlefields great armies of counters do battle, each counter representative of a particular type of unit with its own array of statistics and each of which needs to be utilised correctly in order to combat the foe. Usually, dice are involved in the combat rolls to simulate the chance tides of war as the armies tussle over their victory conditions.

In this app, both sides have three unit types available: infantry, cavalry and artillery. Naturally, the cannon is slow moving, hard hitting and fragile; the horsies are fast and deadly; and the infantry are a bit rubbish. This appears to be a fairly accurate representation of what little I know about the forces involved in the Blue and Grey Civil War.

A player’s turn is split into two rounds, movement and combat.  In the former, every unit in your army can move up to its movement point total, though this limit can be increased or decreased by terrain modifiers and the proximity to enemy units. Normally, you’re going to want to balance your movement phase concerns between providing a defensive screen for your artillery pieces – thus protecting them from the attentions of the enemy’s cavalry – and trying to do the same to the other army’s cannons. Positioning is critical here. Overreach and leave a lone unit unsupported by adjacent units and you’ve opened them up for a mobbing. Don’t hit aggressively enough and while you bashing away at their rank and file soldiers, they’re dropping cannon fire on your head from a distance.

After you’ve grossly overcommitted your men, it’s time to see how many of your soldiers you’ve gotten killed this turn. Combat is worked out in a relatively simple calculation that compares the offence attribute of the aggressor with the defence stat of their foe, plus or minus modifiers from morale, terrain and supporting units. Then, after you’ve run the numbers and feel sure that your full strength platoon can best one guy in a hole, you find yourself screwed by the vicissitudes of the randomiser.

From a design perspective, luck is one of the more interesting aspects of the wargame genre. Though strategy is very much the purpose of these games, even the most meticulous of plans will fall apart at the hands of the random number generator and it’s luck that elevates the genre above being a exercise in number crunching, lending the events of the battle a narrative. In Civil War, both sides spin a roulette wheel marked with modifiers ranging between -3 to +3. What’s especially nice about this randomisation mechanic is that each modifier is accompanied by an illustration of the chance event, which lends a personality to the combat. For example, a +1 bonus is conferred from beer to buoy the men’s spirits, while -3 penalty is inflicted when a poorly maintained handgun explodes in the ranks.

There’s a good deal of replayability here for the committed player with three available maps to battle across, each with slightly different objectives and game lengths. In ‘Brandy Station’, the armies have six turns to cause as much damage to their foes as possible, presumably to persuade them to reconsider their choice of costume – or ‘uniform’, as they say in the military. In the unpronounceable ‘Chickamauga’, the enemy must be repelled from a central area of the field before the twelve turn time limit. The final and longest of the scenarios is ‘Fredricksburg’, a gruelling eighteen turn marathon that sees the Blue army assault a town held by the Grey forces – victory goes to the army that can hold one particular hex by the games end. I’ve been working on a theory that this hex holds a vast grey dye warehouse and, as such, its destruction would be a devastating blow to the morale of the defenders.

Implementation

When this was first released last summer it met with a lukewarm response amidst criticism of the artwork, user interface and the occasionally lunatic AI. Happily, The Bitstreamers have kept up their work on the app and intend to continue developing the project, with plans to introduce asynchronous multiplayer in the v2 update. As it stands, Civil War offers single player and pass-and-play modes, which – while satisfying for some armchair generals – may leave the hardcore strategists wanting to test their mettle against a wider array of opponents online.

Right now, thanks to the lack of an online component and a very disconnected pass and play experience, I’m worried that newcomers to the genre will grow bored pretty quickly as they watch the computer work though its turns, especially during the longer scenarios. In tabletop wargames, this down time can be spend analyzing the map and planning for your next assault, with frequent interruptions as you roll dice and hope your men don’t die. Here though, a lot of your valuable gaming time is spent watching the map jump around violently as the computer plays its moves.

Another oddity of Civil War lies in its art work. This is – by far and away – the weirdest thing about the game. The Bitstreamers have opted for a really cute pixel style, which I highly approve of. Unfortunately, during the Blue and Grey Civil War most of the battles seem to have taken place in brown places, with brown mud, brown buildings and brown trees, occasionally broken up by a patch of grass or two.. Individually, the art assets are very attractive, but when the whole screen is filled with the flat colours of pixel art and a dull palette, it’s difficult to feel excited.

Peculiarly, when Civil War was first released, it came with only the lower art style for the soldiers. We may never find out quite why the devs decided that adorable cartoon soldiers would be the soundest business decision for game primarily marketed to historical strategy fans, but I’m so happy they did. If a unit suffers a casualty, stars spin above their heads (!) So when I attack the Grey army’s cavalry and my guns explode – killing hundreds no doubt – I picture Yosemite Sam.

Of course, if you prefer the grim and frowning men, they’re on offer, but their dourness is not for me, I’m afraid. Other optional settings available include limited visibility and an online leaderboard to compare your games against others.

Verdict

Civil War is a bit of an oddity to offer a verdict on. I have no doubt at all that it’s a very competent wargame, with a level of complexity well judged to a tablet audience. It’s just that despite the simplicity of the rules, I can’t see casual gamers putting up with the long wait between turns and bland pallette and… well… chances are, if you’re into wargames, you’ll have more fun playing Battle of the Bulge.

Pricing has been set to $6.99, which is a steal if the digital execution turns out to be nearly as good as the physical. The analog version of Eclipse is ranked number five on both BoardGameGeek’s Top Games and Strategy Games lists, surpassing gaming giants such as Le Havre, Dominion, and Stone Age. Be assured we’ll be investigating if this digital incarnation is worthy of  its origin’s legacy when it drops.

For those wondering what exactly the excitement is all about, buckle up.

Eclipse is the story of intersteller civilization, where players compete for available resources and power in the limited confines of a single galaxy. Supporting two to six players, this battle for galatic dominance features nearly 700 components! Players race to settle new planets and research new technologies, they harvest diplomatic  relationships and when those fail, wage war upon one another.

From the publisher, Asmodee:

The galaxy has been a peaceful place for many years. After the ruthless Terran–Hegemony War (30.027–33.364), much effort has been employed by all major spacefaring species to prevent the terrifying events from repeating themselves. The Galactic Council was formed to enforce precious peace, and it has taken many courageous efforts to prevent the escalation of malicious acts. Nevertheless, tension and discord are growing among the seven major species and in the Council itself. Old alliances are shattering, and hasty diplomatic treaties are made in secrecy. A confrontation of the superpowers seems inevitable – only the outcome of the galactic conflict remains to be seen. Which faction will emerge victorious and lead the galaxy under its rule?

This morning saw the release of a game trailer and several game screenshots, and from what it looks like, the pixel-pushing version of this amazing game should live up to its name quite well.

The player selection screen of the game, which looks to imply that the digital version will support both up to five AI players against a single human opponent, gives a preview of some of the unique races available for play.

A closer look at the Planta character shows that race selection goes beyond the color of your pieces and actually effects the strategy used in play.

Oh boy, oh boy! If you’re too excited to wait patiently, check out our reviews of some of Big Daddy’s Creations’ other games, such as Neuroshima Hex HD, Caylus and Army of Frogs.

Gameplay

In Tribe Survival – why isn’t it called Tribal Survival? That would roll off the tongue so much easier – the goal is to collect all the runes, totem pieces, and  body parts that you can, while completing the 86 currently available quests. You may win once you achieve all this, or you may not and an update could just double it all anyway. If you find out, let us know.

In theory, the best way to excel at Tribe Survival is to train your little hero into a lean, mean, fighting machine. Your little guy has four core stats that are trained exactly the same way – by rolling dice to try and match sets.

The number of dice you’re allowed to roll per a training session depends on the intensity at which you pursue that chiseled pixel perfection, which in turn affects how much energy you use that session. You’re given a set amount of energy per day, so how much you can improve is limited to time, as well as luck, unless you’re willing to dish out some cash to recharge your energy bar.

The energy your character uses for training is separate from your stamina – that you use to battle other players. There’s only a few AI characters to battle, and they’re all considered bosses that you need to unlock, so for the most part you’ll gain experience on the battlefield.

Fighting here is the same as in boss fights – you roll dice. Each opponent gets one 7-sided D6 (only in the virtual realm) that you, as the player of the game, tap to “roll”. Really you’re tapping to stop the random cycle, and maybe you can get good enough to stop it on numbers you actually want, but it’s still a die. Okay, so there are modifiers that get applied randomly from runes you’ve collected and other perks from your totem, but you’re still just rolling a bloody die. And to make it worse, you’re initiating the roll for both you and your opponent. Their character is only shell of a creature, copied from the work their human has dumped into this game – there’s no actual person behind those unblinking eyes when you do battle. Not really. Not at all.

Success in the battlefield earns you runes and totem pieces, which in turn helps you in this arena of rolls. They can increase attack power, modify dice values, freeze an opponent’s roll for multiple rounds and do a variety of other fun things. Another way to earn these perks is to complete quests, which are simple tasks that encourage more play.

Implementation

The theme and art of Tribe Survival is thorough and engaging, the menu system easy to navigate with large, obvious touch areas, and the menu tutorials on initial load are helpful. The “rolling” dice mechanic in the training arena and battlefield gives the user the impression their timing will sway the outcome – whether or not this is true is up to the developer to reveal, as it’s not obvious.

There are still a few hiccups in the code, as occasionally the app freezes for no apparent reason and sometimes even requires a hard termination if it won’t crash on its own. Really this is a shame, as on initial look, this feels like a very high quality game that’s available for free. Which brings me to another pain point – there is no iPad version. The iPhone scaled screen doesn’t look all that bad, aside from being pixelated, but it would be nice if it was an universal app.

Verdict

There’s a lot to do in Tribe Survival. It reminds me a bit of Tiny Tower in that regard – you can spend hours on this game and never win, because there’s no way to win. The use of dice and having players tap those dice while they’re cycling inparts a small feeling of control over success or failure, but it really does come down to dice. You can try and collect runes and totems that give you some real power over the outcomes, if you have the patience to invest in a game that you can never win. This is really a completion-ist’s game, if there ever was one, and if you enjoy that kind of play with a PvP focus, then this game is for you.

Enter CardWarden, an app that lets you create digital decks from physical – or otherwise – cards.

Gameplay

CardWarden isn’t really a game, so this isn’t really about how it plays so much as interacts. At it’s most basic, it’s a tool for storing and prototyping cards digitally. Users can copy existing physical cards with the aid of the camera, or import images from the Photos directory. Once the cards are copied into the app and the deck constructed, there is a place to test how the stack deals out and another to “play” a game.

There’s no way for the app to police which ever game you decide to play on its table, but it tries to provide some of the basic game features. There’s a random number generator for die rolls, tokens for counters, and some “hand” compartments that hide off screen to server as storage for individual players. You can rotate cards 90-degrees in one direction to simulate tapping and flip a card to be face-up or face-down. A simple touch and drag moves cards and decks around the screen and when you save your game, it even saves the positioning.

 Implementation

If you can get past the interface that looks like it comes from 2002, you’ll find CardWarden to be a nice tool for digitizing any card game you care to put the work in for. It has immense potential in regards to prototyping decks for game designers, and is easily used with trading card games. If you have the patience to import your collection, it can also be a great catalog for your cards.

There are a few kinks on the current release, such as an inability to rotate cards 180 or 270 degrees, odd touch areas and smaller buttons. The developer has posted an update for review as of this writing that addresses some of these issues, but for the price, this still a great app, quirks and all.

(Note: The cards featured in the screenshots are from the Kickstarted Matching Lions game, which is a game for ages 3+ and plays like one.)