Back to Front: Hunted Cow thaws out Russian Front for an August release

Don’t even front.

Back in December, prolific developers Hunted Cow gave us a peek at Russian Front, a WWII operational-scale war game that promised to be their biggest yet — and a shift from their Tank Battle tactical games which are more intimate in scope. The normally punctual Hunted Cow originally predicted a January release for this one, and they’ve clearly missed that mark by few months. And that’s a real shame. In a perfect world, every Eastern Front wargame comes out in the dead of winter and every customer gets a free furry hat in the post.

But getting in touch today, the studio told me that Russian Front is back on track and should be out in late August on PC and Android, and presumably iOS after that. It’ll be too warm for furry hats, but what can you do?

Hunted Cow have had one hell of a busy year. They’ve released whole series of light WWII tactical war games (we reviewed the first, Tank Battle East Front 1941 back in March), announced a new partnership with noted board game publishers Victory Point, and even published a slightly random tower defence game. We should expect some news about that VPG hook-up soon, I’m told.

Two more screenshots of Russian Front after the jump.

Land wars in Asia etc.

T-34, you complete me.

Freeze, punk: Mighty Tactical Shooter puts the space-brakes on the shmup

“Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Freaky Space Worm Valance.”

Being a certified Old Man™ with the reflexes of a sedated elephant seal, I can hardly imagine a game I’d like to play less than a bullet hell shoot-em-up. And yet, Mighty Tactical Shooter has me considering blowing the dust off the old gaming Kickstarter klaxon. Before you start the impeachment proceedings, hear me out. Mighty Tactical Shooter is a shooter that you can play and drink a beer at the same time.

Mighty Tactical Shooter is the brainchild of Brighton-based former Second Life dev Johnny Marshall, and it’s built around an idea I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen before. The game is a 2D side-scrolling shooter like the ones that have roamed the Earth since the age of the dinosaur, but the evolutionary twist here is that the game is entirely turn-based.

Turns in Mighty Tactical Shooter are simultaneous with the enemies’, so when they fire a missile at you, you can use a gravity weapon to alter its path, or target it with a missile of your own. Basically, you get to see a shmup the way Wayne Gretzky sees a hockey rink. There’s also three different AI subsystems on your ship (“AI buddies” — sounds legit) which you can route power to at your discretion, boosting your ability to dish out, absorb, or repair damage, which would give you a lot of flexibility in how you approach different tactical environments.

There’s eight hours left to fund Mighty Tactical Shooter on Kickstarter, but its success is now a forgone conclusion as it hit its £10,000 goal earlier today. Marshall told me yesterday that the game already runs like a dream on his Android tablet, and he’s planning an iPad edition as well.

The pitch video is after the break.

Review: 80 Days

I’ve been everywhere, man.

I am of two minds about 80 Days, and trying to find a compromise between those different points of view has been about as easy as actually circumnavigating the globe. Here is a game that I can recognize and appreciate as probably the best example of interactive fiction ever produced, but I have very little interest in sitting down and replaying it.

My dilemma is that 80 Days really doesn’t do anything wrong, exactly. It drops you headlong into Verne’s classic tale of Phileas Fogg’s attempt to circle the globe in the titular amount of time in order to win a £20,000 wager. You play as Fogg’s sturdy valet, Passepartout and are in charge of deciding the route, managing your funds, and the overall well-being of your employer. The game starts with a sense of urgency to catch the first train out of London and the pace never lets up.

The game consists of 144 different cities which act as hubs for your journey. Each city offers you actions you can perform. Want to explore a bit? It may open up new routes on the map, but it will cost you precious time. Need more cash? Go to the bank, but it will take a day or so for the money to be wired across. A global map and showing you known routes and the costs and times associated with them is always at your disposal, and if you’ve planned properly (or just get lucky) a route will be ready to depart for Rome as soon as you pull into Vienna, other wise you’ll have to accelerate time or occupy yourself in the city market.

It’s pronounced “eye-gor”

One of the major activities you can perform in each city is to visit the market. Buying and selling of goods (a bolt of silk in Rangoon, a vial of poison in Yokohama) is the most time-efficient way to increase your overall funds or to find items that may protect Fogg on your journey. For example, you can purchase an inexpensive fur coat which will fortify Fogg’s health on that Trans-Siberia train ride, but someone in Prague wants to give you £900 for it. What do you do? Smart arbitrage can play a crucial role in your success or failure, as your cash reserves can deplete rapidly, but it also seems like quite the crap shoot. Fogg will usually tell you where an item can be sold for a profit, but that amount can vary from hundreds to thousands of pounds.

Move to a city, find new routes, depart. On the way, make some cash and keep you boss alive. Oh, and do it all in 80 days. That’s the crunch, but it’s the fluff that really makes 80 Days shine.

In between every city and accompanying each action you select is some incredibly well-written prose, telling the stories of the people you meet and adventures you undertake as you meander about. Here you can incite a mutiny against the crown and commandeer a steamship, discover a city that walks on steam-powered legs, or gossip with smugglers in a seedy tavern. It’s these interactions that drive the story forward and make the game fun to explore. There’s a vivid imagination at work behind this setting, which isn’t like anything you’ve seen before.

This really shortens the daily commute

So, why do I have any reservations? Why am I not zipping around the globe instead of playing Hearthstone? There’s nothing wrong with the game as it is, but there are several small factors that don’t do it for me.

Buying and selling goods between cities is, frankly, not a very rewarding experience. In fact, it’s fairly dull. Finding new routes is a brute force matter of just asking as many questions as possible — it never feels like there’s any strategy to Passepartout’s conversations. Perhaps there is a subtlety to figuring out more and better routes, but after several games I didn’t see it. Just keep pounding away (conversationally, that is) and more routes will open. Certain items that you buy in markets will cause certain kinds of characters to have more conversation options, but this mechanic is mostly obscure (how do I know if this ticket inspector is “prim” or “solicitous”?) and impossible to plan ahead for.

As for keeping Fogg healthy, that can get a bit tricky. Of course, while travelling you can always attend to Fogg which acts as a heal, increasing his hit points. This comes at the opportunity cost of conversing with fellow passengers to unlock more routes, of course.

Choose your own mis-adventure

While the game-like parts of 80 days aren’t the most compelling, the story more than makes up for it. It’s great fun to see what kind of mischief you can get into (or not into) in your journey. Passepartout is a player character that you’re always one step away from, observing as much as you inhabit, and he’s written in a way that’s both comical and insightful about 19th-century classism. The setting and modes of transport and full of surprises: submersible trains, walking cities, airships, ocean-bound steamers, hot air balloons. The politics of this Victorian world aren’t quite our own, either, opening up interesting subplots about secretive guilds and corrupt satraps. It’s an exhilarating read.

And that’s really the issue. If you go into 80 Days looking for a good yarn, you’ll get it. But it feels like a ride more than a game — I never felt like I was getting better or worse at playing 80 Days. I just had a different ride every time. But there’s quite a lot to be said for that in a world where the ride might be a mechanical elephant, stalking through Madhya Pradesh with the sounds of drums echoing out from the jungle.

Out Tonight: 80 Days, Empire Manager, MEG RVO, and Devious Dungeon for Android

Once you get east of say, Chittagong, you can probably lose that cricket ball.

After pushing back release at the 11th hour last week, 80 Days is here tonight. The launch date switch-a-roo was a smart bit of business because this is one of the quietest release nights in memory: there’s only three new noteworthy titles to be pulled out of the ceaseless, fetid tide of infinite runners and hidden object games.

Let’s have a look at them, shall we? Have your manservant fetch the looking spectacles.

80 Days is the next game from the makers of last year’s genre-redefining Sorcery — it was meant to be a quick diversion while Inkle was on a break between Sorcery chapters 2 and 3, but quickly took on a life of its own. Based loosely on Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in Eighty Days, this game takes place on a 19th-century Earth that is not quite our own.

I loved the game when I played a preview build of it a few weeks back. Inkle’s steam-powered automatons and airship passenger lines make for exciting exploration and the characters in this gamebook are endearing and memorable. And like Sorcery before it, 80 Days has a completely fresh visual style that looks like no other work of interactive fiction I’ve ever seen. Neumann will be delivering PT‘s final verdict soon — we should have that review up no later than tomorrow morning.

80 Days will be out at midnight for five US dollars, and out at 11pm Eastern if you’re in the colonies.

I feel a bit as though MEG RVO is a younger cousin who’s graduating high school today — the game’s genial developers Skunkwerks Kinetic Industries (much nicer than that gunmetal moniker would suggest) have been keeping us abreast of this game’s development for years on our humble PT forums.

Tonight’s release of MEG RVO — Battle for the Territories is a multiplayer RTS that boasts of creative input from legendary novelist William Gibson. I’m too old and crotchety to play multiplayer RTS games but if I was going to recommend one, it would definitely be the one with William Gibson’s name in the credits. It’ll definitely be better than this one with Pauly Shore’s name on it, anyway.

MEG RVO — Battle for the Territories is five dollars when it arrives in your time zone tonight.

Some of you have already looked at the screenshot down there and deduced that Empire Manager borrows some inspiration from Centurion: Defender of Rome. Those of you have probably stopped reading and are downloading already.

For the rest of you, Empire Manager comes to us from Tower Dwellers makers Eccentricity, and it definitely takes a page from Centurion’s book. You have to manage a Classical-era empire, carefully balancing your expenses against your harvests and managing research while you build a standing army to conquer neighbours and guard your provinces. I’ve only had time to spend 10 minutes or so with it but it’s clever. No video I’m afraid, but there’s screenshots here.

No need to wait up if you’re interested — Empire Manager is out right now for $4 (iPhone only) or $8 for the Universal edition with no IAP silliness of any kind.

If you can seduce Cleopatra in this one I haven’t figured out how yet.
But I’m not giving up that easily.

Finally, we have Devious Dungeons, a roguelike platformer published by the fine citizens at Noodlecake, makers of PT‘s favorite guilty pleasure Super Stickman Golf. Their press release opened with the question, “Does anyone really know what a rogue-like really is?” I immediately deleted the email and then set fire to my computer before Clancy and Phil got wind of that particular topic, thus rescuing the rest of the week.

This one came out on iOS yonks ago but it’s debuting tomorrow on Android.

Devious Dungeons will be $2 on Android when it arrives a bit later, and you can grab it right now on iOS if you’re so inclined.

Licensed to ill: Plague Quarter opens in Hearthstone

The starting position for Heroic Loatheb. Unless you’ve got some healing, you’ll be dead in 10 rounds from his hero power alone.

Today is going to be a crappy day and it’s Blizzard’s fault. We were told that each new quarter of the Curse of Naxxramas expansion for Hearthstone would arrive over the next four Tuesdays. What they failed to mention is that “Tuesday” means 11:59pm Pacific Time. That means that addicts, like me, were forced to stay up until 2am to unlock the next wing of the expansion. Blizzard, you magnificent bastards.

For sane Hearthstone fans, you were greeted this morning with the option to enter the Plague Quarter. If you’re unfamiliar with Warcraft lore, the Plague was a magical disease that turned the humans of Lordaeron into the undead Scourge (and was also responsible for the Sylvanas led Forsaken, but that’s another tale). Thus, in the Plague Quarter, you can expect a lot of undeath and disease, and the bosses do not disappoint.

Noth the Plaguebringer is the first boss and a powerful necromancer. He is the first character with a passive hero power, and it simply raises any of his opponent’s dead minions as 1/1 skeletons on his side. The second boss is the guy who’s been in all the promotional images for Naxxramas, Heigan the Unclean. His power is a 1 mana burst that does 2 damage to your left-most minion. Lastly, we have Loatheb, an undead-fungal-monster-thingee. For 2 mana he can hit your hero for 3 damage, and on top of that he starts with 75 hit points.

The Plague Quarter is available for 700 gold or $7, or cheaper if you purchase it as part of a bundle. Otherwise, Hearthstone is free to download on the App Store.

Delay of game overturned: Blood Bowl hits iOS & Android tomorrow

The last holdouts report to camp.

About a week after we lamented the lack of updates over its whereabouts, Focus Home Interactive have announced that the delayed tablet version of Blood Bowl will be out tomorrow on both Android and iOS.

I just had a peek around the Kiwi App Store (where the game would already be if it were getting a midnight release) and I don’t see any sign of Blood Bowl there yet, so it’ll probably go live in the middle of the day sometime tomorrow. This appears to be a straight port of the PC version of the game that’s been out for some years — FHI are advertising that there’s cross-platform play between mobile and PC. There’s also same-device hotseat play. The game will ship with Human and Orc squads, and there will be Dwarfs, Skaven, Wood Elves and Chaos available as “additional races” — presumably DLC within the app.

There’s no trailer for this tablet edition yet, so after the jump I’ve got an hour of Total Biscuit walking you through the (presumably near-identical) PC version. Not familiar with Blood Bowl? It’s basically what Vince McMahon was trying to do with the XFL, except a bit more serious. The video below should give you a good grounding, or you can have a look at the tabletop version that inspired all these digital ones.

Out There’s away team: A Galactic Keep Dice Battles hands-on preview

It bleeds. You can kill it.

Something moves in the darkness at the end of this tunnel. It is too far away to see what, exactly. But you know that it is not Balkyn Gray, because Balkyn Gray’s corpse is what you have been sent here to retrieve.

More likely it’s the thing that killed him, a tonelit fox. The poison rounds from Balkyn’s reouge rifle will have weakened the monster, but it sure won’t be any friendlier, and the knife-sharp bone crests protruding from its arms won’t be any softer.

Check your inventory. Your bio-stun rod, good for getting the drop on organics. An ancient but still-effective sabre you found in a nest of feral war shadows. Some local plants with observed medicinal properties — less than useful for you, a robot, but some of your comrades may find them valuable later. Balkyn’s Huntmaster Handbook, the constant companion of every pakall hunter. The Coalition-issued temporal relay that you’ll affix to Balkyn’s body if and when you find it, which will pull him out of this reality and reassemble him… somewhere else.

There’s a passage off to the right, one that looks like it was shored up for use by sentients. Maybe there’s something in there you could scrounge to help you fight the tonelit. Of course, if there’s no other way out of that passage and the tonelit decides to wander over this way, you’ll be trapped in there with it. And maybe someone else will have to come down here to slap a relay onto your unmoving shell.

Starting a new game gives you a chance to flip through the episode’s sourcebook, which includes maps and story background.

Galactic Keep: Dice Battles is so original and so inventive, that any attempt to compare it to other media comes up short. Like Warhammer Quest, it is a turn-based dungeon crawler, but the sci-fi setting is weirder (exuberantly so) and more full of variety. Like Out There, the game pays humble homage to the comics and pen-and-paper RPGs of the 1980s, but it’s more ostentatious and violent than Mi-Clos’ melancholy exploration game. Gilded Skull designer Rob Lemon’s art and writing would slot him seamlessly into a gig at Image Comics working on Prophet.

What Gilded Skull have made is a lovingly detailed tribute to tabletop role-playing, and GKDB goes to great lengths to emulate the experience of playing with pen-and-paper. When you start a new game of Galactic Keep, you’re invited to flip through a sourcebook that might have been transported here from a hobby store in 1987. The cards for characters you haven’t played with yet are kept behind virtual plastic protectors, waiting for you to write your own stats onto them. Moving and fighting are all turn-based and adjudicated by rolling virtual 10-sided dice. There are half a dozen different characters, but if one dies while exploring the abandoned mining station you’ve been sent to investigate, you have to retrieve her corpse before you can play as her again.

You will explore just to see what Lemon’s come up with for his next monster.

But this is very much a video game, taking advantage of the digital medium to make something that’s more than just a replica. Characters level up and weapons can be modded without having to find a decent pencil eraser. AI monsters wander the map and chase you when you come into view. Ambient sounds sell the feeling of being on an alien world.

The greatest achievement of Galactic Keep is the fiction, the universe. Any nerd with coherent memories of the mid-1980s will instantly feel at home, but this world is completely one-of-a-kind. Lemon’s coalition of alien bounty hunters is filled with fascinating original characters and his creature designs borrow little from familiar sources. There’s no Alien or Predator knock-offs, no sci-fi Indiana Jones and no light-sabres. The game is so completely fresh that I found myself playing it just see  a new item or the next beast.

Humans are a minority in this corner of the galaxy.

The game is still in alpha (Lemon hopes to release it this year) but it’s a remarkable thing already. I worry a bit about the combat, which is almost completely dice-driven and not positional, but it offers a similar amount of depth as Warhammer Quest did, and that’s a game I sunk many, many hours into.

I also fret about how much obvious effort has gone into the content in this first module of the game. Lemon and his partners at Gilded Skull have been working on Galactic Keep for years — and it shows in the game’s extraordinary level of hand-crafted detail. But that also suggests that more GK expansions will take a similar amount of time. But if that’s a problem, it’s a good one, because it only demonstrates how fond I am of what’s here.

I will not make any substantial bet that Galactic Keep sees a release in 2014. I’ve now seen first-hand what an obsessive perfectionist Rob Lemon is (this pre-release alpha is already more polished than 95% of the version 1.0 games I play) and I wouldn’t be surprised if he woke up in September with a manic certainty that the game needs another year of work. It doesn’t, though.

Whenever Galactic Keep gets here, it will have been worth the wait.

The road rises to meet your feet in Phantom Rift, the next game from Foursaken Media

More like Fabulous Rift.

America’s most prolific all-sibling game development studio have revealed their latest offering. The video after the jump shows off gameplay from Phantom Rift, the next title from Block Fortress makers Foursaken Media. You play as a wizard exploring a mysterious and perilous world by himself, which definitely violates the terms of your travel insurance. That’s living on the edge.

Phantom Rift looks to be the most promising Foursaken game yet, to my eye: there’s a big emphasis on exploration, it seems, and the combat appears to be turn-based. The brothers advertise that there will be 300 different collectible spells to employ. You can customise your wizard, as well, and the sooner I unlock the leopard-print Anubis head you can see at 0:18, the happier I’ll be.

Phantom Rift is due out for iOS and Android in Q3 of this year. I can’t quite grok how the combat system works from the video, but I’m definitely intrigued. Watch the trailer and speculate below.

Chainsaw Warrior devs say: Save New York, win a board game

You know, he’s already really self-conscious. Calling him “thing” isn’t helping.

A board game? When the Ghostbusters saved New York, they got a key to the city. Mariano Rivera got a throne made out of bats. The Avengers got shawarma. And we get a board game?

To be fair, what Auroch Digital are offering here isn’t your aunt’s sitting-room copy of Pictionary: it’s a 1980s-vintage Chainsaw Warrior set. To win this fine artefact, you have to upload a video of yourself saving New York from an invasion of trans-dimensional zombies (the worst kind) in Chainsaw Warrior, send a link to gtn@aurochdigital.com, and they’ll choose an exceptional entry to receive the original Games Workshop board game from 1987.

When I reviewed Chainsaw Warrior last year, it was probably my favorite least-favorite game of 2013. The game is a reverently accurate resurrection of the masochistically unfair Games Workshop titles of the 1980s, and thus wasn’t to my taste. But the production of the game itself was so professionally done, I still hold it up as one of the exemplars of digital card game translations. Watch the trailer after the break just to catch some of the music.

Chainsaw Warrior is available on iOS, Android, and PC too — and Auroch have put it on sale for the moment. If one of you wins the game, you gotta send us pictures of it. And we can go get shawarma.

Shanty town: Year Walk makers Simogo unveil The Sailor’s Dream

Seeking to find.

Simogo have revealed their next game: The Sailor’s Dream, a title that they see as completing a triptych of games alongside the critically acclaimed Year Walk and Device 6.

In a blog post today, Simogo’s Simon Flesser refers to The Sailor’s Dream as “a more philanthropic story” than the eerie Year Walk and the drolly self-referential Device 6. “Instead of creating a feeling of suspense,” he says, “we want to communicate something that feels warmer, yet melancholic.” To that end, The Sailor’s Dream has no puzzles, and Simogo calls it “challenge-free”. The story will be told from multiple perspectives, maybe like an interactive Rashomon.

Simogo have squared the modern artist’s circle: they have become commercially successful by making games with no obvious commercial appeal. The Sailor’s Dream sounds like their boldest stroke yet — go tell a game publisher that you’d like funding to make a “challenge-free” game and come back and describe their guffaws in detail.

We bestowed year-end awards on both Year Walk and Device 6 last year, so I’m clearly quite fond of Simogo. The game arrives on iOS in “late 2014″. Let’s see where this story takes us.

Watch the trailer after the jump.

I encourage you to click through to YouTube just to see how many Sailor Moon videos YouTube packs into the “recommended” column.

A place of (not so) quiet reflection: MZR hits iOS soon

Ugh lay off it’s Monday

Okay, imagine a game about solving mazes quickly. Now imagine that your goal in the game isn’t to solve the maze, precisely, but to bet on which possible solutions to the maze are the fastest. Also imagine that the mazes take place in one of those hallucinogenic flashbacks that Rust Cohle was always having in True Detective.

That’s what’s going on in MZR, which British dev Yordan Gyurchev (working as Funky Circuit) submitted for Apple certification over the weekend. The frantic pacing and throbbing visuals are quite a departure for Gyurchev, whose previous work includes the comparatively sedate alien invasion-themed geography quiz Inquisition Earth.

Gird yourself to watch the trailer after the jump.

UPDATE: Down in the comments, the eagled-eyed Blackfire1929 spotted that MZR is on the App Store already for free. I told you it was soon!

Racing slick: Our warm-up lap with Motorsport Manager (which is in App Store approvals right now)

Right on the Button.

I was floored back in June by the trailer for Motorsport Manager, an iOS open-wheel racing sim that former Hello Games dev Christian West has been building by himself for the past year. It was just beautiful to look at, which isn’t something a rational person ever expects from a game of this variety.

Sports management games are such rarities that those of us who enjoy them are more than happy to accept them as cantilevered spreadsheets with a bare minimum of video game tinsel. I still remember when the big feature in a new Out of the Park Baseball game was sound effects. This was in like 2007, by the way, not during the Reagan administration.

I’ve been playing a preview build of Motorsport Manager over the weekend, and I can tell you first-hand that, yup, there’s sound effects. Generally speaking, the high-gloss presentation completely lives up to the expectations set by the trailer. But let’s see what else is in there.

My team’s fans were second-guessing my qual strategy on the in-game Twitter. Everybody’s a critic.

In Motorsport Manager, you are the owner of a racing team that starts in a fictionalised low-tier British or Aussie competition (think GP3), trying to work your way up to the top flight of competition. In-between races your control is at a very high level: you’re signing contracts with sponsors and expanding R&D facilities while keeping one eye on the team’s bottom line. In this respect, Motorsport Manager resembles James Black’s delightful featherweight soccer sim Football Chairman, another game that streamlined the sports management sim into something more… well, manageable.

If you were expecting Motorsport Manager to have the deep individual spark plug modelling of an old classic like Grand Prix Manager 2 – that’s not what this is. You aren’t making technician-level decisions about ballast or toe angles. On the car development side of things, your job is to allocate budgets and let the boffins get on with it. But on race day, things are different.

You can get away with racing slicks on a wet track — for a little while.

Every race weekend features a qualifying day and then the race itself. You choose the car’s basic setup for each track (focus on acceleration or top speed? straightaway speed or cornering aerodynamics?), choose tires, and decide how hard you want your drivers (who are rated on overtaking, consistency, and other attributes) to push versus nursing those rapidly-deteroriating tires. Motorsport Manager is rather hands-off most of the time, but on race weekend it breaks out the tactical decisions you expect from a racing sim.

All of this is presented in a beautifully self-assured package. The UI has a clean-lined iOS 7 feel about it and the races themselves (which play out in real-time but can be sped up if you don’t want to watch all 20-odd laps) are animated on a 3D race course with a striking tilt-shift visual effect.

Motorsport Manager isn’t massively complex — but it’s clearly made by someone with a deep love of the sport. The app is filled with delightful world-building details like tweets from your team’s fans (and from your occasionally cranky drivers), random off-track events, and charmingly designed (and humorous) sponsor logos. It’s a time-waster, but it’s a time-waster made by a gear-head for gear-heads, and it’s easy to fall down a “one more race” rabbit hole where a five-minute session turns into an hour.

West has submitted the game to Apple and he’s hoping to launch it in mid-August. I’ll let you know when he’s got a specific date in mind. Until then, you can follow him on Twitter.

Field Marshal Owen’s Guide to Commander: The Great War (for Noobs)

Home by Christmas, they said.

So you’ve decided that you’re not waiting for my review, and now you’re embedded into the couch, a cold drink within arm’s reach, and Commander: The Great War loaded up on your iPad. Good choice. I’m terribly fond of this game, and non-wargamers need not be intimidated by it.

Commander is a turn-based, grand strategy-level wargame based on the First World War. It is an admirable attempt to do justice to an enormously complex, globe-spanning war — so while not a terribly complex game, it still has a number of different levers one must learn to operate it enjoyably. If also suffers from the fact that World War I has been completely eclipsed as a topic of popular understanding (and as a subject of wargames!) by its successor. Going into Commander without a working knowledge of the historical context is a handicap you don’t need to suffer.

So with this guide, I’m going to attempt to give you quick grounding in how to understand Commander and try to color in enough of this period in history so that you feel the weight of what you’re trying to do.

When you start a new game of Commander: The Great War (using the earliest 1914 campaign start date), the first thing you may notice is that you’re not fighting in those famous Flanders fields, marching towards (depending on which side you picked) Paris or Berlin. No, you’re off in Europe’s south-eastern corner, fighting in Serbia. Why is that, exactly?

Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie. He was a jerk, by all accounts, but staunchly anti-war. Great moustache, anyway.

Franz Ferdinand’s Sunday Drive: The war kicks off

You know those nights when you go to bed with your partner, and you know that she’s quietly steaming mad about something you did (what exactly? you’re not sure) and you start pre-emptively preparing defenses against any number of accusations while you lie uncomfortably in the dark staring up at the ceiling, getting increasingly agitated as you wait for the inevitable fight to start? This is basically Europe in 1914.

There were six countries in Europe who claimed to be (and acknowledged one another as) “Great Powers”: Britain, France, the recently-unified nations of Germany and Italy, the serpentine confederacy of duchies and kingdoms known as Austria-Hungary, and the enormous (and enormously backward) tsardom of Russia.

Joining and dividing these countries was a mess of formal treaties and secret gentleman’s agreements forming a crazy web of alliances based on hypothetical future events. “If X invades Y, I’ll join that war on your side within 15 days.” All of the powers expected that some enormous European war was just around the corner.

And they got one. When Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on a Sunday drive in Sarajevo by a teenage Slav nationalist in June 1914, Austrian-Hungary declared war on tiny Serbia, starting a domino rally of triggered alliances and treaty clauses which culminated in a general European war – and soon, a world war. Shoulda stayed home, Franz.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

Who’s fighting whom?

The alliances end up shaking out like this: Germany and Austria-Hungary form the Central Powers, fighting a multi-front war against the Entente Allies: heavy hitters France and Britain, plus scrappy Serbia, Belgium, and Russia.

But that’s not the end of it: you have to prepare for other countries to enter the war and complicate matters. Not every historical entry into the war necessarily happens in every game (a country will sometimes stay neutral if your game breaks significantly with history) but you need to prepare for certain eventualities.

The Ottoman Empire will join the Central Powers in 1914. This means that Russia has to watch its back in the Caucasus and Britain has to be ready to defend Egypt — or go on the offensive into the Middle East.

Italy will join the Allies in mid-1915, and sometimes earlier if the Entente is doing well, which means Austria-Hungary will have a new long border to defend.

Outkast’s advice about attacking prudently: Don’t pull the thang out unless you came to bang.

Gameplay basics

The period of history being simulated by Commander: The Great War is a radical turning point in the history of warfare. The ability of a modern army to defend a space is rapidly outpacing the ability to attack one: machine guns, barbed wire, quick-firing field guns, and aircraft-spotted artillery provide major benefits to an entrenched defender. This then, isn’t a wargame like Panzer Corps, where the best thing to do when in doubt is to fix bayonets and start sticking.

• Attack carefully with as much preparation as you can muster. If you’re going to try and take your opponent’s trenches, make it a proper offensive. Position your forces a turn in advance, with strong infantry (not garrisons!) and cavalry next to the hex you intend to attack. Use artillery bombardments and aircraft spotting to lower the organisation of the enemy forces. It’s not in the manual, but cursing loudly seems to help, especially in French.

• Counterattack ruthlessly. If your opponent breaks through your front line, that’s a great moment to counterattack his attacking force. His troops won’t be entrenched, and will have lower efficiency after having just attacked.

• Hoard shells for your offensives. Just as in real life, you have a limited number of shells for your artillery — no one could have anticipated in 1914 how much ammunition industrialised warfare would demand. In the lower left-hand corner of the screen, you’ll see how many shells your country has available this turn. (It’s the data column with, well, a bullet on it. You can increase this number by investing into industrial capacity in the management screen.) Every artillery bombardment consumes 10 shells, so don’t blast out rounds like it’s Mexican New Year every day. Make every shell count, and save artillery fire for your offensives.

• Babysit your battleships. Your battleships are monstrously powerful (don’t forget to use them to bombard shore hexes you’re attacking) but losing one will cause your country to take a major morale hit. In real life, the great steel fleets of WWI were treated like haemophiliac only sons, risked in combat solely in the most dire extremity. You’d do well helicopter-parent your battlewagons just like the real admirals did.

• Cavalry is damned useful. If you’re coming to Commander from a WWII wargame where cavalry is a punchline, you’re in for a surprise. In the early war, cavalry is a great unit for attacking — especially for serving the coup de grace to a weakened enemy unit, because cavalry gets a damage bonus when it forces its opponent to retreat.

• Trains and naval transports are a limited resource. You’re not playing Transport Tycoon, pal. Look again at that chart in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. The numbers under the train and anchor icons tell you how many uses of rail transport per turn you get and how many naval transports you can have asea on any given turn. You can increase this by investing production into the management screen.

• You don’t need to kill a country’s entire military to defeat it — just seize its capital. Take and hold an enemy capital for a couple of turns and they’ll negotiate a separate peace by offering to surrender. Make sure that you control any strategically key parts of their territory before you do, because if you accept they’ll become a neutral, not an ally.

• Don’t forget to upgrade. When your eggheads come up with a technology advance, it doesn’t automatically filter out to existing units. Touch the double-arrow button in the lower right of the screen to upgrade your deployed forces. This costs production points to do, so prioritise troops that are about to go into the breach, or that are holding key hexes.

Belgrade or bust.

How to play the Central Powers: Opening objectives

For this guide, I’m assuming that you’re playing the 1914 scenario on the easiest of the three difficulties. If this is your first go with Commander, I highly recommend this. On higher difficulties, the AI is a right bastard. I also highly recommend playing as the Entente first, as they have an easier time of it.

Who are the Central Powers? At the very start of the war, you’re Austria-Hungary, invading Serbia to extract justice for the murders of Franz and Sophie. After a couple of turns, you’re joined by mighty Germany, who have been itching for a chance to invade France and finish what they started in the War of 1870.

As the Central Powers, you have the initiative on your side. Your armies are enormous and relatively advanced, but that advantage will steadily ebb away as the war goes on. The Allies just flat-out have more men than you do, and the longer the fighting continues, the more of those men they can stuff into uniforms and hand rifles to. A war of attrition is a war you can’t win.

• Take cities quickly, especially capitals. In Commander, cities generate production points that you need to build additional forces. Take risks if you think you can grab a city like Calais or Warsaw — it’ll pay off in the long run.

• Show no mercy to the Belgians. Knocking Belgium out of the war by capturing Brussels within the first few turns is very handy — that’s one less Entente ally producing troops to throw at you and the world’s foremost chocolatiers under your command.

• Keep your fleet in port unless you intend to build it up. As the Germans, any battle with the British navy in 1914 will end with your lunch money getting stolen and you getting a huge wedgie. Your ships get a major defense bonus in port (the hexes with anchors on them) so keep them there unless you spot a golden opportunity like an unescorted Royal Navy battleship.

• Take Belgrade at all costs. Historically, the Austro-Hungarians expected to steamroll the outnumbered and less advanced Serbian Army. But the Serbs shocked the world by repelling the Austro-Hungarian invasion and launching a counter-invasion of their own. This is exactly what’s going to happen to you if you don’t cripple the Serbian economy by conquering Belgrade, Serbia’s most valuable city. Lucky for you, Belgrade is right on the border — throw divisions at it until it falls, because you’ll have a hell of a time holding out against the combined Serbian-Italian riposte coming your way in 1915.

• Defend in depth on the Eastern Front. In Commander (as in real life) the Russian front is much more fluid and harder to define than the west. This means that the front line moves frequently and troops will benefit less from entrenchment. Make sure you’ve got reserve units behind the front lines to plug holes where they appear.

• When the Turks join the game, focus on Egypt. When the Ottomans join the war sometime in late 1914, you’ve got a couple of obvious choices: hit the Russians in the Caucasus (the right-center of the map, launching attacks from Erzurum) or invade British Egypt from Gaza. Trust me, the Caucasus is a sideshow. Prioritize Egypt — not only will you steal a small number of production points from the cities there, but you’ll deny the British the resources coming from convoys that traverse the Suez Canal.

• Try to get your Mediterranean submarines into the Atlantic. You start with a German submarine flotilla in the Med. If you can escape through Gibraltar into the open ocean, you can torment the Entente’s merchant convoys with it.

Egypt: so peaceful, so serene. Until next turn. Prepare accordingly.

How to play the Entente Allies: Opening objectives

Here’s the good news for the Entente: in 1914, you’ve got Germany and Austria-Hungary literally surrounded. But here’s the bad news: that means that it’s much harder for your allies to support one another. Occupying the interior of the circle, Germany can ship troops by rail to any front — but you can’t. French and British troops will never (beyond some exceptional effort on your part) play a role on the Russian or Serbian fronts and vice versa.

The good news is that you’ve got time on your side. Keep your capitals intact and play defense at first. You’ve got Russia on your side, the Andre the Giant of Europe: maybe it’s not too dainty or sophisticated, but it’s huge. Every other country in the game has to worry about manpower (the gingerbread men icons in the lower-left hand side of the screen), but not Russia, which can keep on churning out new divisions as long as its industrial capacity allows. Eventually the Entente will overwhelm the Central Powers through sheer weight — but you have to survive the initial assault.

• Don’t get fancy with your shopping at first. Hey, look at all this neat stuff in the production screen. Blimps! Armored cars! Armored trains! Did I tell you about the blimps? STOP IT. That new-fangled stuff has its uses, but in August 1914, you need good old-fashioned infantry legions to shore up your front lines. Buy infantry until your front lines are airtight and backed up. Then buy an artillery. Then (and only then) should you consider commissioning the HMS Led Zeppelin.

• Spend some of Britain’s production on strengthening your Egyptian forces. The Ottomans are coming and they want the land of the Pharaohs real bad (see How to play the Central Powers, above). If you don’t add a couple of regular infantry units to your Suez garrison, then T.E. Lawrence will be really sad.

• Improve Russia’s railway capacity ASAP. The Russian front is big and fluid and you’re going to need to shuttle troops around it quickly. At the start of the war you have enough rolling stock to move one trainload of troops per turn — it’s worth upgrading this in 1914 to make your troops more mobile and to get some of your far eastern garrisons (Omsk doesn’t need defending, trust me) to the Austrian border or Caucasus where they’ll do some good.

• Hold Brussels if you can, but do anything you must to hold Belgrade. Keeping the Belgians in the war is difficult, but it’s not a fatal blow to lose them. In real life, the Belgian Army withdrew into their fortresses rather than face the numerically superior Germans with doubtful support from the French, and were effectively a non-factor in the war. If you can keep them in the fight at all, you’ll be doing better than your historical counterparts. Losing Belgrade, on the other hand, is a devastating blow in the long term. Spend anything, sacrifice anyone to hold it.

• The Russian navy is small, but useful. Don’t try to take on Germany’s fleet but park your Baltic ships off of Stockholm to harass Germany’s merchant shipping.

• Give Gallipoli a shot. In 1915, the British tried to deal a decisive blow to the Ottomans by landing a small Australian & Kiwi force at Gallipoli. This campaign was an infamous disaster in real life, but it’s entirely possible for it go better for you. If you can spare a few divisions from Egypt (or Italy if they’ve already joined), try landing them near the Dardanelles — or at Gaza. The Ottoman Empire is vast and the AI (or your human multiplayer opponent) can’t possibly defend it all.

This guide is just intended to get you started. You should definitely download this PDF of the Commander manual and give it a read — it’s not arduous at all and covers much that I didn’t even brush on here.

The real story is well worth reading about.

Further reading

I can’t overemphasise how rewarding it is to have a little historical background on WWI when you play Commander. If you’ll forgive the presumption, here’s a few books on the subject that I personally recommend. No doubt our well-read PT regulars will have more books to share in the comments.

• The Guns of August. This narrative history of the lead-up to and opening months of the war is one of the finest works of non-fiction you will ever experience. When I read it as a teenager, I wanted to propose marriage to author Barbara Tuchman, who had disappointingly passed away at the age of 77 years earlier.

• The First World War: An Illustrated History. AJP Taylor was a hugely talented story-teller who wrote this breezy, droll history that I think is the best single-volume history of the whole war, full stop. Imagine being down at the pub with your well-read (and mostly drunk) uncle: that’s what reading AJP Taylor is like.

• Storm of Steel. Ernst Junger’s memoir of serving in the trenches as a line soldier is really fucking scary, pardon my French. He pulls no punches at all and makes you very glad that for us, this war is just an interesting strategic puzzle to solve in video games.

• The White War. If WWI is relatively ignored in modern memory, then the Italian front of that war has completely vanished. A very readable history of an aspect of the conflict that few specialise in.

• The Pity of War. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson is a bit of a jerk but he loves challenging the conventional wisdom about WWI. After you’ve read a few other books, try this one out and see if you agree with Ferguson’s theories.

Missing in action: Where are Blood Bowl and Star Realms?

It’s a punt.

It’s come to my attention that some of you are performing a dark cabalistic ritual to summon the mysteriously delayed mobile edition of Blood Bowl. STOP. You are performing the wrong dark cabalistic ritual. I know you meant well, but you appear to have summoned this Kim Kardashian game into existence instead. Also the Jonas Brothers have been crashing on my couch for the last three days. You’re not allowed to watch E! while invoking the occult anymore.

Instead of beseeching the dark powers for aid, I sent around inquiries to see what the holdup is on high-fantasy football game Blood Bowl (announced for “early July” a few weeks ago) and on the iOS version of sci-fi deck-building card game Star Realms (which was meant to be here around July 4th).

Details of what I uncovered after the jump. But fair warning: none of it is particularly good news.

Back at the beginning of the month there were hearts set a-thumping everywhere by the news that Games Workshop’s (literally) fantasy football tabletop game Blood Bowl was coming to mobile in “early July”. Clearly, that has not come to pass.

After some effort I got in touch with Focus Home Interactive, the French publisher in charge of the project. They told me on Wednesday that the game has been “slightly delayed”. Well, yes. I think we knew that. More news was promised “very soon”, but the takeaway here is that nobody knows what’s up with Blood Bowl, so don’t expect an imminent release.

Launch aborted. Again.

Sci-fi deck-builder Star Realms has been a huge hit in its physical card game form, and I was mightily impressed with the PC beta. The Android edition launched over the July 4th holiday weekend with iOS meant to be following close in its wake — instead, Android users have enjoyed a rare period of platform exclusivity as the iOS version keeps getting rejected by Apple.

Producer Rob Dougherty told me this afternoon that the game has been rejected by Apple again (the game’s been submitted for approval at least twice this month) just yesterday. He didn’t give me any details as to why, exactly, but Star Realms’ cross-platform play between iOS, Android, and PC might have something to do with it — as might the game’s unique “pay once, unlock every platform” scheme.

Dougherty also said that he doesn’t want to keep players on pins and needles obsessively checking the App Store — he told me that if and when Star Realms gets approved by the powers that be at Cupertino, he’ll let everybody know in advance what day the game will drop. They’re planning on re-submitting this weekend.

Review: Bicolor

That 4, crucially, lets you draw in white. Bicolor is basically just a puzzle version of white crayon apologetics.

There was a period during which I hated Bicolor. It’s a simple puzzle game, involving drawing and erasing lines on a grid. While the concept won’t raise your heart rate, it’s not quite like anything I’ve played before, and it gratifyingly forces you to break the glass to use cognitive tools you rarely have to employ elsewhere.

But it commits one of the cardinal sins of the puzzle genre: massive difficulty spikes. For two days, I was completely stuck on a level which prior experience had left me entirely unprepared to solve. Indeed, it almost seems as though part of the problem is that there’s so little to learn–beyond the basic insight that squares with only one connection are bad, every level presents a new challenge, and most of them are over quickly and leave you feeling like there were probably lots of other options.

Those concerns are real, and genuinely frustrating. However, the very freedom Bicolor provides allows it to subtly offer beautiful solutions to levels which can be completed with less holistically elegant bumbling about. Discovering one of these solutions feels like earning an achievement, but without the manipulative increase in a meaningless number. It’s just a wink from the level designer, which is strangely satisfying in a world so full of explicit rewards. It also so thoroughly engaged me on one evening that I didn’t notice the time until after three in the morning.

This was the level which shut down my every attempt to unlock its secrets for days. Any resemblance to romantic misadventures is purely coincidental.

Bicolor was planted smack in the center of the austere rock garden of minimalism; Papa Sangre is more visually lush, and it’s audio-only. It’s a good fit for the puzzle genre, and presumably helps keep development costs down and bring us more varied games, but it does make me appreciate the variety that Eric Sabee’s Ascension art brings to my iOS gaming. The visual simplicity at least suits the simplicity of the gameplay–it really is just drawing and erasing (not necessarily straight) lines of specific length.

There are a surprisingly large number of symmetrical levels–initially, this seemed like just an excuse to fill up the space, since a solution which works for one section can be mechanically applied to the others. However, asymmetrical solutions are also possible, and sometimes more interesting. I never did find a symmetrical solution to the pictured orange level; I’m not sure it’s possible (proof of this is left as an exercise to the reader, which is my way of trying to sound smart while shrugging).

I think I had socks with this pattern and color scheme once. Hey, shut up, it was the 80s.

Most of Bicolor’s levels can be completely pretty quickly and without much thought. Whether you’ll get enough out of it to make it worth your time may well depend on your interest in looking for a graceful solution when very little effort will get you to the next puzzle, and your ability to tolerate the inconsistent difficulty. I’m not given to chasing achievements, except where they are used as ways of highlighting activities which are independently enjoyable, so I mostly find myself happy to blunder through games so long as I get to see all the levels. That’s how I initially approached Bicolor, and the best thing I can say about the game is that it reminded me that I can play while I’m playing.

Bicolor was played on an iPad Air for this review.

Joffre good show: Commander the Great War is here for iPad

Don’t Foch around.

After a couple of years in the making, Slitherine’s Commander: The Great War launched for iPad in the wee hours of the morning — it’s on the App Store right now for $20. We talked a couple of weeks ago why I’m excited about this release: it’s the first true grand strategy game on mobile, simulating the economic, diplomatic, and military aspects of World War I.

In many respects this is the biggest strategy game yet for the iPad, a game that’s going to swallow whole evenings on the couch and devour entire trans-continental plane journeys. I wanted to get my own hands on it today before I talked about it, and I can report that my first impressions are good.

The graphics aren’t retina-quality, I’m afraid, but that’s my biggest complaint so far. Maybe that wass too much to expect from a port of a PC game that’s a few years old already, anyway. But the controls are good and the game is stable. I played this game to death on PC a couple of years ago and so barring any catastrophic technical hitch that shows up later, I’m ready to give this Commander the PT seal of approval right now.

You can fight the war as the Entente or as the Central Powers, controlling each nation’s research and production individually, and commanding their armies and navies on an operational level. You can jump in at any year — right at the start in 1914, or later when the front lines have calcified and the Americans have finally decided to show up.

Commander is super large-scale: you’re controlling forces in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the North American east coast, and western Asia. In terms of scope, this game makes Panzer Corps look like an Angry Birds level pack. But this is still a pretty accessible war game. You can expect a full review from us next week. Now if you’ll excuse me, my Serbs are about to march into Zagreb.

Commander: The Great War is on the App Store right now, and there’s a trailer below.

You’re the best around: SolForge World Championship announced

Eight go in, one comes out

In all the recent hubbub about Hearthstone and it’s recent expansion, it’s easy to forget that Stone Blade Entertainment was doing the digital CCG thing since before Hearthstone was even a glint in Team 5′s eye. With more than 1.5 years of life on iPad, SolForge has grown quite the rabid fan base (who are probably upset that I mentioned the big H in this article at all), and now it’s time for those fans to celebrate SolForge and maybe win some cash in the process.

Earlier this week, Stone Blade announced the upcoming World Championships of SolForge in which competitors can play for a minimum purse of $5K in an 8-player, invitation only tournament. Qualifier tournaments begin this weekend, offering entrants a chance at some in-game gold and one of those coveted invites to the big tournament which starts next year and will crown a champion at GenCon 2015.

Interested in showing your SolForge plumage? Head over to the tournament page for more details and instructions for signing-up.

“Ownership is becoming obsolete”: LEX goes free for a day, open sources code forever

“Ownership is dying, as it should since it’s a dinosaur.”

Mere days after Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend’s compulsively playable puzzler Threes came out earlier this year, clones of the game started to appear. Games like 2048 were unabashedly riding the coattails of Threes’ rush of popularity, and themselves spawned a secondary wave of clone clones. Here at PT we made a conscious decision at the time not to cover 2048 and the imitators that joined it in mimicking Threes’ design.

Wohlwend and Vollmer (who had had their games cloned before), bemused by 2048, reacted by posting an open letter that showed the year of work that had gone into Threes and decried the ease with which the clones earned a profit off of their sweat. Reactions online ranged from full-throated support for Wohlwend and Vollmer to dismissive “that’s capitalism” defences of the clones.

Kurt Bieg of Simple Machine has decided to wade into this debate. Actually, he’s not wading — he’s diving in head-first, and throwing his co-workers in, too. Bieg is open-sourcing all of his studio’s games, starting with word game LEX. “We believe ownership is becoming obsolete,” Bieg told me. And if you’re surprised by that sentiment, he was just getting warmed up.

Threes alongside two of its imitators. [Image by the IB Times]

Bieg emailed me earlier this week to tell me that LEX was going open-source today, and that future games from Simple Machine would be as well. This is our way,” he said, “of inspiring young and old people to read, learn, and ultimately manipulate code that came from a studio known for taking chances and innovating puzzle games.”

Given his admittedly avant garde stance on ownership (he cites anti-patent activist Elon Musk as an inspiration) I had asked Bieg specifically what he thought of the Threes cloning affair.

“During that whole time Threes came out, we were disappointed to see how the developers of Threes handled the discussion, only contributing personal emotions, ultimately releasing internal development emails to somehow ‘prove’ that they ‘own’ the idea,” says Bieg. “At that point, I felt like the discussion had already moved on to something much much bigger, only no one else was talking about it. Look at the other side, 2048 creator Gabriel Cirulli innovated the way a game can be consumed by open sourcing [his game]. Philosophically speaking, ownership is dying, as it should since it’s a dinosaur.”

I’m broadly sympathetic to this share-alike commons approach, but people need to be able to eat off the back of their hard work, don’t they? If somebody releases a tweaked version of a game like Threes a week after it launches, I asked, what’s the incentive for a dev to spend so much time working on polishing a game?

“Isn’t what happened to Threes exactly what we dream of when we work on anything for any duration? To create something so unexpected that it captures the attention of millions of people around the world. To incite people to iterate on your idea and imitate it. When a game becomes so huge it creates a new genre. Yet, then to argue that they alone should exclusively own that mechanic so no one else can build on, much like a patent.

“I thought that way up until this year. I understand the mentality, it’s been ingrained in us, to own. But just imagine what would have played out had they embraced the change they themselves sparked and open-sourced the Threes code. Now that would have been something different.”

I’m not sure how far I agree with Kurt Bieg. I think to a great extent, what he’s doing is something that only an already-successful developer can do — like when Radiohead gave away an album for free and just made their money on tour tickets and t-shirts. That’s a completely viable tactic when you’re the biggest band on the planet. It’s less lucrative when you’re playing the Tuesday night gig behind the chicken wire at Bob’s Country Bunker.

But you don’t have to agree with a guy to respect that he’s walking the talk. Simple Machine are putting their money quite unequivocally where their collective mouth is. We’ll be watching.

Planning of the apes: Coding Monkeys schedule Rules! for an August 7th launch

The unicorn from Dream Quest has had some work done.

[gavel banging]

As the duly elected President of the Mount Hexmap Chapter of The Coding Monkeys Fan Club, it is my duty to inform you that Rules!, the fast-paced puzzle game that they announced last month, will be with us August 7th. The Monkeys call it “one part Simon Says and one part Super Hexagon”. From what I’ve seen I think it’s more like a reflex-focussed Papers, Please.

Rules is a game where the rules evolve as you play, and you have to remember what the previously established rules are when things suddenly switch up. Everything’s constantly changing and you’re never right, basically. I had a girlfriend like that once.

Now I know that when we joined this club, it was on the back of the Coding Monkeys most extraordinary digital board game conversions like Lost Cities and Carcassonne. Some members of our esteemed organisation have pointed out that Rules is not a board game at all, and having consulted the appropriate committees I have no choice but to agree. But to that I say: who cares? It’s a new Coding Monkeys game. The Coding Monkeys have never released anything that wasn’t utterly brilliant, therefore Rules shall almost certainly be brilliant, QED.

Kelsey will be reviewing Rules for us and we’ll have his verdict when the game launches. Meeting adjourned.

(I like the old trailer better, actually. Here it is.)

Thomas Was Alone appears on different rectangles

It’s hip to be square.

The surprisingly heartfelt side-scrolling platformer Thomas Was Alone has made the jump to Android and iPhones after materialising a few weeks ago on iPad. On iOS this comes as a Universal update, so there’s no need to buy again if you purchased it earlier for the larger form factor.

Touchscreen devices are definitely not the best way to play this occasionally tetchy platformer, but I found the minor control issues well worth putting up with for the narrative, which (like a good reality TV show) has a power to make you feel genuine emotional attachment to a bunch of lifeless two-dimensional objects.

Read my review from May if you want to learn more, and you can find the newer, smaller Thomas on the App Store and the Android Market. Trailer below.

Out Tonight: Not 80 Days, but there’s Revolution 60, Poptile, MESA, and more

Any tile.

Tonight was meant to be the night for Inkle’s around-the-world interactive fiction opus 80 Days to drop — but alas, it is not to be. Inkle’s Jon Ingold emailed me a couple of days back. “We’ve been asked by Apple to move the release day back to next Thursday, the 31st,” he said. “So we are of course doing it.”

This could only mean one of two things. The first possibility: In reviewing the app for release, Apple has exposed Inkle’s dastardly plot to use the game to Manchurian Candidate the world’s population, preparing the ground for a reptilian takeover of Earth. Or second, Apple want to feature the game next week in a prominent slot on the App Store’s front page.

It’s almost certainly the former (alert David Icke, please) but either way the result is the same: 80 Days will be here next Wednesday night. You can read my hands-on 80 Days preview if you want to see what we’re in for next week.

There are other releases tonight, of course. Let’s have a look after the jump.

Dream Revenant is a surreal adventure game that promises 4 acres of space to explore as you delve into the mind of a man on his deathbed trying to “unravel the dark secrets of his past”. I think when I’m on my deathbed I’ll probably just be worrying about not cancelling my Netflix subscription before I croak. Wouldn’t make a very good game, I suppose.

Dream Revenant is out at midnight wherever you are (or 11pm Eastern in the US) for two dollars.

Poptile is a game so simple that you’re going to get it within moments of launching the trailer below. Looks like a fine stress reliever.

Poptile’s free to download later tonight with a $0.99 IAP to unlock addition color themes. The devs tell me that there’s a colour-blind mode.

Do we need any more iOS shooters in the wake of the near-apotheosis of the form represented by World of Tanks Blitz? If your answer to that rhetorical question would have been “yes”, then you might want to check out Gameloft’s Modern Combat 5: Blackout. Gameloft are the basically The Asylum of gaming, pumping out familiar homages to successful titles, so don’t expect innovation here. The game looks awfully pretty, though.

Modern Combat 5 will be five bucks when it drops in your time zone tonight. Gameloft warn that you’ll need an iPad 2 or iPhone 4S to handle this man-shooting monstrosity.

The iPad-only adventure game Revolution 60 is a “hugely cinematic experience” with a big branching sci-fi plot and professional voice acting. It’s also got what will certainly be a hugely divisive art style — Revolution 60 appears to take place in a universe where Ken and Barbie are accurate anatomical specimens and vinyl is a practical material for clothing.

Revolution 60 is free to download later tonight with a $5.99 IAP to unlock the whole shebang.

MESA is a multiplayer-only abstract board-control game with a neat aesthetic. Developers Forest Giant describe it as “a completely original game of strategy and friendly domination”. It looks like Mahjong with lasers, which is as good a log line as I’ve heard all year.

No need to wait until midnight for this one — MESA is out right now for free. There’s a $1.99 IAP to unlock unlimited play and different boards.

Light a candle for Rise of Vigil: New Ascension expansion drops on iOS

Busy as Sabee.

Champagne is being uncorked high atop Mount Hexmap in the Pocket Tactics Prognostication Center and Quick-Pick Lotto Research Institute. The Rise of Vigil expansion for Ascension is going to be out any minute now for iOS, just we predicted last week. This is the first new expansion to everyone’s favourite digital card game in over a year, and marks the renewal of vows between app developers Playdek and game designers Stone Blade, who agreed to put aside their differences and make beautiful Ascension together again.

I asked Stone Blade designer Brian Kibler to tell me what we should be expecting from the new expansion. “Rise of Vigil is my favorite set we’ve released since the original game,” Kibler told me. “The new Energize mechanic leads to big exciting turns, and Treasure cards really make players evaluate cards differently as the game goes on. This combination makes the set great for Ascension beginners and veterans alike.”

Well. We’ll see for ourselves very soon. The Rise of Vigil rules are available as a PDF if you want to get familiar with what’s new while you wait for the App Store update to turn over. From what I’ve read, this expansion mixes things up tremendously: the treasure cards incent you to make non-optimal buys from the center row, and the new energy shards boost your ability to draw cards from your deck, which might make bigger decks more viable and tight decks even punchier.

Android adherents need not be too envious: if all goes to plan, Playdek’s iOS app will be making its way to Google-powered devices sometime later this summer, then PC in the autumn.

After the jump, two more cards from the Rise of Vigil expansion. Never played Ascension? Neither had I a couple of years ago. Read something I wrote about the first expansion back in 2012 to see why it’s so popular.

No Aslan! Don’t go into the light.

One of the new treasure cards.

We’re off to see the lizard(men): Majestic Nights is an RPG set in a conspiracy-filled 1980s

Finkle is Einhorn.

I am not a believer in conspiracy theories. In my time, I’ve worked for and with enough big companies and government agencies to know that they generally hang together with duct tape and bubble gum and can barely sort themselves out, much less manipulate a new world order on behalf of a shadowy Illuminati.

But not believing conspiracy theories is no barrier to loving them. And I love them. I used to listen to the Art Bell show on a battery-powered AM radio in my room every night I could get away with it when I was a kid. And my favourite thing about Deus Ex was that it was essentially an Art Bell show given video game form, with an enthusiastically uncritical embrace of every crackpot notion from Majestic 12 to Area 51.

Australian devs Epiphany Games might have had my same late night radio listening habits. Their new game Majestic Nights is an isometric RPG set “in an alternate 1980s where all conspiracy theories, past and present, are true”. The game casts you as former intelligence agent Cardholder and private investigator Cal who are seeking The Truth across the six episodes of Majestic Nights. The first prologue episode (“Sunset After Dark”) will be free when it arrives in late 2014 on desktops and tablets. Epiphany previously produced fantasy action game Runic Rumble.

Watch the skies for chemtrails and black helicopters until then. For the moment, there’s a trailer and screenshots after the jump, and you can monitor the movements of Epiphany Games on Facebook.

Must be tough to get a lot of work done in that bunker.

A little George Lucas reference there.

This is how Knocked Up started.

My chemical romance: Science puzzler Sokobond coming to iOS & Android

Shell game.

Sokobond is a puzzle game about making chemical compounds that requires “no chemistry knowledge” to play. I think that’s downright cowardly, but I suppose I understand the commercial impulse behind not shutting out 98% of the world’s population from buying your game.

It’s lovely, minimalist thing from indie developers Alan Hazelden and Harry Lee, puzzle specialists who were responsible for These Robotic Hearts of Mine and Stickets, respectively. Sokobond released for desktops yesterday on Steam, but its creators say that iOS & Android versions are forthcoming.

The last time we experimented with a chemistry-centric game, it turned out to be a bit of a dud. I figure we’re due for a win. Watch the trailer below.