Pocket Tactics’ Games of the Month: September 2014

FNG Alex picks a game we hadn’t even covered before. That kid’s got moxie.

The summer — horrible, horrible summer — is finally over. The fickle sun now favours that mysterious other hemisphere and won’t throw its awful unblinking glare onto your iPad screens any longer. Put away your parasols and desert canteens. The outdoors are safe for gaming again.

What games did the PT druid circle choose as their favourites of the summer’s twilight? After the jump, Jacob, Clancy, Kelsey, Owen, and FNG Alex tell you all about their picks.

Matchstick Memories

Rendezvous au Café Liliana

Review: Matchstick Memories

If you’ve ever taken a class which made you think hard in unexpected ways, but which was kind of tedious to sit through, you have a pretty good idea of how I feel about Matchstick Memories. The puzzling isn’t punishment, it’s just bland most of the time. But I’ll remember the moments when it isn’t, because the interplay between the fiction and the puzzling was so original. I may not remember much about Intro Psych, for example, but the selective attention video will stay with me so well and connect to so many other experiences that I’ll never regret the time I spent with it.

–Kelsey Rinella

Fotonica

September belongs to artsy endless runner FOTONICA, whose gentle chromatic aberration washing over clean vector art is export-quality Zen. This first-person rejig on a tired genre shouldn’t be played on swaying public transport, lest you feel the need to chromatically aberrate on a fellow commuter once the motion sickness kicks in. Within the dismal eddy of F2P licensed money-vacuums, this bastard child of Rez and Mirror’s Edge is a cultural victory. While lacking any sort of tactical meat, and possibly incurring a rueful look of suspicion from the PT dukedom, allow me this one month’s indulgence. You’ll get a good ambient soundtrack out of it.

–Alex Connolly

Ascension: Darkness Unleashed

Swing low, sweet mechana.

News: Darkness Unleashed released

There are very, very, very few games with the staying power of Ascension on my iPad. After two-plus years and I-don’t-want-to-know how many hundreds on online matches, the UI is starting to burn into my retinas. Ascension wasn’t about to lose that grip, but September’s new expansion set only tightened it.

The first few Ascension sets were careful, deliberate strategy games about slowly building synergies. By contrast, the latest expansion, Darkness Unleashed, is as subtle as a home run derby. I’ve rarely seen a close finish in DU because once you’ve started to assemble a good positive feedback loop you can’t really stop your hand from going super-critical and nuking your opponent.

With the last two sets enabled, Ascension is closer to Galaxy Trucker than chess now — it’s a game where the appearance of explosive reversals and shocking chain reactions seem to be down to luck as much as skill, but it’s so pyrotechnic that I can’t stop watching it and I don’t know if I ever will.

–Owen Faraday

Down Among the Dead Men

“They should make a Pirates movie where Johnny Depp plays every character, plus all the Care Bears, plus a live-action Jack Skellington, and then at the end we pan back to reveal it’s all being directed by Ed Wood as portrayed by Johnny Depp. $$$” — Clancy

News: Down Among the Dead Men in Out Tonight

Down Among the Dead Men is good fun if you’re looking for that Inkle gamebook experience, but not necessarily the commitment that comes with an act of Sorcery! or a trip ’round the world in 80 Days. This one is a pulpy revenge yarn with a surprisingly diverse range of player characters: alongside the typical swashbuckler are an adventurer well-versed in sea lore, a clever rogue, and a street-smart witch, among others.

Though there is out-and-out magic in it, the game’s world isn’t an overwrought Pirates of the Caribbean with copious hand-wringing about destiny between cameos from bankable piratical figures (Blackbeard, sea-squid Davy Jones, The Monkees’ Davy Jones, et cetera). Rather, most of the time your crew is whining about how, for all your wealth of mystical trinkets, you still can’t conjure up a decent meal or enough money to get the crow’s nest staffed. Like any good pirate tale, Down Among the Dead Men is about desperate men and women strung along by their desire for blood and money. Magic is just another of the means serving that end.

–Sean Clancy

Smarter Than You

News: Smarter Than You releasing Sept 25

It’s been a dismal month for iOS gaming for me, at least until the last few days of September. I’ll throw my vote to Smarter Than You, which throws an interesting twist into the classic Rock Paper Scissors formula. I still haven’t figured out how much of it is based on chance and how much can be controlled by smart (or otherwise) decisions. It feels like luck when you lose, but skill when you win. I have yet to meet M.E.T.I.S., the game’s haughty AI, but I’m very curious to see what happens when she is unleashed.

–Jacob Tierney

Are we the baddies? Herocraft’s Strategy & Tactics WWII Sandbox lets you play WWII as any country you want

I’m fighting as the People’s Front of Judea.

It’s no big exaggeration to say that Herocraft’s Strategy & Tactics WWII was one of my least favourite games of 2013. In Bizarro World my assertion that it was “a complete failure of a game” is a box quote. But it’s entirely possible that I’m crazy: Herocraft have been reinvesting in that light wargame with numerous expansions over the past year, and today they’ve come out with a brand new edition of it, so maybe I’m alone in hating it?

Strategy & Tactics WWII Sandbox tears down the walls of last year’s title, which was built around a string of scenarios, and opens up all of Europe. You can take control of any country in the conflict and essentially do as you please. Make a separate peace with Germany as the US and invade Russia. Stultify future historians by crushing the Western world as Greece. There’s 16 playable countries, with 10 more en route, the devs say.

Given my antipathy for the original game, I’m not exactly holding my breath about this one. But maybe a bigger, more epic sweep and interesting non-battlefield activities are what S&T needs to redeem the mushy, undifferentiated combat engine. And hey, maybe the combat itself has improved from when I last saw it. Even better: there don’t appear to be any in-app purchases either, which were another thing dragging the first game down.

It sounds like this grand strategy incarnation of S&T is a lot closer to what it was originally intended to be: the mobile version of Hearts of Iron, before Paradox pulled the rug out.

Strategy & Tactics WWII Sandbox is on iOS for $10, and it’s on Android too. I’ll give it a spin and report back my findings.

In other Herocraft news, I’ve been mucking about with a press preview build of their Warhammer 40K Space Wolf tactical game — and that one doesn’t seem too bad so far, actually. Space Wolf is due out in October.

Viet gone? : Vietnam ’65 put on hold

Hey, hey, LBJ, is it December yet?

Back in August Owen mentioned that upcoming war game, Vietnam ’65 had been submitted to Apple and then about a week later boasted (gleefully, and with much malice, I might add) about playing a pre-release version and announcing that it would be in the rest of our hands on October 1st.

Today we received an odd email from the developer stating that Vietnam ’65 wouldn’t be coming on October 1st as originally planned. It turns out that they’re looking for a publisher and, without one, won’t be releasing the game on iOS. They’re still fully expecting to launch the game before Christmas and, on the bright side, are using the extra time to complete redo the terrain art as well as enhancing the gameplay by adding some new mechanisms and tightening the current gameplay.

I guess we’ll have to fight our battles in WW2 for a little while yet.

Do I have to catch em all? : Pokémon Online TCG soft launches

I need to ask my 9 year-old what the hell is going on here. [Image via TouchArcade]

Of all the things in my head I wish I could extract and never remember it would be Pokémon junk. Of course, I have 3 boys at home all under the age of 12 [ It's all legal. We checked. - ed.] so Pokémon is simply a way of life, and isn’t going away any time soon. That said, I’ve never actually played the game, so while I can tell a Bouffalant from a Bulbasaur, that’s about as into the game as I’ve ever been. I’ve even been told by some “adult” sources that Pokémon isn’t actually that bad of a game, and it appears to have an adult following based on all the bearded men I see playing it at my FLGS.

Last week, Pokémon for iPad soft launched in Canada which means its world-wide release is imminent. The game is already available for PC and Mac, so chances are the soft launch period will be short. Toucharcade is reporting that any progress made during the soft launch will carry over when the app launches world-wide, as well.

Not familiar with Pokémon? It’s a basic CCG in the Magic mold, where you summon creatures (the Pokémon)  that battle each other, trying to capture each other’s prize cards. Or something. I’ve watched my kids play and, I swear, the rules change every time they play based on who’s winning or losing. I don’t want to crush Pokémon too badly here. I’ve never played and I’ve been told the game itself is pretty good. Hell, it’s the only CCG that Magic can’t seem to kill, so there must be something there. Plus, it’s cute.

I thought length didn’t matter : Frontline goes long with its next installment

Children, avert your eyes!

The first game in the Frontline series from Slitherine, Frontline: Road to Moscow, is most notable for being given a 17+ rating due to its depiction of guns, as if guns held by toy soldiers and miniature tanks were something that 16 year-old kids just couldn’t handle. Looking at screenshots, it’s easy to confuse Road to Moscow with Grand Theft Auto because both have a map. Or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve played a GTA game.

Undaunted, Slitherine is producing another game in the Frontline series, this one tackling D-Day and it’s called Frontline: the Longest Day. This iteration will have new units, new art, and 5 all-new campaigns. The game is currently entering beta testing for both iOS and PC, so if you’re interested in helping to get this one a 2014 release, head over and sign up.

More NSFW (according to Apple) screens after the break.

Review: Galaxy Trucker

Yes, I’m yellow. Yes, I just lost 15 pieces of my ship to meteors. Yes, I’ll have another drink.

Vlaada Chvátil has always been a designer known for taking risks. Look no farther than his tabletop magnum opus, Through the Ages, for proof of that. Here is a civilization-building game—complete with diplomacy, leaders, and wonders—that truly felt as sprawling as any Sid Meier creation ever has, but it was accomplished with nothing but cards. No maps, no little plastic soldiers, no dice. It was a pure eurogame masterpiece and, while there have been other civilization building games, none have matched it or dared to follow his lead and try to recreate what Through the Ages did sans map.

In 2007, the follow up to Through the Ages was released and, while I’m not sure what people were expecting, I’m positive nobody was expecting Galaxy Trucker. Where Through the Ages dared you to play without analysis paralysis, Galaxy Trucker dared you to play without drinking a beer. It was a farcical romp that involved little, if any, strategy and created its fun out random, wanton destruction. It was also one of the greatest board games ever created, and it’s a testament to its uniqueness that no other game has ever come along and tried to replicate it. Galaxy Trucker is, truly, a one of a kind experience on the table.

Seven years later and Vlaada is, again, doing something unexpected. Galaxy Trucker has now arrived on our iPads. It seems an odd choice for a digital game as the bulk of the board game is played simultaneously. There are no turns in Galaxy Trucker, instead everyone is frantically building their spaceship at the same time. How would this work on a digital device? Doesn’t Vlaada and everyone else at Czech Games Edition understand we want our board games asynchronous? Where did this rash come from?

Galaxy Trucker is really two games in one. In the first part, players will build a spacecraft of junk parts, trying to prepare it as best they can for the dangers present on the upcoming flight. The second half of the game is the flight itself, where all manner of terrors will wreak havoc with even the best-designed ship.

There’s little you can do about it once the flight begins. If you left weak spots in your defenses, you better hope a stray meteor or pirate gunfire doesn’t hit that part of your ship. It might not—but it probably will—and sitting on the edge of that razor, knowing that a certain card or die roll can determine if your ship will survive the flight are what makes Galaxy Trucker so damn much fun.

Planet Brazil

The ship-building portion of the game on the iPad works fantastically well. There are two different methods of ship building: real-time and turn-based. Real-time ship building is identical to the tabletop version. There is a pile of chits lying face down on the table, where you can select a token and see if it is something you want to add to your ship. You can reject tiles and put them back into the public pile, or you can add them to your growing ship, but once you do that it’s permanently attached. In the pile, you’ll find parts like extra crew cabins, cargo holds, laser cannons, engines, shield generators — all with different connectors, that don’t always fit together. As you’re building and revealing tiles, your opponents are doing the same, so you constantly have to be on the lookout for parts you may need suddenly being thrown atop the pile of hidden parts.

Turn-based is a new system created exclusively for the digital app which allows for asynchronous multiplayer. In this mode every player takes their turn using action points to reveal and select tiles. You begin each turn with 9 action points, which you spend to draw new tiles (1AP) or place items onto your ship (2AP). Parts are shown in three rows at the top of the screen. The top row indicates tiles you’ve already seen on previous turns, the middle row are tiles that you’re opponents revealed since your last turn and are new to you, and the bottom row contains all the new tiles you have drawn on the current turn. It’s a completely different, but immensely enjoyable way to play Galaxy Trucker, and I’ve already heard people asking if they could convert their cardboard versions to play with the action point system (and I don’t see why not).

My ships suck even in turn-based mode

The second half of each mission is where CGE really made the game come alive. Whereas the first portion of the game is a fairly literal representation of the board game, the flight is where you realize that Galaxy Trucker is a video game. Your ships are shown in a pseudo-3D representation and the event cards are drawn on the left side of the board.

As events happen, the players’ ships are animated, playing out the events as they happen. Attacked by smugglers? Watch the laser cannons fire and see the baddies come onto your ship and haul away your cargo. Meteor storm? Here come the meteors smashing into, and breaking away, half of your ship. Abandoned ship? Watch your little astronauts head over to captain the new ship home for scrap. While the flight is really just a simple race mechanism, adding all this fluff really makes Galaxy Trucker pop on your iPad. None of it was necessary, and the 2D-into-3D effect is initially a little weird, but it really makes the game come to life.

So far, I’ve only been talking about the gameplay itself, which is brilliant on iPad. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The game comes with a lengthy single-player campaign that you’d expect from an RPG and not a silly board game conversion. The map is made of planets and asteroids, each with its own quests and routes. You’re free to fly the routes you want instead of being railroaded down a certain story path, and each route offers its own unique rules and dangers. I really can’t express how incredible the campaign truly is. I’ve played around 15 hours, and I still haven’t revealed half of the map yet.

The campaign keeps creating reasons for me to head back to old planets for new quests and routes. If you see 2 planets not connected somehow, don’t worry, there will be a route between them eventually. I’m constantly being surprised by funny dialog or great mechanisms that fit the theme of each route. For example, the campaign appeared to be done completely in the real-time, simultaneous-play mode, but then I found a planet full of methodical robots and was told that all routes leading off that planet need to be in turn-based mode. So much evident time and attention has been put into Galaxy Trucker’s single-player campaign, which is more remarkable because I don’t think any of us expected the game to have one at all.

Here I’m being told a new mechanism in the campaign has always existed and I just wasn’t seeing it. This guy is a lying turd.

I could seriously say that Galaxy Trucker would be worth it for the single-player campaign alone. It’s that good. But on top of campaign play, there is single-player vs. AI mode, too, which is like playing the cardboard version against bots. To make it interesting, there are 12 different bots between easy and tough difficulty and the bots in this game are either cheating or I suck [I’m guessing it’s the latter. --ed.], because they are tough to beat in a head-to-head race.

Multiplayer is offered in pass-and-play mode (turn-based building only, obviously), or online. The online mode offers the same options as the single-player games do, and include an option to increase or decrease the timers to force building your ship in a quicker, more hectic manner. Multiplayer plays fantastic and feels closer to the cardboard game than I ever could have hoped for.

Galaxy Trucker game offers a lengthy and brilliant tutorial for those just getting into the space trucking business, and has a rulebook (Yardmaster, I hope you’re taking notes) that was built from the ground up for the digital version. Also, each card can be expanded and the rules for that event are displayed on the screen during the game. No need to leave a game and check out the rulebook.

What I haven’t mentioned yet is just how funny the game is, and I’m not just talking about your ship blowing up. If you’ve ever read the rulebook for the cardboard version, you know that it is, quite possibly, one of the greatest rulebooks ever written, displaying a sense of humor usually reserved to Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett novels. It’s dry and meta and all sorts of wonderful, and that entire sense of fun permeates this game’s writing and visual style. The campaign has some actual laugh-out-loud moments, and you can’t help but smile at most of the denizens of the galaxy that you’ll run into.

Worlds wide web

The game designer who gave us empire-building games without maps evidently prides himself on doing the unexpected and Chvátil has done that again. Here’s a digital board game with a single-player campaign that will keep you occupied through the end of the year, and a game defined by its frantic real-time scramble for parts that has been perfectly reshaped into a turn-based one. This is one impressive game.

Galaxy Trucker isn’t a game for everyone. People looking for a sober and realistic space game will hate its light-hearted tone. People who only play games to win will hate it. Perfectionists who can’t stand to watch their creations explode will hate it. You shouldn’t hang out with these people. These are bad people who are just wrong because Galaxy Trucker is too good not to love. Honestly, I can’t find any flaws with the game, and can see myself playing it for years. Galaxy Trucker isn’t merely the best board game on iPad this year, it’s the best board game on iPad ever.

Sunday Almanac: It’s Galaxy Trucker Night

If we ain’t outta here in ten minutes, we won’t need no rocket to fly through space.

This week’s Almanac was originally going to be a rant at EA over the new SimCity BuildIt details that they divulged to Pocket Gamer‘s intrepid Mark Brown. But as Typhoid Mary once said: I’m not worried about all that crap.

No, tonight I’m more concerned with the iPad release of Galaxy Trucker, the year’s most surprisingly excellent digital board game adaptation. If you live in Germany or points east, Galaxy Trucker for iPad is on the App Store right now for five American dollars. In the US, it’ll be dropping at 11pm Eastern time and in the UK at midnight.

I interviewed designer Vlaada Chvatil about this game on Friday and if I interpret the howls emanating from the PT Writers’ Dungeon correctly, Neumann should be putting the finishing touches on our review momentarily. But here’s the short version: this game is damn good, and you’re going to be playing it tonight for longer than you’d planned. I’ve taken the liberty of preparing some excuses you can use when you turn up to the office an hour late tomorrow morning.

• “The boiler exploded.”
• “My wife/husband has become the Gatekeeper/Keymaster of Gozer the Gozerian.”
• “Time is an illusion/flat circle.”

One of those should do the trick. Sunday links after the jump.

In case you’re the only PT reader who hasn’t seen this video yet, here’s the Galaxy Trucker trailer.

• How popular are mobile games? A third of Americans over 13 are playing them, according to the “Entertainment Software Association”, who — to be perfectly fair — sound like they might have a dog in that fight. But to put that number in perspective, it’s roughly equal to the number of adults who read an e-book last year, according to Pew.

• Back in the mid-1990s, search engines sucked and the best way to find stuff online was the people-powered Yahoo Directory. That artefact of Web history will be shut down on December 31st.

• Japanese industrial concern Obayashi wants to build an operational space elevator by 2050.

• If you’re going to lose something in an airport, Schiphol is where you want to do it. What a great dog.

• When the sewers of Paris get too gunked up, maintenance workers clean them out with these giant 19th-century pinballs.

• The Sinquefield Cup in August quite possibly saw the strongest field of any chess tournament in history, including Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, described by an opponent as “the Sauron of chess”. (Hat-tip to Jonathan R.)

• Congratulations sons of Poland: every single point in last week’s Patriots-Raiders game was scored by a ‘-kowski’.

• Norway is a film about a vampire who can’t stop dancing or he’ll die.

Weekend Price Drops: Throw Up the Horns Edition

Nameless King, what is best in life?

It’s been a good long while since I had a reason to write about God of Blades, which is a real pity because I love God of Blades. Our 2012 Action Game of the Year channels the late 70′s so hard it smells vaguely of leather and hair spray. It comes from a time when fantasy genre fiction was so tightly wrapped around psychedelia that you couldn’t pull them apart. God of Blades is Heavy Metal: The Game, basically.

You’re the Nameless King (or the Whispering Lady) called back from the dead to confront an evil that only you can defeat — and you defeat it by running around thwapping monsters in the puss with a giant sword longer than you are tall. There’s unlockable swords, subtly tactical duelling, and a soundtrack that gives me chills. Don’t you dare play this with the sound off or you’re missing the half of the appeal.

God of Blades is free on iOS right now so put on your Black Sabbath t-shirt and download it immediately. It’s on Android, too, but not free over on that side of the aisle.

More interesting bundles and discounts after the jump.

Incidentally, Texas-based God of Blades makers White Whale Games recently announced their next project: the party card game Monstrocards isn’t a mobile game, sadly, but it looks neat.

Here’s the God of Blades trailer and if you’ll excuse me I’m just going to watch this five more times.

Another PT fave is free right now: Warhammer Quest, the iOS translation of the classic Games Workshop tabletop dungeon-delver. WQ is a brilliant sandbox of a game with exquisite production values that I’ve dumped countless hours into. If you look at the App Store reviews right now, there’s a slew of negative ones beefing about the game’s in-app purchases.

If there’s anybody on the planet who’s happy to kneecap a game because of its reliance on IAPs, it’s me. So believe me when I say that there’s nothing cynical or underhanded about Warhammer Quest. Some of the IAPs are just additional post-release content like new areas and new heroes. There’s also the ability to buy consumable gold. Most of that wasn’t in the game at launch, and it was a wonderful game then, and their addition hasn’t spoiled the game in any way.

Not everyone will love WQ — its narrative is thinner than rice paper and the somewhat limited variety means that your 3rd gameplay hour won’t be hugely different from your 30th — but it’s well worth a whack for free.

Hellraid: The Escape is The Room with fantasy monsters stalking the halls and lots of gruesome ways to die — and it’s pretty good by all accounts. I never got around to playing it myself but a couple of readers wrote in to sing its praises when it came out this summer.

Hellraid is a dollar right now, which is 66% off the usual price. This one will be on Android next week.

Peerless digital board game specialists Playdek have jumped onto the bundlewagon with not one but three bundles. No half-measures from these guys.

The Playdek Board Game Bundle collects Lords of Waterdeep and 2013 Board Game of the Year Agricola into one ten-dollar package, which saves you ten bucks. If you’re just getting into board games (or want to) then this wouldn’t be a bad place to start: Waterdeep has a fairly gentle learning curve and Agricola has a best-in-class tutorial for learning the principles of worker placement-style games.

The Playdek Card Game Bundle has five games in it: Playdek’s sophomore effort Food Fight, the vampire-themed Nightfall, Penny Arcade Gamers vs Evil, the wacky Fluxx, and the oh-god-don’t-play-this-on-the-bus Tanto Cuore. You get all of these for eight bucks.

The Playdek Deluxe 8 Game Bundle mashes the two above together and throws in one-off push-your-luck dice game Can’t Stop into the mix for $15.

Finally, there’s a first bundle from prolific wargame makers Hunted Cow: The American Civil War Collection sounds like some nice hardback books you’d get from Time-Life but it’s really three hex tactical games for seven dollars.

Government reinforcements arrive in Heroes of the Revolution update

It’s now harder to fight city hall.

There was a big update last week for one of the year’s real underdogs: Cuban rebel wargame Heroes of the Revolution, an experience that I was quite fond of despite some wooly flaws. A couple of those flaws are addressed head-on in the new patch, which (thank the gods) adds the option to skip the tedious dice-rolling animations. There’s also new recruits for the enemy Cuban regime’s army – in version 1.0 Batista’s boys were an olive drab fly for your rebel juggernaut to swat by the late game, as their strength didn’t scale along with yours very well. Hopefully the new update means that there’s a good level of challenge all the way through.

There’s also an update to disable the in-game music, though why you’d want to turn off that saucy little Cuban guitar number is beyond me.

Read my review of Heroes of the Revolution, which is available on iOS for three bucks. I talked to GamerNationX boss John Ellenberger last week and he’s already cooking up some new ideas for his next title.

Dig that soundtrack.

It’s about time: Battle Worlds Kronos to have October release

Let’s talk about hex

We first mentioned the possibility of Battle World: Kronos back in April of 2013 when the Kickstarter campaign was underway and a mobile version was promised. Since then, there have been promises of release, but as of today we’ve seen nothing in the App Store. According to an update unearthed by reader Zac Belado, that might soon change.

Why should we care? Kronos is a hex-map, turn-based wargame with a single-player campaign as well as asynchronous multiplayer, none of which is a common site on either the App Store or Google Play. Also, Sean seemed to like the PC version when he reviewed it last year.

Today’s update specifically mentions that the iOS and Android versions are nearly ready for release and should be available on both platforms by the end of October.

Screenshots and (old) video of gameplay after the break.

I’m the captain now: Vlaada Chvátil talks to us about Galaxy Trucker for iPad

Your cards ain’t worth a dime if you don’t lay ‘em down.

If you’ve been hanging out with us for the last couple of weeks, you know that we’re pretty well jazzed about Galaxy Trucker, the iPad adaptation of the board game of the same name that’s coming out this Monday.

After 2013′s flood of top-quality board games for iOS (Agricola, Pandemic, Brief History of the World, Lords of Waterdeep… just to name a few), this year there’s been barely a trickle. Dave and I have been playing a preview build of Galaxy Trucker, and it’s easily good enough to compete with that beautiful 2013 bumper crop.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised. Vlaada Chvátil, the designer of Galaxy Trucker and the head honcho at publisher Czech Games Edition has a career that spans the worlds of tabletop and video games. Chvátil is a bona fide board game legend thanks to designs like Space Alert, Mage Knight, and Through The Ages on his CV, but his first notable game design was the 2001 PC RTS Original War, a cult hit that still has an enthusiastic following today.

After the jump, I ask Vlaada Chvátil about Galaxy Trucker and where he sees the intersection of board games and digital platforms taking us in the future.

Different varieties of Galaxy Trucker’s dastardly pirates.

For the unfamiliar, Galaxy Trucker is a game where you assemble a spaceship out a of a pile of junk parts, then compete with other players to survive a gauntlet of challenges as your ship falls apart around you. It’s wonderfully chaotic fun that is hugely replayable — you’ll never make the same ship twice, or face the same set of challenges in it. Galaxy Trucker for iPad builds a big single-player campaign that introduces new situations and gameplay variations, plus a wide array of online and same-device multiplayer game modes.

This digital Galaxy Trucker has been in development for a good long while, but that long gestation shows in the quality of the app. Chvátil took time out from the run-up to release to answer some questions for us.

Owen Faraday: Galaxy Trucker will be is the first CGE mobile game to see release [Through the Ages was indefinitely postponed after a long and troubled development cycle earlier this year], but it’s also one of the more complex CGE games to implement. What made you choose Galaxy Trucker to port to mobile?

Vlaada Chvátil: Me and Petr Murmak (who is in charge of CGE) understand each other well regarding board games, including their digital versions. After all, we started to work together in 2007, when I was playtesting Through the Ages using an online prototype.

When we saw the first iPad, we both immediately agreed – Galaxy Trucker would play great on this device, and it will not be so difficult to implement. Time proved we were right… in one of these two statements.

OF: The game has been in development for a good while, what were some of the challenges to get it to where it is?

VC: If we had been going for a 1:1 implementation, it would be not so difficult. Actually, we had a good playable version last fall. The biggest challenge here was the fact that there are two parts of the game, and each plays differently — you build the ships in real time mode, and fly them in traditional turn-based mode. It requires two different approaches, especially in multiplayer. Or one very universal.

But we decided to go further, trying to improve every aspect of the game. We created a turn-based building mode, so the game is suitable for pass-and-play and asynchronous play. For the flight phase, we went for a 3D-like visualisation with a lot of eye candy, to support the theme of the game. We added an autopilot option, for those who prefer just the ship building part. We implemented different AI personalities and various adventure decks to enhance replayability. And especially, we added many hours of solo experience by implementing a non-linear campaign for the game — scripting of that monster took lots of my time during the past year.

And we should not underestimate the tutorial — doing it right requires lots of thinking, work and playtesting. Of course, you have to playtest all aspects of the game, and tweaking and balancing them until everything feels right.

But that’s still just the game itself. We wanted also a great app. System of menus, settings, player profiles, achievements, leaderboards, game logs, helps, localizations… To do these things right requires lots of work regardless of whether the game itself is simple or complex. In a small team, you really feel that.

And last but not least, we took this as an investment, developing not just the game, but an entire board game engine for our further implementations. Especially challenging task was our own multiplatform solution for multiplayer.

I have to say, despite several of us having experience from the videogame industry, from developing mobile applications, and from implementing digital prototypes of boardgames, we underestimated how much effort it will take to deliver an app we can be proud of. We hope it was worth it and the players will appreciate our work.

OF: What do you see as the role of mobile and digital in the future? Is it a second platform to bring board games to, or do you see opportunities to make games that are part digital (like FFG’s XCOM game) or wholly digital designs?

VC: Well, I think we can consider it rather present than future. The success of purely digital games designed as if they were board games (Hearthstone, SolForge) suggests we will see more of them. Board games have been played online since the internet started to spread, and the idea of an artifical opponent is actually even older than electronic computers (like the Mechanical Turk in late 18th century: yes, it was just a clever illusion, but the idea was there).

And as for digital elements in board games, there is going to be more of them, as smart devices are becoming a common part of our lives, and we at CGE were never afraid to use them. Space Alert is driven by soundtracks instead of an app just because it was published too early — but during development, the sound was generated dynamically by a program on my notebook, and a mission-generating app appeared soon after the game was published.

I personally see digital devices as an interesting game component that open a wide space of opportunities. Generating the mission and handling the game flow is just one of them. Another one (handling of information that has to be deducted) can be seen in the CGE game for this year called Alchemists (including a nice use of camera). And I have a game in development that uses a device in yet another way.

I know there are people who do not like this trend, but I take it just as one of the game elements. There are also people who do not like dice in games, yet we have seen many original and clever uses of dice in the past years. But still, there are enough games that do not use dice, and there will be sure enough games that do not use digital elements. But both as a designer and as a gamer, I welcome anything that enhances the variety of board games.

Galaxy Trucker for iPad is out this Monday, September 29th.

Mint in box: 80s board game throwback Card Dungeon sets up for iOS next week

Do not bend The Crusader.

PT reader Nikos wrote in to tell us about Card Dungeon, a single-player roguelike due out next week on iOS from Indiana’s Playtap Games. You play as the Crusader, delving randomly-generated dungeons and collecting loot on a quest. There’s thousands of cards to find in the game, the devs say.

Now, Card Dungeon is going to look awfully familiar to anybody who’s played Card Hunter, Blue Manchu’s popular web-based free-to-play RPG that’s currently in development for mobile – they’re both doing this tongue-in-cheek channelling of 1980s tabletop games. I asked developer Fredrik Skarstedt about that today.

“There is no relationship between the excellent Card Hunter and our game,” says Skarstedt. “Both games use the same source material as inspiration: Dungeons and Dragons, board games such as Dungeon! and Heroquest from the 80′s, that I used to play as a kid, and collectible card games. I wanted Card Dungeon to look and feel like how I saw those games in my imagination when I played them as a kid.” Hmm.

There’s some substantial differences under that similar surface aesthetic: in Card Dungeon you control one character, not a party. It’s also a straight-up premium game that you pay for once and play to your heart’s content. There’s also that roguelike bit I mentioned earlier. “We also have corpse runs as a major feature,” says Skarstedt. “If you die during a run a grave marker will be placed at that location. If you make it back to your where you died, you gain all of your cards and money back that you were using the last run. If you don’t make it and perish again a new grave marker will be placed at the new location.”

Card Dungeon is out on October 1st for $3.99 — we’ll remind you next week.

The coming of the machines: Legions of Steel in beta, due out on iOS & Android before year’s end

Tom Servo, why have you forsaken us

“Far in the future,” says the fluff for Slitherine’s forthcoming Legions of Steel, “factions from the Milky Way are forming a military coalition. Their target: The Empire of the Machines, a fearsome robotic authority that endangers the whole galaxy.” If you bought one of those fancy AI thermostats for your house, this is all your fault.

Legions of Steel is borrowing a page from Terminator there, but it’s borrowing the rest of the book from a semi-obscure board game of the same name from the early 90s. Tabletop Legions of Steel was a tactical miniatures game that developed a cult following but never broke through to the same level as Warhammer.

But some folks have never forgotten it — especially not the guys at French developer Studio Nyx, who acquired the rights to Legions of Steel a couple of years ago and have been toiling away ever since. The game is now in full-on beta for both PC and tablets, and unusually for a Slitherine-published game, it’s planned for a simultaneous release on all of those platforms.

Legions of Steel is due out before the end of the year, Slitherine tell me, and the turn-based sci-fi corridor brawls will no doubt be welcomed by those who were a little underwhelmed by Space Hulk‘s rough-around-the-edges adaptation last year. There’s both online multiplayer and single-player scenarios in the mix. Slitherine are looking for beta testers on all platforms, and you can find those details here.

More screenshots and a gameplay video after the jump.

Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range?

Radial menus are the future.

Another bug hunt.

Out Tonight: Smarter Than You, Anomaly Defenders, Interstellar, and more

It’s like Red Rover, but with lasers.

We already talked about Anomaly Defenders this morning, 11-bit’s sci-fi tower defence game that casts you Ender Wiggin-style into the role of protecting the aliens you were once trying to exterminate. Edgy, but that’s not the most new interesting story on the App Store tonight. That crown belongs to Luca Redwood, the maker of the wonderfully original puzzle game 10000000.

Redwood has got a very unusual new game for us: Smarter Than You, which he’s calling a “social duelling game”. It’s a Game Center-driven asynchronous paper-rock-scissors game where the power of the attacks varies every round and you have the chance to deceive your opponent about your intentions. But that’s not the weird bit. I’ll tell you that (and show you the rest of tonight’s worthwhile releases) after the jump.

Full disclosure: I have a beer with Luca Redwood every once in a while. Over a couple of these beers recently, he told me the premise behind Smarter Than You. It’s a completely free game, and there’s only one way you can spend money on it. When a duel is over, you have the option of buying a one-dollar IAP “tip” that grants bonus experience points to your opponent, which she can use to unlock visual flair like new faces and flags for their avatar.

“I have no idea if this is going to make even one dollar,” Redwood told me. I don’t honestly know, either — I kind of doubt it. But it’s a great experiment. Will people spend money solely to congratulate a stranger?

One of the other things happening behind the scenes with Smarter Than You is that Redwood is building an AI that uses the total sum of every game of Smarter Than You ever played as its heuristic framework. M.E.T.I.S. (who challenged PT readers to solve a puzzle earlier this summer), Redwood claims, will be able to beat anyone in the world — you might just spot her in-game tonight.

Smarter Than You is a free iOS Universal app available on the App Store at midnight wherever you are, or 11pm Eastern.

I’ve played a bit of Anomaly Defenders already today. Tower defence isn’t my favourite game genre, but there’s no denying the lustrous sheen of this game’s polish. What’s really odd about it is how it passes without comment that you’re in charge of killing the humans now. “Commander, you’re a genius, come save my people,” purrs the Alien Boss Lady. And off you go, setting up towers to mow down your fellow homo sapiens. “Sorry Chuck and Larry,” you don’t say at any point, “but I’ve made an ethical decision to prevent genocide by killing you.”

Whatever its sins of narrative omission, Anomaly Defenders is — like all 11-bit games –beautiful to behold. It’s much less passive than other tower defence games, but it’s not going to convert you if you don’t already appreciate the form.

Anomaly Defenders is an iOS Universal app and it’s five dollars. Out later tonight.

Interstellar is a movie tie-in game done right, it appears. We’ve seen studios charge for tie-in games lately, which is definitely not the optimal way to raise awareness for your upcoming film. Interstellar beats the drum for Chris Nolan’s forthcoming sci-fi epic starring Rust Cohle.

I haven’t played this but it looks like a full-fat game where you plan the trajectory of the film’s spaceship through realistically modelled solar systems, proving once and for all that time is a flat circle.

Interstellar is free on iOS, and it’s on Android too for that same price.

The McConaissance goes digital.

Review: Back to Bed

I used to share a room with a sleepwalker. It wasn’t quite like this.

If a game is also a piece of surrealist art, can its shoddy controls and weak design be treated as an intentional part of its message? “It’s a commentary on the futility of trying to control our own lives,” says the e-cigarrette-smoking hipster [watch it -- ed.] in this hypothetical App Store art gallery I just invented. “You just don’t get it maaaaan.”

Back to Bed makes no such explicit excuses for its many flaws, but tries to coast on on its Daliesque aesthetic far longer than it can get away with. Once the veneer of weirdness wears thin you’ll find little but frustration beneath. There seems to be a surplus of games like this on the App Store lately, with striking visuals quickly giving way to underwhelming mechanics.

Yes, creepy-voiced narrator. Yes it does.

You play Back to Bed as a four-legged human-faced… thing shepherding a sleepwalker across hazardous rooftops. Bob, your somnambulist charge, will walk in a straight line until he hits an obstacle, when he will turn clockwise. Your job is to pick up oversized apples to place in Bob’s way, so that he will eventually make the twists and turns needed to end up safely in his bed. No it doesn’t make much sense, but it fits right in with the dreamlike logic of a surrealist world.

So this is a puzzle game, one where the player is manipulating the world to guide dimwitted but predictable NPCs to the goal. But you’re still a character within it. A difficult-to-control character, guided by tapping your destination on the screen. A character that never seems to pick up or drop the damn apple when and where you want him to.

Ready or not, Bob will start sleepwalking a few seconds into the level. This will inevitably lead to him stumbling off the rooftops before you’ve prepared a proper path. This, at least, just means he starts back from the beginning, eternally falling and trying again until you’ve finally managed to line everything up just right. If he hits one of the nefarious living alarm clocks that prowl some levels, however, it’s game over. The distinction feels arbitrary — why is the alarm clock worse than plummeting off of the roof?

The green antenna dude might start featuring in my recurring nightmares.

Back to Bed goes out of its way to artificially inflate its difficulty. Sometimes to get the apples you need you must climb a staircase which lets you walk up walls. A neat visual, sure, but completely unconnected to the rest of the mechanics and way more difficult than it needs to be thanks to the inept controls. It’s not part of the puzzle, it’s just a chore. Often the game doesn’t provide you enough apples to create complete paths, meaning you will need to place one, wait for Bob to hit it, pick it up, then rush over to where it needs to be next. Did I mention how frustrating it is to pick up and drop these damn apples? It’s pretty frustrating.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a game that prizes style over substance, as long as the substance isn’t actively bad enough to prevent you from enjoying yourself. At first Back to Bed seems to ape the lovely Monument Valley, a wonderful little game that prized surprising and delighting its players over challenging them.

Sleep, Bob. Sleep, and dream of starring in a better game.

But Back to Bed neither surprises or delights. It throws some weird visuals at you, then repeats its small handful of ideas ad nauseum while you trudge through its annoying stages. Monument Valley ended quickly, leaving you wanting more. Back to Bed outstays its welcome within just a few levels.

And if a game is going to live and dies on aesthetics, shouldn’t they at least be good? Back to Bed’s textures are bland, its levels repetitive. The art is initially appealing but that appeal starts to wane when you realise you’ve seen almost all of the visual elements within the first few minutes of playing. Back to Bed has achieved the unthinkable: it makes surrealism boring.

Towering crescendo: Anomaly Defenders turns your coat tonight

“We’re not putting up with those leafers this year.”

Polish studio 11-bit’s Anomaly series of tower offense games was so popular that for a few years they were an Anomaly factory, steadily cranking out new editions of the game and little else. They’ve been broadening their horizons this year with announcements of the refugee survival sim This War of Mine and the multiplayer strategy game Spacecom, but before they move on they’ve got a good-bye letter to the games that launched them on their way — one where you fight on behalf of the “bad guys”.

The previous games in the Anomaly series imagine an alien invasion of Earth. These aliens have unimaginably advanced technology but — lucky for mankind — have never played a TD game, so they plop their base structures down in a labyrinth for your intrepid human special ops chaps to navigate. Playing as the creeps rather than the towers has always given the Anomaly games a distinct vein to tap in an over-mined genre: there’s multiple paths through the mazes, tactically interesting special abilities, and customisable unit composition. 11-bit’s titles have been the pinnacle of tower defense production values, with big Michael Bay effects and full voice acting.

Anomaly Defenders flips it all around. The humans are the invaders now, bringing the fight to the aliens’ world. The aliens have recruited you to fight a delaying action against your former comrades, giving them time to skeddadle and prevent your race from committing genocide in their lust for revenge. It’s the first “traditional” (if a seven-year-old game genre can have traditions) tower defense game in the series, and it’s got a hell of an interesting premise. You Benedict.

Anomaly Defenders is 11-bit’s final installment in this series, and it’s out on Android right this very minute; it’ll drop for iOS at midnight tonight. Watch the trailer after the jump.

Review: Rapture World Conquest

God is dud.

Please welcome new reviewer Alex Connolly, a Nippon-based writer and illustrator who is condemned to the PT writers’ dungeon for sins committed in a(t least one) past life. Follow Alex on Twitter and peruse his excellent blog — after you’ve read this review, of course. –Owen

The Rapture — the celestial event that spirits away the worthy before Beezlebub clambers out of a sewer. Morbid curiosity makes me somewhat intrigued by Christian eschatology. If Chris Carter’s Millennium was right, evil encroaches on the periphery of everything.

Or at least tedium. Tedium creeps like bathroom mould. And that’s where I found myself with Rapture: World Conquest. Sitting on a stool next to the tiles with vinegar, scrubbing idly while the comets fell.

Steve Tyler didn’t miss a thing.

Rapture: World Conquest is the compaction of Civilization and Populous into bite-sized chunks; distilling these grand dames to their barest of conceits and stirring in the simplified combat elements of Galcon. Players conquer territories under the banner of real-world empires (Germany, Scotland, etc.) on a 3D globe, adjusting their capacities for growth and specialities with modifiers, as well as hurling an ever-increasing array of catastrophes upon opposing forces.

Rapture does deliver on the superficial elements of its inspirations, as there’s a good sense of Old Testament kingdoms and wrath about the game. The rousing orchestral score helps to elicit a sense of gravitas and drama to what is basically just herding dots, coupled with the mid-to-late game regional miracle detonations exploding across the globe like teen acne. Rapture: World Conquest delivers a suitably bombastic audio-visual experience that does justice to the theme.

The strategic grafting of Rapture: World Conquest sees Galcon’s (very) light RTS gameplay wrapped in a series of holistic and zone-specific boosters, focuses and miracles. The two main boosts include an initial temporary freeze on opponent’s troop production and a boost to your own. You can also throttle troop deployment numbers in true GALCON style. The focus element splits imperial production between emphasis on gold production, military production, mana and science. Gold feeds the boosters – as do your nickels and dimes via an admittedly unobtrusive IAP scheme, much to my chagrin – with the other focuses rather self-explanatory. Mana, as one can imagine, offers fuel for miracles. These range from tawdry tornadoes to meteor strikes and earthquakes, each dragged from their celestial dock and deployed as needed upon the sons of thine enemy.

A few of these ‘achievements’ need a good Spiriting Away.

As I tapped my way towards Christian D-Day – the simulated three-thousand year end-game limit, where the righteous dots are whisked from this spherical Sodom and given eternal life on a scoreboard – I wondered why this simply wasn’t as engaging as it should be. It was a hermetic musing, a really good think.

Damnable projects like the delightful but massively unfinished Topia World Builder had me without purpose, but occupied in a zen-like bliss. There, I had nothing but a sad, anaemic bolt of fizzling lightning there to enact my celestial rage. Rapture gives me droughts and meteorites and plagues, yet they feel nothing more than cursory effects to offset the bustle of neon mites. The feedback from territories asunder is adequate – identifying zones under heavenly assault is clear – but the speed of the game makes these feel like minor, near-insignificant impediments for troop movement. By the time a player’s empire gets off the ground, everything else feels secondary to pooling minions into massive blitzkriegs and weathering the onslaught of opposing vengeance.

The same old Galcon horde management that we’ve seen perfected years ago just doesn’t seem as fresh when augmented so minimally. And perhaps the real-time aspect drains any higher-level strategic play from Rapture’s tactical breadth. It is a fast game, but one that sadly forsakes the opportunity for interesting elements due to its expediency. This is where it gets nebulous. As admirable as it is to condense the the rise and fall of civilisations to five minutes, I feel Rapture could have benefited from slowing the hell down a little.

Bocciaccio Shrugged.

We know what Galcon feels like. It works because it’s unfettered by unnecessary accoutrements, free from elements that dilute or distract. Rapture, on the other hand, does want to inject something higher into the basic and admittedly solid core. The problem is, these slants aren’t engaging enough. They’re a meagre side order, brought to the fore only when they’re needed for mission objective specificities. I’m still playing a rather fetching version of Galcon, except I’ve got mechanics that don’t particularly inspire or compel. Were things more sedate there could be meaningful and strategic decisions to be made. Mission designs might encourage the use of ten specific miracles during a match, but given their relative similarities and basic troop rush effectiveness, the extrinsic motivator in using certain mechanics is merely a grind towards meeting objectives and carrying on. These miracles should be the linchpin of the game, not merely complimentary.

At the end of the day (or to be painfully contextual, at the End of Days) Tundra Games have been too faithful to Galcon and far less ambitious with their own ideas in Rapture: World Conquest. Had only this been a brooding affair of baroque imagining, a kind of Dante-esque Plague Inc., where the extraneous mechanics had time to deliver a distinctly tactical experience on the shores of blood and seas of glass. Instead, Rapture: World Conquest feels like a quick, safe riff with its aspirations not quite reaching the heavens.

First trailer for Galaxy Trucker will separate your saucer

She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special modifications myself.

“Hey, didn’t you just write about Galaxy Trucker last week?” Yep. I did. Here’s the deal: I am head over heels in friggin’ love with Galaxy Trucker. I never knew before that I wanted to be the captain of a galactic garbage scow cobbled together from random parts and race other junkers on freight-hauling runs, but I did.

Galaxy Trucker is the top-class board-game-to-digital adaptation we’ve been waiting all year for. It’s strategic and rewards planning without feeling heavy or inaccessible. It’s light-hearted and fun but in a clever, knowing way. The quality of the app takes a little while to truly appreciate because of the cartoony graphics, but it’s one of the best thought-out UIs I’ve seen in some time. It’s got more multiplayer options than an octopus brothel.

Basically, if you read this site because you share my taste in games, then you’re going to want to get Galaxy Trucker for iPad when it comes out in the next week or so. It’s that good.

If you don’t share my taste in games, then please accept my humble apologies now, because there’s going to be more Galaxy Trucker content coming from us. I’m working on an interview with designer Vlaada Chvatil and Dave’s cracking on with our review.

In the meantime, watch this first trailer for Galaxy Trucker — it perfectly captures the game’s droll sense of humour and shows off some gameplay. It’s after the jump.

Abominable behaviour: Yeti’s Parole Officer is the latest IF from Choice of Games

Doing “Harry and the Hendersons” was actually part of his sentence.

If you’ve heard a better pitch for a game this year than one in which you play the parole officer responsible for giant cryptid in the far future, please post it to me immediately. That’s exactly what Choice of Games have for us this week in their latest iOS & Android gamebook, Yeti’s Parole Officer.

You are the case officer for the Pan-Galactic Prisons Bureau, responsible for not just the Yeti but also Mothman, the Chupacabra, and Nessie. You’re the Men in Black’s version of Loren Coleman, keeping the people of Earth in the dark about the existence of monsters among them. I sincerely hope this game is as entertaining as its premise.

There’s good reason to believe it is: Choice of Games’ interactive fiction is reliably good. Their sci-fi epic The Fleet warped off with our Interactive Fiction Game of the Year runner-up award last year. CoG’s engine is looking increasingly dated in the face of the exquisite artifacts that Inkle make like 80 Days, but good IF writing is still good IF writing, no matter how lovely the wrapper.

Yeti’s Parole Officer is going to be out this week, September 26th, on iOS and on Android.

Blitzkrieg bop: Hunted Cow announces Dan Verssen’s Lightning War for mobile and desktops

By Jove!

This has been Hunted Cow’s Summer of Licensing Love. The Scottish developers have already lined up partnerships with Victory Point Games and Decision Games to bring their tabletop titles to digital, and they just told me that they’ve got one more hook-up to announce.

Hunted Cow have agreed to bring Dan Verssen Games’ Lightning War series of hobby card games to iOS, Android, and desktops, with the first title arriving in Q2 of 2015. The Lightning War games include five tabletop card games released between 2004 and 2008; four WWII-themed games and a modern “War on Terror” one. Hunted Cow’s deal extends to the entire quintet.

The Lightning War games are quick, low-complexity card games that simulate historical battles. In the D-Day game, for example, there’s five cards in the middle of the table representing the five beaches assaulted in Operation Overlord — each of the two players (Axis vs Allies) has cards marked with historical units that he plays to counter his opponent’s moves and take the beaches. A whole head-to-head match takes less than an hour.

Hunted Cow chief Andrew Mulholland told me that the first release to arrive next spring should be either Lightning: Midway or Lightning: D-Day. This will be DVG’s first return to mobile since Phantom Leader, a game that I really enjoyed back in 2012 despite the amateurish quality of the app.

There’s vanishingly few videos of these games being played on YouTube so after the jump, some chap just takes Lightning: Poland out of its box. And then doesn’t play it for some reason.

Neuroshima burning: Neuroshima Hex gets update, new army

 

Apparently, the Mississippi River is awash in Iocaine powder

Neuroshima Hex is one of those board games for iOS that we always seem to forget about. We shouldn’t. It’s a great implementation that’s been polished to a fine sheen over the past several years and, unlike a lot of board game apps, still routinely gets updated with new content. Unlike, oh, games like Eclipse…cough, cough.

Today Neuroshima Hex was updated once more, bringing in yet another army, this time it’s the Mississippi. In the world of Neuroshima Hex, the Mississippi River is a polluted wasteland of deadly fumes and toxic sludge, which houses a race of mutated warriors who are now available as a $2 IAP. Of course, Big Daddy’s Creations also did some bug squashing and, to top it all off, has put nearly all their games and IAP on sale. Check out the list over at the BDC site.

Neuroshima Hex is available (and on sale) for both Android and iOS.

Ante matter: Sci-fi card game Starbase Annex is out now on iOS

Cleared to dock.

Starbase Orion creator Rocco Bowling’s latest game is now out worldwide on the App Store. Starbase Annex is set in the same universe as Bowling’s Master of Orion-inspired 4X game but it’s much simpler. Despite the 4X theme, this is definitely the least complex game that Chimera Software have put out yet, so don’t go into this expecting a card-driven Twilight Struggle featuring Bowling’s creepy-crawly aliens or anything.

An individual game of Starbase Annex plays quickly: you get points to buy ship and colony cards that you lay on a hex board across from your opponent, then manoeuvre your fleets to try and capture hers’. There’s no multiplayer here, just a nice, long single-player campaign against increasingly devious AIs. It’s good light entertainment and there’s plenty of it.

Rocco told us right here in the PT Forums that an Android version is in the works, but for now this one’s just on the App Store for $2.

Review: Matchstick Memories

This puzzle was more fun when I was matching swords.

My first thought, upon hearing the pitch for Matchstick Memories, was that it had great potential to remedy a serious problem with classic interactive fiction: as I read most IF games, I’m basically playing Spock (Leonard Nimoy style, not the new-fangled, emotional Zachary Quinto version). I might have some investment in the story, but I always have as much time as I like to rationally evaluate my options. Even worse, the authors know this, so they have to write their choices so as not to make the better option so obvious that the distinctive freedom the book offers effectively disappears. So, not only do I feel like that bizarre abstraction, Economic Model Man, but the story also ends up feeling contrived for maximum uncertainty.

Matchstick Memories (henceforth MM) offers interactive fiction in which your performance on a variety of puzzles determines your choices. You’re still the ruthlessly efficient Economic Model Man, but now there’s some gameplay standing between you and your decisions. It’s well-suited to players who’ve ever imagined that successful life choices might hinge on the thousands upon thousands of hours of games you’ve played (which, as a man with a gig reviewing games for a website, I have).

And now you understand the plot about as well as I do.

Genre mashups are fertile ground, not just for games generally, but specifically for those which explore the interaction between mechanics and theme at a somewhat abstract level. MM uses its structure to help users encounter bewildering, frightening, or unexpected situations in a context which actually evokes plausible emotional reactions, rather than our idealized hope for how we’d react. It doesn’t always work perfectly–the brevity of the story elements sometimes makes it hard to find a thematically-appropriate reason why you walked east when you’d have preferred to walk west, which some blunder in your puzzle-solving might be said to model. However, sometimes you’re running for your life through a burning building, confused about which direction is which because there’s so much smoke and you’re so tired and oh God I can’t see what the Jesus I almost didn’t make it that time such heat keep going keep going. The moments that fit give you a thrilling peek at a game design ethos which could grant even simple games powerful resonance.

The plot involves navigating your memories, which is harder than you’d expect for reasons which you’re trying to discover. Progress consists of discovering matchbooks which give you the ability to cheat a bit on some of the puzzles, making further exploration easier. The puzzles are all simple and familiar: some of them are minesweeper, some are match-3, and there are several others of a similar level of complexity. As a result, you can usually grasp instantly what you need to do–though there’s a help button which will tell you the rules, I didn’t even notice its presence until about halfway through the game, because I never felt the need to go looking for it. That’s intentional; among varied palettes which mirror the fictional situation and restrained use of brightness instability, MM can create discomfort and uncertainty by presenting new puzzles which look very much like familiar ones, but behave slightly differently.

My Waterloo. Note well, readers: do not attempt puzzles which require constant contact over a long swipe while in the midst of a flesh-desiccating home improvement project.

The other major tool it uses is time. Though most puzzles are untimed, not all are, and at crucial moments the game often requires the use of a modicum of dexterity to draw lines quickly. Perhaps as a result of my recent grouting project, which left my hands very dry indeed, the game just didn’t detect my fingers very consistently, and these puzzles were maddeningly difficult. During play for the review, the game received an update which helps by changing a puzzle after it’s been failed five times. I’d have used that on several pre-update occasions, and it seems to keep the game moving when it would otherwise stall out in frustration.

Unfortunately, though MM binds its pieces together in an utterly fascinating way, the pieces themselves aren’t very interesting, and not being able to choose which game you play means there’s no way to suit the choice to your real-life context. While none of the sub-games would be my first choice on its own, a frantic dash of a game suits some situations. Other times I might be satisfied to play minesweeper, but rarely do I pick up my device indifferent to which of those I play. Worse, the moments at which the decisions are poorly represented by puzzles are as common and occasionally repetitive as in the choose-your-own-adventure books I recall from childhood. In one particularly egregious example, simply walking around a car (over a path several times retraced) required solving five separate puzzles. None of them were challenging, but it took longer to decide to step out of the car and walk to the other side than it would have in real life for the average New Englander to drive to the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts and back.

The sum simply takes too long for the quality of the puzzling; new spins on minesweeper and Bejeweled are always welcome, but they require to be rotating a little faster than they do in MM to look like innovation. To an extent, Matchstick Memories’ design demands that familiarity, in order for the puzzles to be familiar enough to set up the way the game plays with expectations to create confusion and disorientation, but the payoff requires a rarified taste to appreciate enough to justify the time spent. I recall a joke about a clown who makes a viewer cry, followed by an absurdly long description of following events, and then the punchline. It’s an absolute classic, an unforgettable touchstone for a certain kind of joke which derives its humor from a totally different dynamic than any other kind of joke I’ve encountered. I didn’t really enjoy hearing it, though, and even telling it is tiresome.

A veritable smorgasbord of minimalist puzzles.

A deliberately obscure story rarely appeals to me, and lowest-common-denominator puzzles never do, but the interplay between them in MM is so clever that I’m delighted to have encountered it. Creator Cooper Buckingham may only be entering the iOS space, but MM is inventive and evocative enough that I do hope it won’t be his last. I expect this to be a controversial game, with users alternately stimulated and bored depending on their tastes. So be it–if the lessons of the game design work here are widely discussed, it will be a merrier, more empathetic world.

Michael Brough’s Helix will spin you right round on iOS soon

Right round baby.

The inimitable Michael Brough has got a new game for us soon, and it’s a big shift from the roguelikes he’s been making lately like 868-HACK and Zaga-33. In fact, it’s probably best described as an arcade game, but being a game from the Mind of Brough, it’s not quite like any arcade game you’ve ever played before.

Putting neat labels on Brough games is like Helix is like trying to write an OK Cupid profile for Sybil, but Helix is a little like playing Geometry Wars on Pacifism mode: you’re besieged by creeps that want to kill you, and you’ve got nothing to shoot back with. Instead, you make orbits around them — draw the right pattern while avoiding contact with the bad guys, and they’ll destroy themselves.

Helix might be a little more reflex-oriented than some of Brough’s other stuff, but it’s still a Michael Brough game, so you can bet we’ll be playing it around here. Brough told me he’s getting very close to releasing it on iOS — he’s just sorting out some iOS 8-induced bugs in his final build.

Watch a gameplay video after the jump, and read Nowak’s review of the peerless 868-HACK from last year.

This video is a couple of years old but it still gives you the gist for what Helix is all about.