Out tonight: Byte Master and Godspeed Commander

Even the combat in the Sorcery games is better than tonight’s crop.

This week’s crop of new releases is bleaker than the Baklands on the other side of Kharé. Not the nice Baklands of 1000 years ago, but the crappy cursed Baklands of today. If this doesn’t make any sense to you, then you need to stop reading this and pick up last week’s standout, Sorcery! 3. This week is a different story. In fact, I could only find two releases that seemed worth talking about.

The first entrant is called Byte Master and looks to be a puzzle game with an electrical bent. I actually don’t know what to make of any of it from the trailer. It looks like it might have some match-3 to it, but then there are scenes reminiscent of searching through old datasheets at my old job. There are scenes of comparators, inductors, capacitors, etc., but how they fit into the game is a mystery. The description makes it all sound like a CPU-themed Threes but with what I can only guess is annoying IAP. It’s free to download for iOS Universal.

One more game after the break.

The second and last game of interest tonight is called Godspeed Commander. Here you control a spaceship via a match-3 mechanism. Yeah, more match-3. What are you doing with this spaceship? Battling other players, apparently. There are ten different ships you can choose from with over 50 different components to add to them and, I kid you not, “intense gem matching combat you can’t put down!” It also promises over one trillion options for customizing a character, so have at it. Like our other game this week, this is a free to download game for iOS Universal which I’m assuming has a load of IAP.

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Review: Last Voyage

Neighborhood’s something of a food desert, but the rent’s not bad.

Last Voyage is a puzzle game which trades just as heavily in mood and the suggestion of plot as it does in clever mind-benders. As the title suggests it’s a journey of sorts—an abstract, seemingly space-faring trip in five parts. Each act centers around just a handful of mechanics, each different from the last, with the game’s ghostly cosmic synth running throughout.

None of this is to say that Last Voyage has a story in any traditional sense, though there’s a familiar, filmic quality to how the game presents certain puzzles—the monolith and psychedelic tunnel of 2001: A Space Odyssey are possible touchstones here, though the repeated images of a half-risen sun speak just as readily to The Twilight Zone’s middle ground between fear and knowledge. These similarities don’t stop at passing visuals, though. Varied though its sections may be there’s a strong, mechanical, interactive framework which supports Last Voyage’s thematic aspirations.

Each puzzle (though one could just as easily use “task,” “vignette,” “chapter,” or “riddle”) is two-fold. First, there’s figuring out just what the puzzle is, followed by figuring out how to solve it—and you can trust that the former is often more difficult (or at least more frustrating) than the latter.

Here’s an early one: you’re presented with some towers, casting long shadows into the foreground and beyond, with that setting sun behind them (totally the Zone, yeah?). It’s important to stress that there’s no prompt here whatsoever, no text describing what to do or how to interact with the scene—and, again, like much in Last Voyage it does feel very close to a scene. Soon you discover you can move these towers up and down (later on in the act: left and right), and that they each have a red band, at different heights, across one side or more. So you twiddle around, move that thing so that these bands form a line and- oh. That was it. Huh? Huh.

“We were inspired to develop the quantum leap technology so that humanity might be able to travel back in time, to an age when Quantum Leap references were still topical.”

You might add a third component to the above, and treat each puzzle and act of Last Voyage as tri-fold, if you assume that beyond the color and pattern matching segments, and beyond the eventual on-rails, reflex-testing obstacle segment (not as out-of-place as it sounds), the game’s actually trying to say something. Minimalist aesthetics and ambient synth music are overused as shorthand for thematic depth, but Last Voyage (I mean, even the title right? Why’s it the last one? Who’s voyaging?) lands enough clever punches to earn those loaded stylistic trappings.

Without talking too much more about specific puzzles (a major blow to a game which leans on keeping players unsure of themselves), the conclusion of the game’s fourth act is most illustrative of the mindset Last Voyage tries to engender. Here you’re given a bright blue path to follow, one which occasionally zags sharply to either side—sort of a laid-back infinite runner, without the “infinite” part. Swipe left or right and you’ll course-correct, otherwise you lose the beam and have to start again at the last checkpoint. Things get trickier when the background switches from black to those Space Odyssey psychedelics, and the path gets that much harder to track. Then, suddenly, the electric acid show drops out, and the path (which you’ve been following perfectly, just as the game and universe asked of you) starts to fade away. “Ah, ah, where’s it going? Where did it go? Where am I going?”

This means you’ve finished the act, actually, and are to be rewarded not with a shower of sparkling stars and the congrats of some anthropomorphic cartoon raccoon but, rather, with a bit of a downer. Sound it out and, yeah, maybe it’s painfully glib—you’ve lost the path you see, like, metaphorically and, like, literally—but in the moment it’s surprisingly affecting. Really, it is. Ditto when you fail, and the game over screen calmly instructs you to “stay on the path.” “You mean the path of my life, right? Right? CAN WE LEAVE THE TOWN TOMORROW?”

Cripes, this says I’m quadruple-pregnant. And I was just testing my pool’s pH.

Then there’s the game-ending challenge, where you’re meant to guide a small diamond (possibly a spacecraft) past a series of rapidly approaching obstacles. Swipe left or right to maneuver your craft as it travels, slightly tilted, past deadly contracting orbs and swirling triangles towards some unknown finish line, all while a star slowly appears from behind a nearby planet in the background.

But, oh, there are these pickups which slow time down briefly, and help you navigate the trickier series of obstacles that would surely be impossible to beat otherwise. Except, well, you know they’re not impossible, because sometimes Last Voyage will ask you to navigate three exceptionally tricky hazards with the benefit of slow-mo and then give you the same three obstacles again, without the pickup, trusting that the player’s muscle memory will kick in and spit out the same, quick, left-right-pause-left-right-LEFT. It’s a dick move, for sure, Dad/Mom/sibling/whomever promising not to let go of the bike right before giving a hearty shove at the crest of Babybreak Hill, but it feels damn good (like a trick from a good, mean-spirited street illusionist) when it works the first time—which may in fact be the very first time you see this particular gag.

“I am Uatu, the Watcher. I cannot interfere, I can only watch. At least until I start seeing some of that sweet, sweet MCU money, that is.”

Last Voyage is a puzzle game which is uncharacteristically comfortable with—and perhaps cautiously optimistic about—the unknown. Though not traditionally tough (at least not until the aforementioned final act), the game excels at regularly shifting its terms of engagement, being at different times a puzzle game, a psychedelic finite runner, and a sub-orbital obstacle course. Some sections don’t resonate quite as fiercely as those described above, coming off a bit too much like “regular” puzzles next to the best of Last Voyage’s emotional abstractions. As a package, though, this one succeeds as both puzzle and parable.

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Review: Pickomino

Get used to seeing this.

I give Reiner Knizia a hard time because his games tend to be abstracts with a thin veneer of theme painted over the top and I, for the most part, don’t enjoy abstract games. There are exceptions, of course. I enjoy Lost Cities and Ra! quite a bit, and I’ve been known to lose games of Tigris and Euphrates with great gusto. Pickomino is another Knizia game that I’ve owned and enjoyed for years which has just made the jump to digital and, like those other games, the theme is thinner than my resumé.

The “theme” puts you in the shoes of a hungry chicken at a worm barbecue. Your job, collect more worms from the grill than your opponents. Seriously. In reality, it’s a simple dice game with clever mechanics and enough “take-that” to make it a very fun family game.

Pickomino is a simple game in which you roll eight 6-sided dice. The dice are numbered 1-5 with one side having a picture of a worm on it. After you roll, you must select one number to hold, and then take all the dice with that number out of your pool. You then roll the remaining dice and repeat, however you cannot select a value that you’ve already chosen. The side with the worm counts as a five numerically, but you must have at least one worm in your held dice to select a worm tile from the grill.

Yes, the entire point of all this dice rolling is to snag worm tiles from the “grill” at the top of the screen. The worm tiles range from 21-36 and when you save enough dice to equal or surpass the number on the tile, you take it and stack it on top of any other tiles you might have already won. If you roll a value of a tile on the top of one of your opponent’s stacks, you can steal that tile away from them.

A rare good roll

If you ever roll the dice and cannot select a tile, or roll your dice but cannot remove any dice from your pool that turn, you have a misthrow which not only wastes your turn, but you have to put your topmost tile back on the grill and flip over, or “burn”, the tile with the highest value on the grill.

The app itself is very well done, with six different AI opponents to compete against. There is also local play, which is how I’ve found myself having the most fun. Playing Pickomino on the iPad and passing it to your friends is really no different that having the dice and tiles spread out on a table, minus all the setup time. We took the game camping and my kids and I played the hell out of this thing. It was a perfect implementation for a dice game on the go. There is also online asynchronous play as well, which works fine if you can get Game Center to cooperate.

As the worm burns.

Pickomino is one of those games that I was never expecting to see in a digital format, and its arrival was a complete surprise. Overall, however, it’s a happy surprise. It plays just like the physical version, and throws in several competitive AIs as well. It’s not going to knock off Agricola or Galaxy Trucker as a full-blown euro, but as a quick diversion, Pickomino is an excellent choice and another really well made board game app for iOS.

Pickomino was played on an iPad Air for this review.

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RPG Redo: Preview of upcoming Knights of Pen and Paper 2

I actually wear a hat like that when I role-play. The pointy one, not the one with horns. That would be too nerdy.

Knights of Pen & Paper was a unique take on the standard role playing game, putting you in the roles of not only the players of a tabletop game, but also the game master. It had its tongue firmly in cheek, and presented everything in a fun, 8-bit style. It was a clever enough title that it attracted Paradox Entertainment who has now taken over the reigns and is publishing the upcoming, and creatively titled, Knights of Pen & Paper 2.

KOPP2 isn’t expected to hit the App Store until May, but I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a pre-release copy this week. It’s not the full game–only about 20% of the game is present–but I’ve had a chance to check out the tutorial and early missions. Immediately you’ll notice that the graphics are a huge upgrade. The game uses 16-bit graphics that brought back strong feelings of messing around with my old Sega Genesis. Gameplay-wise, things feel very much the same, which isn’t the worst thing considering that the first game was so well done. If it isn’t broken, right? The game involves the players collecting quests and the GM deciding how hard to make each fight by adding or subtracting monsters. The players then fight away, using powers gained through leveling.

The game definitely still has the same sense of humor–the tutorial pits you against the Tarrasque–which is probably the biggest draw of the game. Yes, there’s a good RPG in here, but it’s the humor that sets it apart. Looking forward to getting my hands on the full game when it releases in the next month.

Check out the new gameplay trailer after the break.

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Cuck-coup: Coup bluffs its way onto App Store

The Contessa & The Captain, this fall on NBC

Coup is one of those games that, when it was announced, we had no idea how it would work in a digital format. The entire game is based on lying and bluffing your way to victory, so not being able to see or talk with your opponents just seemed like a subpar way to play the game. Well, we don’t need to speculate on whether it will be a success or failure any more because it’s been released for iOS Universal and can be nabbed right now as a free download.

Coup is a game in which each player is dealt two characters, each of which has a special power. You know which characters you have, but nobody else does. On your turn, you then take an action based on which character the other players think you have. You don’t need to have that character to take the action, but if you’re lying and someone calls you on it, you lose one of your cards. If you lose both cards, you’re out of the round. It’s a very fun, fast bluffing game when sitting around a table and enjoying your beverage of choice.

Will it work on your iPhone? Give it a go and let us know in the comments. No trailer for this one, but you can see it being played by the crew of Game Night! from BGG after the break.

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Out Tonight: Sorcery 3, Does Not Commute, and Key

This new view doesn’t just look cool, it changes everything.

The big release of tonight (and maybe of 2015 thus far) is Sorcery 3 from inkle Studios. The folks at inkle redefined what a digital gamebook could be with the first installment of Sorcery, and perfected it (or so we thought) with Sorcery 2. Tonight, we get to see if they’ve managed to improve upon what was already the flagship of the genre (spoiler: they have).

Sorcery 3 continues the story of your search for the Crown of Kings through the wastelands of the Baklands. If you’ve played the first 2 chapters, you might think you know what to expect, but you’d be wrong. This version has the same look and feel–no one is going to mistake it for anything other than a Sorcery title–but the gameplay has so many new twists and turns that it doesn’t even resemble its source material after a bit.

You can start this chapter with a new character but the real joy comes from continuing with a character that’s gone through the Shamutanti Hills and Khare and has all the boons and banes that they’ve collected along the way. In this leg of the journey, you’re hunting–or being hunted by–seven serpents who are heading to Mampang to report your progress to the evil Archmage who will then be ready for you in the final chapter. Searching for, and defending yourself against, these serpents is way cooler than it has any right to be.

If you’ve played the first two installments of the Sorcery series, this is a no-brainer. If you’re new to the series, pick up all three of the games and play through them in order. You won’t be disappointed. I should have a review up for Sorcery 3 tomorrow morning, but if the preceding few paragraphs didn’t tip you off, I’ll give you a little tidbit of what to expect when the review lands: I love it.

Pick it up for iOS Universal for $5. You can also snag it for Android devices.

More of tonight’s games after the break.

Also out tonight is the top-down driver, Does Not Commute. When we wrote about the game yesterday, we weren’t exactly sure what we seeing. Today we have a little bit more information. In the game you’re tagged with driving a car along a specific route, and then travel back in time, jump into another vehicle and drive somewhere having to avoid yourself in the other car. Repeat. It sounds a bit dry, but the trailer looks like a lot of fun, and there might even be a story wrapped up in all this driving about. The game will be for iOS Universal and will be free to download with a one-time IAP to unlock the premium game.

Our last game tonight is Key – 3D Cubic Puzzle, which from this point forward will just be calling Key. Key is a puzzle game that looks a lot like Edge, but plays instead like 3D Tetris. You’re given a piece that will only fit into one side of a 3D cube, and when you place it, you’re given another. This isn’t a relaxing puzzler where you sit and think about your next move; each move is timed and you’re awarded more time based on how quickly you place the pieces correctly into the cube. Not my kind of thing–my blood pressure is high enough–but to each their own. Key will be available for iOS Universal and is free to download. No idea on the IAP situation with this one.

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Wood anniversary: Carcassonne celebrates 5 year anniversary on App Store

Have you seen the latest Jurassic World trailer? This is pretty much it.

Carcassonne was released before Mt. Hexmap was even a twinkle in Owen’s eye, which makes it weird that it’s still considered by many to be the best digital board game port available. I’m not sure if that’s a testament to the incredible job that TheCodingMonkeys did when crafting Carcassonne, or an indictment of all the games that have come since. Seeing as how I really like a lot of those other games, I’ll stick with the former.

To celebrate the five year anniversary of Carcassonne’s release, TheCodingMonkeys have bundled up all the released expansions and are selling them together in an Anniversary Bundle. Yes, now you can snag every released expansion for only $5. For those of you who’ve already bought all the expansions, you’ll get nothing and like it.

TheCodingMonkeys have also announced that Carcassonne will be heading to the Mac App Store later this year as well, with full cross-platform play with the iOS version.

Carcassonne is available for iOS Universal and will run you $10. Trailer after the break.

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Spiderweb sayonara: Spiderweb Software stops iPad RPG development

Say goodbye to these, because it’s the last time you’ll be seeing them.

Well, this one came out of nowhere. Yesterday we were speculating on why Spiderweb Software’s latest RPG, Avernum 2: Crystal Souls had been pulled from the App Store shortly after its release on Wednesday night. According to Jeff Vogel at Spiderweb, iOS 8.3 completely broke their engine and they don’t plan on fixing it. In fact, say goodbye to Spiderweb games on iPad, they have ceased all future development on the platform as well.

There are other reasons for their sudden departure, such as the competition on the App Store rising to levels that have hurt Spiderweb sales and causing their advertising budget to skyrocket. On top of that, the dev is just tired of dealing with Apple.

All of Spiderweb’s games have been, and will continue to be, available on PC and Mac, so it’s not like we’ll never see any new Spiderweb RPGs. We just won’t see them on our tablets anymore, which is where I was first introduced to their unique games. If you want to give the titles that still remain on iPad a try, check out Avadon: The Black Fortress, Avernum: Escape from the Pit, Avernum 6, and Avadon 2: The Corruption.

After the break, check out the trailer for the game that broke the camel’s back.

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On like Donkey Kong: Pixels getting video game treatment

A game where I can play as Kevin James? Sign me up.

While I wasn’t watching, 80’s nostalgia became a thing. The timing really sucks, too, because I had a pretty rad mullet back then, but there’s no amount of Rogaine that’s bringing that puppy back to life. This phenomenon’s latest offender is the upcoming movie Pixels, which stars Opera Man and Paul Blart as guys fighting classic video game icons like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Centipede, etc. because of some stupid reason. The trailer looks like a mash up of Tron and every Roland Emmerich movie, which means it looks terrible.

That’s not going to stop the video game crossovers, though. Today Bandai Namco announced that they’re making a game based on a movie that’s based on video games, and will be the first game to have all these classic characters together. Before you get too excited (oh, you weren’t?), it’s going to be a tower defense game and nowhere in the press release is Donkey Kong mentioned. They mention Frogger, but not Donkey Kong? I might boycott the game sight unseen just because of that.

Pixels, the video game and not the movie, will be releasing in July right before the release of Pixels, the movie not the video game. Watch the trailer for said movie after the break.

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Out Tonight: Bull Run 1861, Layer, Singularity, and Spellcrafter

All that’s missing are the civilians watching the battle while eating their picnic lunches.

It’s already been a busy week thus far, with games like Pandemic and Hearthstone heading to the small screen and Sentinels of the Multiverse getting an expansion. So, what could there possibly be left to talk about? Let’s start with the American Civil War and another hex war game from the aptly named HexWar, this one focusing on the first major battle of the war, the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.

As is the case with the HexWar games, you can play as either side in the conflict and there are a good chunk of scenarios you can play through. This one offers you a scenario that encompasses the entire battle as well as scenarios that handle smaller portions of the battle as well as the smaller engagements that led up to the meeting at Manassas.

Civil War: Bull Run 1861 is available for iPad and will run you $5.

More of this week’s releases after the break.

The next game on the list is simply called Layer and it’s another one of those minimalist puzzle games that seem to be all the rage. In this one, you have to stack layers. Or something. Honestly, even after watching the trailer I’m a bit confused. Looks like a bunch of tapping to me, but when I say that out loud I sound like a very grumpy, very old man, so I’m going to keep it to myself. Layer is a Universal app that will run $2. Now, watch the trailer and tell me that you understand what’s going on.

Singularity is another minimalist puzzle game but there’s something strange going on here. From appearances, it looks pretty much exactly like Unexpect3rd’s other release Causality. The icons are the same and the iTunes descriptions are the same. Also, there’s no mention of Singularity on Unexpect3rd’s website. Now, Causality was released in June of 2014, so I’m not sure if this is a reimagining or an entirely new game. Either way, it’s free to try for iOS Universal.

I don’t know what’s going on, either.

Last game we’ll talk about today is Spellcrafter: The Path of Magic. Spellcrafter is a 3rd person RPG that appears to have turn-based combat. The big selling point, however, is the magic system that has you drawing symbols on your touchscreen to cast different spells. I think there was a Harry Potter game a few years ago that did the same thing, and it was utterly terrible, so we can only hope that things have improved in the crowded “draw spells on your screen” genre. Spellcrafter actually looks pretty decent and the trailer itself is pretty well put together, if you can get past the rhymes. Ugh. This one is for iOS Universal and should run $3 when it releases tonight.

Okay, now it’s your turn. Tell me what I’m missing.

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Stone on the go: Hearthstone arrives for iPhone

Not different enough to make me a better player, apparently.

Love it or loathe it, there’s no denying that Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is hugely popular. Today’s announcement from Blizzard Entertainment isn’t going to hurt that popularity at all. Blizzard released Hearthstone on iPad almost exactly one year ago and it didn’t make Android tablets until December, but today the game has opened up and can be played on both iPhone and Android phones.

The game has been given a facelift for the smaller screen, but otherwise it’s the full game that you’ve come to love (or hate). The major difference that I can see during play are that your cards are kept off to the side during play instead of being enlarged in the center of the screen like on the iPad. All you have to do it touch your hand to bring it to the center, however, so it’s not a major change. The only other difference I’ve noticed so far is the main menu, which is in a different configuration than the iPad or PC version.

The rollout of the update may take a while, so if it’s not showing up in your App Store yet, keep trying. That said, you should be able to snag it here for iPhone and here for Android devices.

Uncharacteristically, Blizzard hasn’t posted a corny video for this announcement yet, so we’ll post the corny trailer for the Blackrock Mountain expansion that launched nearly two weeks ago instead. Look for it after the break.

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Spreading the disease: Pandemic moving to iPhone

And I feel fine.

One of the darlings of 2013 was Matt Leacock’s cooperative juggernaut Pandemic: The Board Game which was ported to iPad from new developer, F2Z Digital Media. It was the first game developed by F2Z and Z-man, and we all thought it was the start of something big. In fact, shortly after the game was released there was an update that included parts of the first expansion with promises of more to come. Since January of 2014, however, there’s been radio silence leading many of us to believe that F2Z had been a one-hit wonder.

It turns out that F2Z isn’t dead, however. This Friday, Pandemic will come to iPhone via an update that will make the app Universal. Pandemic will also be on sale for only $5 starting on Friday and going through next week.

No other hints of what we can expect in Pandemic’s future, but it’s nice to know that Pandemic actually has a future. Check out the trailer after the break.

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City slickers: Sentinels of the Multiverse heads to Rook City tomorrow

Expatriette eschews super powers and instead uses good old fashioned fire power. I’m okay with this.

It’s been a long couple of weeks. After Owen unchained me (for cleaning, I assume), I noticed that the garbage can which usually blocks the doggie door here at Mt. Hexmap was nowhere to be found. I seized the opportunity and bolted on a family vacation in which I spent my time camping–yes, in a tent–in the wilds of Florida. I’m back now, re-shackled to the kitchen table with nothing to show for it but angry family members, bug bites in places I dare not mention, and Owen’s icy glare. On top of all that, I was given the opportunity to get my hands on a pre-release version of the upcoming expansion for Sentinels of the Multiverse, Rook City, but missed it because our tent, for some reason, didn’t have wifi.

It’s not like I’ll have to wait too long to get my hands on the expansion anyway because Handelabra has announced that Rook City will be releasing tomorrow for all platforms. The expansion will arrive as a $5 IAP, or as part of the Season 1 Pass if you’re going that route. Rook City introduced two new characters, Mr. Fixer and Expatriette, both of which feel very different from the other heroes. It will also introduce two new urban environments as well as four new villains.

I was, finally, able to load up the expansion last night and I’m really impressed. I haven’t been able to play Sentinels much over the last month or two and have missed an update or two along the way. If you haven’t picked up the game since its launch last year, give it another try. I was amazed at how much more polished and put together the game is now compared to launch, and I was the guy who loved it back then. All the confusion about what powers are helping or hurting has been cleaned up and clarified to the point where I never had to wonder why something was happening. On top of that, add new visual cues for the different effects and the game really shines.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is available for iPad as well as Android Tablets and Kindle. The expansion will be available tomorrow on all platforms, but the exact time is up to whenever it’s approved by the various powers-that-be.

After the break catch the guys at Handelabra playing Sentinels and previewing a bunch of the Rook City content.

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New Release Appendix: Tank Battle, Tercio to Salvo, Pickomino, and more

dat massed

The Easter Bunny made the arduous trek up Mount Hexmap over the weekend (the funicular was closed due to the bank holiday here in the UK) to scatter an assortment of pastel-dyed HEAT shells and bouncing betties around the grounds of PT HQ. I’m not sure that the Easter Bunny is hip to the current international consensus about land mines, but it’s always nice to see him.

Before heading back down, he mentioned that there were some new games out. Let’s see what those are.

If you take Pa Faraday to a beach, the first thing he’ll do is point out the best way to assault it with LSTs — meanwhile Ma Faraday slinks a little deeper into her copy of Grazia to avoid eye contact with other holidaymakers.

This new Tank Battle game from Hunted Cow’s HexWar label is right up Pa’s street: Tank Battle Normandy takes the Scottish studio’s long-running light strategy franchise and brings it to the most famous of all WWII venues. Somewhat unusually for a HexWar title, you can play Operation Overlord as the Allies or as the Germans in this one and the game ships with 23 scenarios, with two additional 8-mission campaigns available as one-off DLCs within the app. The devs tell us that there’s over 100 different units, including a bunch of the Churchill Funnies — history’s only known stand-up comedy tanks.

Tank Battle Normandy is iOS Universal and it’s two bucks.

Britain’s other noted wargaming house didn’t take the weekend off either: Slitherine have released an expansion for Pike & Shot, one of the most divisive wargames in memory. I really quite liked Pike & Shot and so did our man Davy Lane, but a fair few folks were put off by the unusually long scenarios. That’s a pity because the combat is pretty interesting and the era of warfare being modeled is unusual.

Tercio to Salvo is the first expansion for Slitherine’s iPad-only Renaissance wargame and it adds 10 new scenarios that include some real deep cuts of early modern history. Raise your hand if you can name the belligerents in the Battle of Axtorna. Anybody? I thought not. Anyway, Pike & Shot continues to do its bit to unearth some lesser-visited eras of history and I love it for that. If you’re not daunted by the idea of playing a wargame you need to sink 45 minutes into to complete a scenario, give Pike & Shot a… chance.

You can find the Tercio to Salvo expansion as a $10 IAP within the Pike & Shot iPad app.

Friend of PT Alan Newman wrote in to tell us about Pickomino, a Reiner Knizia-designed dice game that’s been brought to iOS by German publishers USM. That name should ring a bell for digital board game aficionados — USM are the current keepers of the Catan grail on iOS.

Pickomino isn’t one I know personally but Al tells us it’s a great little filler — albeit one with a few launch day bugs. USM tend to make high quality stuff so I’d be surprised if those cracks aren’t plastered over quickly.

No trailer or anything for this but here’s picture of some chickens rolling dice. How do chickens roll dice without any hands? DON’T RUIN THIS FOR ME.

Joke’s on you, chickens. You ARE the tasty snack

Finally, I got an interesting pitch in the inbox from the makers of Blades of Chance, who have got a turn-based street sword-fighting (!) game for Android. It’s same-device multiplayer-only, and not on iOS, so the market for this is a bit narrow but this trailer looks like Nicholas Winding-Refn’s pitch to re-make Battle Royale and I couldn’t not post that.

Blades of Chance is on Android and it’s two bucks.

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Review: Swap Heroes 2

Isn’t this where they found Frankie Carbone in Goodfellas?

Call any particular cast of characters “interchangeable” and, for most games, you’d be speaking in the pejorative. But for Swap Heroes 2, the second action-puzzler of its name from developer Chris Savory, rolling with a foursome of interchangeable fantasy archetypes is the whole point. As the name suggests, the idea isn’t that your squad is comprised of bland nobodies who wouldn’t stand out at your average weekend LARP (let alone a week-long camp where everyone’s armored to the nines), but rather that your team adheres to one specific, rigid tactical formation, a formation which only allows for two characters to change places at any one time.

The positions are thus: three heroes in front, one in the back. Each turn you’ve only one option, and that’s to have two of your team switch places. Swap between any two of your frontmost fighters and, after they’ve moved, your entire offensive line will take a swing at the three lanes of baddies set out before them, all while your back-row Tom Brady analogue takes their sweet-ass time to read the defense and recover a few hit points. (To those unfamiliar with American football: uh, the scrum? It’s kind of like the scrum, I think.)

Bring your in-reserve hero forward, though, and that’s when things really get swappy. Each class has a different special ability that activates only when they’re called up to the front. For example, the Warrior–one of the four classes unlocked at the start of the game, out of eight total–lays down a blue wave of laser-sword energy that damages every single enemy on the field. The Mage, meanwhile, throws down a column of fire which scorches every enemy in a lane for three turns, regardless of whether or not our red-clad sorceress holds the line. The Archer gets an underwhelming super arrow that’s extra damaging but fundamentally indistinguishable from his basic attack, while the Bard has an equally disappointing heal-over-time tune. (Archer gets a pass for being a straight-up anthropomorphic Disney fox in Robin Hood gear.)

“What most people don’t know about this neighborhood is it has some great charcuterie joints. And, yeah, the monsters too.”

That’s basically it. The give and take of any level (each divided into two stages which ask you to dispatch 25 mooks) lies in keeping the sometimes pink, often cuddly hordes of monsters at bay while also taking your most banged-up squaddies off active duty when necessary–any team deaths will end a level.

This rotation is complicated by a handful of enemies which can deal indirect damage, or mobs which can lock heroes in place for a turn. More common, though, are several different themes on the same basic “melee” and “ranged” monsters, creatures best dealt with by your own melee and ranged (and middle-ranged) heroes. You might see a row of pig soldiers advancing down the left lane and figure that you have a turn, at most, to get your own Warrior or Monk there. But, there’s a hostile spellcaster camped in the middle of the center lane and your Bard looks mighty bloodied. In addition to their special attacks heroes vary in terms of stats such as health and attack damage, so your beefy Monk would be able to hold the center for a few turns, though the Warrior, being able to hit targets two spaces away, would be the better choice. All this assuming a rock golem or spider doesn’t teleport into the right lane and overwhelm your Mage, or that you’ve put enough upgrade tokens (gained by beating levels) into healing for when your Bard pirouettes back into the fray, or that a devious living bomb doesn’t appear and completely bork your plans, forcing you to get some ranged damage out before the ACME-looking thing blows and wounds each of your fantasy foursome with shrapnel.

Conspicuously absent: “affability,” “flair,” and “gumption” stats.

These battles are good fun, the sort that rests on the barrier between moment-to-moment puzzle smarts and grander, theater-wide (or at least level-wide) strategizing. With consistent upgrades for your squad, you’re not going to completely throw a stage with one or two bad moves, and in fact might benefit from a swap that’s inefficient in the now if it moves a hero into position for a move that’s sure to be useful later. As stages progress and you close in on the 25 kills needed to win, though, this dynamic reverses.

Swap Heroes 2 could have done much to dress up its simple squad-switching conceit. There’s a campaign of sorts in the game, level-up tokens, and a few unlockable characters as previously mentioned, though these blandishments are so few it becomes clear that the main draw of the game is meant to be the endless mode, a play-to-death horde affair.

The campaign relies heavily on reuse as well. There are four main stages, each with two 25-kill sections, and each stage has three difficulty levels that award one upgrade star apiece. The final boss is gated, however, requiring that you’ve earned at least ten stars if you want to go a few rounds with the Generic Shadow Villain that inhabits Death Peak. This gating means you’ll need to repeat every stage twice for eight stars, then repeat two (likely the easier first ones) a third time for the necessary ten. In the first go-round with Swap Heroes 2 the game does a fine job ramping up the difficulty with new mobs and mechanics that the player needs to recognize and plan around. This ascending difficulty curve is ruined when the game asks you to replay the same stages (with the same sorts of mobs) over and over again, suffering at the hands of some vaguely increased difficulty which one assumes comes from increasing monsters’ stats or spawning patterns.

“The key, ow, is to make sure and, ow, keep your, ow, feet moving. Oh, and watch out, ow, for the shadow wol-“

Swap Heroes 2 is a good distillation of the combined arms thinking common in fantasy roleplaying games. It, like those core party-based RPGs, asks you to build a team of heroes with different yet complimentary talents, and then presents you with a series of fights where most but not all of your squad will have an immediate job to do (hit this, heal her, shoot that, and so on). Someone is always the dead weight, but that title can pass from one hero to another and back again depending on the turn. Unfortunately, the game seems to think that in isolating and defining that RPG experience it can sport an equally slim selection of heroes, stages, and foes. Swap Heroes 2 is smart, but slight, and could have been much improved if its main mechanic was given the proper room to stretch.

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Overland gameplay video trades space for time

Pipe dreams.

So wow — I’ve been really busy the last few weeks* and what I’m about to post has been out in the world for damn near a month, but I didn’t want it to pass without comment here at PT. Adam Saltsman has unveiled some extensive gameplay from the forthcoming Overland in a video feature he did with GameSpot a couple of weeks back, and wow does that game look great.

You might remember the gist of the big Overland interview we did with Adam back in February: a post-apocalyptic tactical game that took XCOM’s tactical combat and made it more approachable. That’s already a pretty damn good pitch, but there’s more revealed in this video that Saltsman didn’t tell us about. There’s stuff in this video that reminds me (at a high level, anyway) of Keith Burgun’s fascinating 4X experiment Empire: the world is completely hostile to you, and you’re constantly being pushed to move on. No wiping out the enemy and casually looting their pockets in Overland. In fact, it looks like a lot of what you’re doing won’t even be combat in Overland, just buying time to escape into the next scenario. It sounds exhilarating.

The game’s official website still has that coy “2015” plastered in the release date box, but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear more. In the meantime, set aside fifteen minutes to watch the video below.

*With what, you ask? I’ll tell you soon. It’s… awesome.

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Brian Reynolds will you please come home

why brian reynolds

Once upon a time, Brian Reynolds was the dauphin prince of strategy game designers. An early protege of Uncle Sid himself, Reynolds was the driving force behind the narrative 4X masterpiece Alpha Centauri, the hugely under-rated Rise of Nations, and the game that some Civ heads would argue is the apex of that singular series: Civilization II.

Like many prodigies, Reynolds started acting out in ways that defied our expectations for him. Instead of growing into the next Sid Meier, Reynolds (wearing a leather jacket and proclaiming that we aren’t even his real dads) eloped with free-to-play trailblazers Zynga, which in the first decade of this century was a roach motel for promising game developers who checked in and were promptly never heard from again.

While at Zynga, Reynolds created a bunch of the social game horsecrap that the company was known for at the time, most notably Frontierville, a game that transported the mechanics of Zynga’s fading jewel Farmville into the Old West for no apparent reason at all. In 2013, it was announced that Reynolds was leaving Zynga, and everybody who liked actual games breathed collective a sigh of relief. Now Brian could get back to making the proper strategy games that he excelled at.

Except nope that’s apparently not what’s happening at all sorry. Brian Reynolds’ new game is here, and now that he’s free to make any kind of game he wants — he’s made another clone of another godawful F2P game. Reynolds new game is a Clash of Clans imitator called DomiNations, which I fully admit has got a clever title. But dash any hopes you may have had that Brian Reynolds was done with his rebellious phase and was coming home to make real games. Good luck turning a profit with your extremely late arrival in the most crowded and least differentiated corner of the video games market, Brian. I really do mean that. Please make a few million bucks and then make a proper game for the Civ OGs that were with you back in the day.

Watch the trailer for DomiNations after the jump. I’ll meet you there with a handkerchief.

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Review: Ento

Kevin Spacey turns in a surprisingly chilling performance as the voice of a grasshopper who runs a protection racket.

In 2001, Zendo turned science into a boardgame, but wrapped it in a mystical Buddhist theme. Ento, first entry into the iOS space from Omino Games, eschews the competitive element for a pure puzzle, and returns the theme to the more natural fit of science. It takes the form of a rather stilted correspondence between Charles and Alfred. Poor Alfred has to try and deduce whatever rule of taxonomy Charles has in mind by sending him collections of insects and getting back a simple thumbs up or down on whether they follow the rule. Naturally, this requires sending lots of insects, so, basically, it’s a postal worker’s misery simulator.

When you finish a cabinet, you earn bugs. You have to be in the right frame of mind to appreciate Ento’s “rewards”.

Ento eases players into this process gradually, starting off with relatively few insects in a small display and quite simple possible rules. Each cabinet contains five puzzles in displays of escalating size, but the number of types of insects and the complexity of the rules don’t increase until you graduate to the next cabinet (incidentally, the resemblance of these cabinets to flat files has rekindled my latent desire to own one as a way of keeping various boardgames set up and/or in progress). One is quickly disabused of the notion that one can succeed quickly enough to get three stars by testing only a single hypothesis with each guess, so the game revolves around dividing the space of possible rules as evenly as possible each time without exceeding the limits of our feeble memories. I blundered often enough at this memory-dependent equitable division that I now have one more reason to hope I never get divorced.

This struck me as kind of racist at first, but in the context of mid-19th-century discussions, “coloured” was probably progressive.

The basic gameplay loop of placing insects on displays and submitting them for judgment is much more forgiving than actually pinning specimens into precise locations–my only objection is that it seems to present less information at a time than it could on easier levels. You really miss an iPad-specific version of the game when you’re scrolling through the larger sets of guesses, sorted into those which do and do not follow the rule. Forming hypotheses, too, seems terribly wasteful of space early on, only coming to seem remotely well-designed once you’ve completely quite a few levels. As you do, the simplistic early hypotheses available are joined by various other possible categories which cross-cut one another. Perhaps the rule is that there must be exactly three orange specimens, or two weevils (while I am contractually obligated to pun on the lesser of these, following cinematic Jack Aubrey, I am mindful of Stephen Maturin’s quotation of “He who would pun would pick a pocket!“), or perhaps it has to do with which row they’re in. With many options to consider, the use of space in the hypothesis interface becomes far less irritatingly profligate.

The experience of putting together a structured guess in order to test various hypotheses ends up feeling an awful lot like playing Mastermind, or Bagel (from early programming text What to Do After You Hit Return), or Bulls and Cows. I tend to use early guesses to cut out large swaths of possibilities which fall into cognitively similar chunks, because memory is my limiting factor. Happily, what it doesn’t feel like is Battleship–you’re never just plinking away, hoping to get lucky; every test is progress. That is, until the game reminds you that the hypothesis you’ve just come up with is already contradicted by something you know. Then you just have to fetch the dunce cap and sit in the corner.

Knowing that birdwing butterflies aren’t relevant makes it easy to test my beetle hypothesis. Plus, it looks sort of silly.

One of the surprises of Ento is that I never really found my way past the fact that it’s about bugs. For many logic games, like Honeycomb Hotel, the theme basically disappears from my consciousness after a short while. Ento so carefully renders its insects, and makes their species relevant enough, that there are just a few too many reminders of their nature. My father was a biology teacher and tended to bring his work home with him–I still enjoy telling the story of how we dissected a squirrel on our dining room table–and I found insects fascinating as a child, but even I have a lingering visceral reaction to long legs with sharp angles. It’s kind of fun to play with that reaction, sort of like an adult version of peek-a-boo. No, not the kind with a clitoris, just the deliberate consideration of something which makes you uncomfortable. But, for those who get the heebie-jeebies about bugs and hoped that the gameplay of Ento might help them ignore its theme, the best I can say is that I haven’t seen it animate the insects and show them scurrying off to hide in the crevices of your phone.

My father will be so disappointed when he learns that the Rinella Theory is just a guess about how some guy arranges dead bugs.

For a game which sells its theme so thoroughly with its visuals, the use of hypothesis testing is badly grafted onto science. What you’re trying to discover isn’t a regularity in nature; you’re just trying to get an idea of what arbitrary rule is in Charles’s head. What makes Alfred Wallace’s discovery of evolution worth remembering isn’t that he divined Charles Darwin’s mind, but that they largely independently perceived the same pattern in the world. That’s not a deep criticism, of course, and as a logic puzzle Ento is clever enough, but I find myself reflecting back to Zendo with a bit of nostalgia for the forthright inaccuracy of calling the rule the Buddha nature.

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