Between the lines: New puzzler, Lines the Game, hits iOS

Red is the American Pharaoh of Lines.

I thought we had gone a week without missing any good Wednesday night releases, then Lines popped up in my inbox this morning. Lines the Game, as its formally known, is another puzzle game with a minimalist aesthetic that’s all the rage these days. Yeah, that made me roll my eyes a bit, too, but Lines has a few things going for it. First of all, it’s a premium game with a $3 price tag, over 200 levels, and no IAP. Also, I’ve been playing it a bit this morning, and it’s actually a good bit of fun.

The point of Lines is to create the longest line of a single color, but there are other colors streaking through the rather complex line drawings and blocking your path like Tron light cycles. Your color is indicated by the color of the level’s border and you place points on the drawing where your color will begin, and then its a race to fill up the entire picture. To “solve” the puzzle, you just need to be the one taking up the most real estate. It’s incredibly simple at the beginning, but turns into a real brain burner as you move forward. What makes it more interesting is, when you fail, the board resets but the other colors begin in different locations. So, you cannot just replay a puzzle repeatedly and change your starting spot, you need to analyze where everybody else is each time a new puzzle begins.

Lines is available for iOS Universal for $3. Check out the trailer after the break.

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Off the grid: Playing Through the Ages on your iPad today

Not that great, really.

A couple days ago I was hit up with a press release for a new site called Tabletopia, a website that acts as a portal for playing board games online. It’s not the first of its kind, in fact there are more board gaming sites out there than I even care to investigate. Tabletopia is only in alpha now, so I went over to check it out and was stuck by a dire message stating that my OS isn’t supported, which means that Tabletopia will be a PC/Mac-only site for gaming. Not a big deal, but the more I thought about this the more I began to wonder why we aren’t talking about some of those board game sites out there that do support the iPad, allowing you to play all sorts of board games without ever having to visit the App Store.

The game I want to cover today–and I’d love to cover more, if you guys think its a good idea–is Vlaada Chvátil’s masterpiece, Through the Ages, which is getting its own native app later this year from the big brains at Czech Games Edition. Don’t think you have to wait until late 2015 to build your civilization, however. If you don’t mind going against human opponents instead of an AI, you can play Through the Ages right in iOS Safari for the cost of $0.

Through the Ages was released back in 2006 and quickly rose into the Top 10 games of all time on BGG where it’s remained ever since (it’s currently ranked 4th). I spent the next four years trying to develop a VASSAL module so that I could play TtA online with friends, and nearly succeeded. [actually, it was a buggy, stinky mess -ed.] I was in the midst of polishing the module up when a French TtA fan by the name of Nicolas d’Halluin declared that he’d created a website where TtA could be played online and my VASSAL module was immediately rendered obsolete. Thank goodness.

While this does show off a little of the game log, I really just put this here because I won.

The website in question is the awkwardly named boardgaming-online.com, and the implementation is nearly perfect. For those not familiar with the cardboard version, here’s a run down: cards from history are splayed out 13 at a time along a track. These cards represent technologies, wonders, leaders, and events that can be purchased using Civil Actions, the number you have is based on your current form of government. As you buy cards, they slide down the track and become cheaper over time. You also use Civil Actions to actual discover the technologies you’ve collected or build new buildings or increase your civ’s population. You also have Military Actions that you can use to build military units or initiate military actions against your opponents. The goal of the game is to be the one with the most culture (victory points) at the end of the game, which are gained by building and working buildings such as libraries, theaters, temples, and building wonders. If you’ve ever played any version of Sid Meier’s Civilization, you’ll know how to play the game strategically, but might need a boost in picking up how TtA handles all the rules.

Playing TtA on boardgaming-online is a great way to get over that hump. Any cards that you cannot afford in the card row are disabled, and any other actions you can take are clearly listed in a drop down box near the top of the screen. The effects of cards can be seen easily by tapping on its name, bringing up a small picture of the entire card. The game also handles all the bookkeeping and fiddliness of the cardboard version that drives many people away from a second play. Here, everything is calculated and any problems you might have with a lack of food, resources, or happiness is clearly indicated at the top of the screen.

The game even has a “Civilopedia” so you can explore every card in the game outside of the game.

The big question that we need to answer is how the game functions on an iPad or iPhone. Beautifully, but the larger real estate of the iPad makes for a better experience. The greatest advance for TtA online is combining all your possible actions into a drop-down menu. Coalescing all available options into a cut and dried menu makes the entire game move like butter. You can even take and entire turn and then reset your back to the beginning and try something completely different to see what happens. There’s a handy spot for notes at the bottom of the screen, so you won’t lose your strategic plans while waiting for your next turn to roll around. There’s also a chat log for sending inspirational messages to your opponents in the name of good sportsmanship. That’s what I use it for. Honest.

Gameplay is fully asynchronous, and you’ll receive email notifications whenever you need to make a move, whether that be for your own turn or if your opponents triggered something that needs your attention during their turns. The cardboard version of the game can easily be a four hour slog, so expect long games when you go asynchronous. I’ve had games last for weeks.

All hail the drop-down menu.

There’s really no argument here, playing TtA on boardgaming-online is currently the best and easiest way to get in a game of TtA online. Sure, the best way is still to sit around a table with your friends and throw cardstock around the table, but when you can’t make that happen, which is far too often, this online version does everything you’d hope for. On top of that, it’s completely free to play. All you need is an email account.

On a sidenote, you might be wondering how Czech Games Edition feels about their flagship product being available for free on a website that they have no control over. In my discussions about it with Vlaada, it doesn’t appear that they mind it a bit. In fact, they are going to be using boardgaming-online to playtest some of the new changes and tweaks coming to the 4th edition of Through the Ages which is due later this year.

You can find me over at boardgaming-online as David Neumann (ugh, I know, right?). Look me up and get a game going. I’d be happy to teach you how to play, or just get my ass kicked, which is the usual outcome of TtA.

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Out Tonight: Warhammer 40K Armageddon, Wellington’s Victory and more

I don’t want to miss a thing

There have been more than a few somewhat dry release nights so far in 2015. This is not one of those nights. Indeed, this might be one of the best release nights of the year, so let’s not waste any time and jump right in.

Warhammer 40K: Armageddon is a massive game, and it needs to be. It covers the entire Second War for Armageddon from the initial Ork landings to the liberation of the planet. Now, if you’re like me, that sentence might as well read “My hovercraft is full of eels” in Hungarian. I know nothing about the Warhammer universe, and even less about Warhammer 40K. Even so, I’m buying this game simply because it looks like an incredible hex-based war game, regardless of the theme. If you’re into Warhammer, then it’s a no-brainer. Over 300 different units and 30 scenarios that are story-based and can have events from Warhammer history erupt, changing everything. It’s even giving me a chance to type four words I never thought I would: Ork Warboss Ghazghkull Thraka. Let’s see any other wargame pull that off.

Oh, and if you get tired of the huge single-player campaign, you can also play against your friends via PBEM or create your own scenarios using the built-in modding tools. If that’s not enough, it’s been out on PC for a bit and getting rave reviews and that’s without the Untold Battles DLC which comes along for free on iPad.

Armageddon is for iPad only, but I haven’t been able to find it on the NZ App Store to grab a link or price. Considering Slitherine’s past pricing on games like Battle Academy and Panzer Corps, $20 isn’t out of the question.

More games after the break. Don’t worry, it’s all good tonight.

Okay, I’m going to just come out and say it: HexWar is starting to get annoying. I mean, their stuff is fantastic, but my carpal tunnel is acting up and I’m tired. Give it a rest, people!

I kid, I kid. The more the better and this week has them leaving the lab and going back to their wargame roots with Wellington’s Victory, another port of a Decision Games title. This one covers the Battle of Waterloo and contains 7 different missions and a gaggle of Napoleonic units to boss around. It looks like standard HexWar fare, which means a good hex-based wargame with some great graphics.

Wellington’s Victory will be for iOS Universal and run $12.

The last game that deserves mention tonight isn’t a stand alone game, but the first extension to the excellent Wars & Battles from last year. Tonight we get the October War of 1973 which, I’m pretty sure, hasn’t been simulated on the iPad before. Hell, I can only find one cardboard game that focuses on the conflict, and that was made back in 1977.

To get the expansion, you’ll need to first grab the base game for $7 and the October War will appear as IAP for, I think, $10. Oh, and it’s not just for iPad, either. It should be releasing for Android today or tomorrow as well.

I can’t find any footage of the October War in action, so you’ll have to look at the original release material to see what your cold hard cash will get you.

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Eric the half-a-hero: Sentinels of the Multiverse gets cheap

I think the villains are just annoyed that the heroes won’t stop with the stupid grins.

We don’t usually break out posts here just for price drops, but this is the first time that superhero cooperative card game Sentinels of the Multiverse has been this cheap. Exactly half-as-much as it was yesterday, to be exact. You can pick it up right now for only $5, which is a great deal for a game that doesn’t get as much love as it should.

Ok, so the price drop isn’t the only reason I’m posting about Sentinels. One of the knocks against Sentinels when it was released was the lack of multiplayer. Well, it’s coming folks. It’s currently in alpha, but you can see it in action on their YouTube channel. You might think I’m just trying to pad out this post to hit some required minimum word count before the break. Not so! Um…it looks like they’re also making great progress with the Infernal Relics expansion which adds…whew, hit it.

Check out the video of the guys from Handelabra showing off multiplayer and Infernal Relics after the break.

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Review: Fallout Shelter

This is fine.

I am playing a video game featuring an underground vault full of miserable pregnant women who are slightly irradiated and dressed in hand-me-down combat fatigues. This isn’t a Silence of the Lambs simulator: it’s Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter, the surprise iOS tie-in game that they unveiled at E3 yesterday.

If that description makes the game sound sinister, well… it’s not as bad as all that. Post-apocalyptic fiction has a base level of despair built right into it, and the Fallout franchise has always preferred its comedy slightly black. If you line it up next to, say, The Road, Fallout Shelter is pretty light-hearted, considering.

Possibly almost as surprising as the subject matter is the fact that Fallout Shelter is a freemium game from a big publisher that’s pretty fun, actually.

Famed RPG house Bethesda kicked off the Electronics Entertainment Expo with their press conference showing off the first gameplay footage of PC- and console-bound Fallout 4. They also had two surprise mobile game announcements up their sleeves: some scant details about a forthcoming Elder Scrolls card game called Legends, and Fallout Shelter, which they immediately released.

In Fallout Shelter, you’ve got a side-on view of a base you’re building, reminiscent of Tiny Tower or XCOM. Your job is to build rooms in this Vault to house survivors of a nuclear war in Fallout’s alternate universe where American culture stagnated hard in the 1950s. Besides constructing rooms, you can also order around your survivors, assigning them to work in the rooms or sending them out into the wastelands to brave the irradiated Earth and hopefully bring back some loot.

Your citizens can engage in a variety of activities essential for the survival of the vault. In the water filtration room, survivors recycle H2O for drinking. In the power generation room, they maintain the dynamos that keep the electricity flowing. In the living quarters… well, the living quarters are for doin’ it.

That’s right. This is the sexiest game featured on Pocket Tactics since Stone Age. If you assign two male or two female survivors to a living space, they’re stand around amiably making light conversation. But members of the opposite sex will eventually knock those vault-issued boots, resulting in one pregnant vault dweller and one vault dweller who probably just wants to roll over and take a nap, thanks.

Uh…

This is pretty racy for an Apple-approved game, and the bit that makes me actually uncomfortable is that your survivors will always get down eventually. Leave a man and a lady in a room for long enough, and pregnancy is inevitable. Maybe I’m entirely too empathetic towards these 2D cartoon sprites — it’s not as if they have any volition or free will at all, but in this particular subject matter it just feels a bit eww.

On the more progressive end of things, your pregnant dwellers can be put right back to work, and the game doesn’t consider pregnancy any sort of disability — there’s no stat penalty for being with child. Eventually the baby’s born and just runs around the vault unsupervised until it becomes an adult, who can also be immediately put to work. No gap years in this post-apocalypse. There’s also a decidedly Scandinavian attitude towards long-term attachments in the vault; in my game there’s a whole lot of half-brothers and sisters running around, and no one minds at all.

If you make peace with the fact that 50% of the gameplay here is selectively breeding humans for their RPG stats, then Fallout Shelter is a pretty good game for the genre. For better or for worse, it’s one of those appointment games that’s meant to be played in small sessions throughout the day — after a couple of consecutive minutes you’ll run right out of stuff to do and you might as well be watching a B. F. Skinner-themed screensaver.

Move over David Attenborough.

But this is a mobile game of rare polish when you actually are playing it. The 2D characters (modelled after Fallout’s Pip Boy mascot) and 3D environments are very attractive and manage to look like two halves of a whole despite their very different styles. The travelogues that your wasteland adventurers keep are endearing and probably do a better job of “minimal story-telling” than The Outcast ever did. Even more impressive for a free-to-play game: there appears to be a fail state.

Mobile sims tend to be challenge-free express trains to victory, where the essence of the gameplay is just to watch numbers go up and up. In Fallout Shelter, it’s entirely possible to be a bad manager, and the sense I got when my vault was failing wasn’t that I was being wheedled to feed the game money, but that I had messed up.

Will everyone please be careful around the Water Chip. Thank you.

To wit, my Vault 182 was full of miserable, heavily irradiated dwellers on Day 2, but upon reflection I realised that I’d allowed my population to grow too fast, outstripping my ability to supply clean water and Rad-X. After prohibiting nookie (you really can’t think too hard about this game and still enjoy it) and focusing on water production for a while, things stabilised — but I had run dangerously close to getting my survivors killed when a band of raiders showed up at the vault door and most of my armed dwellers were too radiation sick to put up much of a fight. This is a truly rare quality among F2P games, but there’s no way to just dump money into Fallout Shelter and win –the best you can do is get some helpful items for your cash– so there’s actually real, undisturbed gameplay at the core of this thing.

It’s not a deathless classic. Part of that is purely technical concerns. The game has got a couple of UI glitches, a tendency to crash, and a prodigious appetite for battery power. More abstract concerns arise from the basic limitations of the genre — these micro-session games are too far diluted from the formulas of Dungeon Keeper and Sim Tower to have any real bite to them. But there’s an occasional interesting decision to be had, and the game does a great job of capturing the slightly zany parodic feel of Fallout 2. I suspect that Fallout Shelter won’t last more than a week on my iPad, but I haven’t deleted it yet. It’s considerably better than Star Trek Trexels, at any rate.

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Too cool for pool: Latest expansion for Talisman lands

In real life my special power is to turn into a sloth.

Talisman is one of the worst IAP offenders on the App Store. Seriously, I think this latest expansion, The Sacred Pool, brings the total number of things you can buy in-game to just shy of a googol. Or at least that’s how it feels to my bank account. Of course, Talisman offers us the kind of IAP we don’t mind. There are no timers or currencies, just heaps of more content which, of course, makes every game of Talisman more fun.

The Sacred Pool is a small box expansion, meaning that we won’t be getting a new board to wrap around the main one like the Dungeon and Highland expansions before them. Instead we’ll be getting over 70 new adventure cards, more than a dozen new spell cards, 3 more alternative endings, as well as two new decks: Stables and Quest Rewards. The former offers up equestrian followers while the latter gives you new incentives to head to the middle circle and deal with the Warlock.

That’s not all. There are also four new characters as well as the ability to save up to 10 different games as opposed to the one slot we’ve had since Talisman launched. Nomad has also introduced a Sudden Death mode, in which the game creator can put a limit on how many rounds a game will last and at the end each player will score based on what they’ve earned up to that point. This should make for some nice and short online games.

They’ve also released another character, the Shaman, as a separate IAP for $1. It’s a cool shapeshifting character that allows you to shift your stats based on which form you’re currently in: bear, cheetah, or owl. Also, all the revenue that Nomad earns from the Shaman character is going directly to Special Effect, a charity that gives those with physical disabilities the opportunity to play video games.

You can pick up Talisman for iOS Universal, Android, and Kindle. It’s currently on sale for only $1, and all the expansions are currently on sale as well. If you want to load up on everything Talisman has to offer, now’s the time to do it.

Trailer after the break.

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Review: Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp

Damn. Should have stayed at the Severn City airport.

Back when I was growing up, we knew how to do armageddon right. One country pisses off another, bombs fly and everyone is vaporized in seconds. Of course, surviving the nuclear attack would suck, but even those mutants get to drive around really cool cars and hang out with Mel Gibson before he went completely insane. Nowadays, its humanity-ending disease that’s all the rage. Yuck. Slow and miserable, having to watch everything you know slowly fall apart. No thanks. Give me a nuclear blast and the ability to fight robots that look like Schwarzenegger’s skeleton any day. Yep, back in the day even that novel about Captain Trips ended with a nuke going off. Those were good times.

Of course, there aren’t many games involving nuclear war because, as we all know, the only winning move is not to play. Disease, on the other hand, offers up a scenario where we can find a cure and save the day. The latest example of this theme comes from a 2013 board game from Victory Point Games ominously titled Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp, lovingly brought to iOS from the more usually martial-minded HexWar.

There are already some fantastic plague themed games out there on the App Store, namely Plague Inc. and Pandemic, and Infection can walk amongst them with its head held high. This is a great game.

Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp puts you in the lab, harvesting proteins and constructing antibodies to defeat the disease before all of humanity is destroyed. You’re not just a scientist, however, you also have to manage your budget while buying new equipment and hiring the best and the brightest.

My money’s on Yee.

Strip away the theme, and Infection is really a solitaire set collection game. The sets you are trying to collect can be from 3-5 proteins long, and translate to the antibodies needed to cure a particular strain of the deadly bug. Each turn, you will harvest 4 random proteins and can place up to 2 of them into these sets. As you complete different antibodies, you can remove that strain from the petri dish. Remove all the strains and you’ve saved humanity.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Between turns there is a chance that the disease will escape containment and spread around the world. There is a meter at the top of the screen indicating how many outbreaks you’ve had, and if you have enough of them, the world’s population is destroyed. If that’s not bad enough, as more outbreaks occur, your bosses lose faith in your efforts and your funding decreases as well.

Note the strains on the right that aren’t currently in the petri dish? Mutations happen.

Outbreaks aren’t the only thing that happens between turns, however. The disease could also mutate. This can cause new strains to appear, or existing strains—ones that you’ve nearly acquired all the correct proteins for—to suddenly become an entirely different strain. Thus, even when you’re down to only one or two strains left in the dish, with victory seemingly only a turn away, mutation can put you right back in the hole, looking at a petri dish full of creepy crawlies.

Sample is stable? Don’t count on this happening too often.

To win the game, you need to use technology to even the odds. Throughout the game you’ll purchase new lab equipment that breaks the rules and, if you’re lucky, make your life easier. There are items like a centrifuge which can help you predict future mutations, or electron microscopes that allow more proteins to be harvested. I’m not sure any of it makes sense, scientifically, but it all sounds good. Strangely, however, you’re apparently buying all this equipment from the back of some skeevy guy’s custom van with both an eagle and bikini clad woman painted on the side. Seriously, all this equipment is crap. Not only can you only use tech once per round, but it also has a 50% chance of failure. That is, unless you buy a second unit, in which case it works every time. Good luck with that, however, as the store is randomly stocked, so you might never see a second item pop up, and cash is incredibly tight, so buying two of the same thing is seldom possible.

I’ve haven’t cursed at my iPad this much since FTL dropped.

Apart from equipment, you can also hire new staff to help things along. These knuckleheads all give you special powers as well, but they have the temperaments of 3rd graders. Seriously, this guy won’t work with this guy, and she hates him so they can’t work together, etc. You’d think with the end of humanity looming these guys could get their shit together and, I don’t know, act like adults.

Infection comes with 14 pre-built scenarios to play ranging from “well, that was easy” to “why the hell did I get out of bed this morning”. There is also a Quick Game mode which lets you create your own scenario, ensuring that you aren’t going to get bored. There is also a tutorial mode which is serviceable, if a bit on the light side.

Tutorial covers the basics.

I had an issue with the original pre-release version of Infection I was given regarding the non-boardgaminess of the whole thing. Gone were dice rolls, so you weren’t able to determine the likelihood of outbreaks or mutations occurring. It took me a bit to realize that they’ve since added (or maybe they were always there, and I just wasn’t aware of them) the odds that containment will fail. With that, my last true reservation about Infection oozed away.

Did I mention that Infection is hard? Seriously, I don’t think it’s winnable in the harder scenarios. That’s not a bad thing, solitaire or cooperative games are more fun the harder they are to overcome. Infection is one of the good ones, a board game port that will live on my iPad for a long time, and one that has me excited to see what other board games HexWar might be bringing to the platform.

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Out Tonight: Infection, Door Kickers, Spirit of War, Threes Free, and more

D-E-AYY-LMAO

Owen here, covering for Dave while he attends an evil sidekick symposium. Did you know that henchmen are more than twenty times more likely to be injured on the job than sinister masterminds? Well, not at Pocket Tactics — safety is the most important thing in our volcano lair high atop Mount Hexmap. Well, aside from the volcano. There’s a few unavoidable risks associated with that. Some.

Anyway. Tonight is an excellent release night, you know? Maybe the best of 2015 so far. I’ve played almost everything in tonight’s crop, and I’m pretty enthusiastic about, oh, 75% of the games going. Let me tell you all about it after the jump.

Infection: Humanity’s Last Gasp is the digital version the acclaimed board game of the same name from VPG — you’re the head of an Andromeda Strain-style tiger team of scientists racing the clock to cure an epidemic that’s cleaning humanity’s clock. Now Kelsey and Dave are the board gaming experts around here and I’m leaving the final verdict to them but I played the heck out of a press preview of this, and I think it’s damned good. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that this might be the best digital board game adaptation since Galaxy Trucker. Impressive stuff from Hunted Cow’s new strategy game imprint Hexwar.

Infection is an iOS Universal app and it’ll be $5 at midnight wherever you are. Come back tomorrow for Dave’s review.

Door Kickers is another game I’ve managed to get a preview of. This one’s a pausesable-real-time police tactics sim coming over from PC, where it is very highly regarded. The iPad port is very slick, and the gameplay is fun — this is basically the game that Breach & Clear wanted to be a couple of years ago but didn’t quite manage. I’m looking forward to the DLC where you play the guy with the camera phone recording the cops kicking all these doors in.

Door Kickers is an iPad-only app and it’s $5, also out at midnight in your country. The incomparable Alex Connolly is reviewing this one for us — should have his take up next week.

Spirit of War: The Great War is a WWI turn-based tactical game just revealed yesterday, and out of tonight’s haul I have to say that this is the game I’m least enthusiastic about. I’ve been playing the game for the past couple of days and this thing is weird, man. Star Wars Christmas Special weird. Maybe it’ll grow on me between now and tomorrow but for the moment this one doesn’t quite get the Owen Tā Moko of Approval.

Spirit of War is an iOS Universal app and it’s also $5, out at midnight in your strange and foreign land. Watch for my review in the next day or two.

Threes is a game that almost certainly needs no introduction — it was an honourable mention in our Puzzle Game of the Year category last year, but that’s more of a comment on how steep the competition is than any faint praise of the game. Threes is a brilliant light math/pattern-matching game that has an iron-clad permanent spot on my phone.

But what’s this 2014 release doing in Out Tonight?, you ask. Settle down, bub. Threes Free comes out tonight at midnight where thou art. The model here is slightly out of the ordinary: you watch ads in the app to build up credits that you use for replays. That sounds downright painful to me — I think it’s infinitely more sensible to just pony up two measly bucks and have a brilliant game you’ll play forever.

But if Threes Gratis sounds like something you want to try, it’s an iOS Universal app out at midnight in your neck of the woods.

Finally tonight we’ve got Healer’s Quest, which came out a couple of days ago on both iOS and Android. This is a comedy RPG where you play the under-appreciated healer in a party of fantasy do-gooders. I haven’t played this but it sounds like it might be clever.

Healer’s Quest is an iOS Universal app, ad-supported and free —  though you can knock the ads out with a single $3 in-app purchase. Same deal on Android.

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