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October 14, 2014

A (north) star is born : North Star Games building digital division

The local watering hole

The local watering hole [Image by punkin312]

North Star Games is known, primarily, for making some of the best party games on the market. If you haven’t replaced your Genus Edition of Trivial Puruit with gems like Wits & Wagers or Say Anything by now, you should probably stop reading this blog and head to your local game shop. That said, games like Wits & Wagers and Say Anything aren’t really Pocket Tactics fodder. They’re party games, which means they’re light and fluffy and don’t really have a strategic bent.

Over the last year or so, however, North Star has expanded their output and is starting to produce honest-to-goodness strategy games. Their first foray away from party games was Clubs, a ladder-style card game similar to Haggis or Tichu, but with simplified rules. Not exactly Agricola, but it’s a fun game that gets a lot of play with the family. Going farther up the strategy chain, NSG just released Evolution, a card game in which you create species with different traits, competing for the same food source as the other players.

Now, let’s talk about why any of this is important to you, our patient readers. North Star Games has announced that they are in the process of building a digital games division and creating apps for games like Evolution themselves. Before you start thinking that it’s a crazy idea, consider that 2 other board game publishers have done the same thing in the past year with fantastic results.

Currently, they’re still adding developers to the team and, in fact, are looking for applicants now. If you’re a Unity or Objective C/C++ developer and want to give it a try, drop them a line. The first title they are planning is the aforementioned Evolution, which is going to be developed for both iOS and Android. Currently their goal is to have a working beta ready to show off at Gen Con 2015 but, other than that, no street date has been pegged. As founder of NSG, Dominic Crapuchettes told me, they aren’t going to release anything until it is as good or better than any other board game port for iOS. Considering how that bar keeps getting raised, they have a lot of work ahead of them.

Kickstarter trailer for cardboard Evolution after the break.

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