Mobile Board Games

Is there a good reason that practically every iOS developer seems to have little trouble adding GameCenter integration to their games EXCEPT board/card game developers as of late? I'm getting tired of all these releases that ignore network multiplayer but don't compensate for the lack of it with a good AI (which has to be infinitely tougher to implement). I got in a big pissing match with Travis Worthington about it in the Alien Frontiers iOS thread at BGG, as he seems to think we should all act as mindless cheerleaders for indie devs who release games with no network multiplayer, apparently out of the kindness of their hearts. I don't understand the mentality of "getting a neutered release that misrepresents the game is better than getting no release at all."

Dominant Species out as of last night. Once again no asynch in the initial release, but they're promising it in a later update. Along with a hard AI.

I'm having a really difficult time understanding the iOS boardgame business model. A lot of developers claim they can't afford to add network multiplayer or AI to their initial release, but will add those features when sales allow for it. Then they sell it to a niche audience for $5 when the boxed version MSRPs for $80. Do they not understand that people would buy more copies if they could play with their GameCenter friends, and that they could probably charge just a *bit* more than a fiver to an audience that desperately wants great iOS versions of their beloved board games?

Agreed. Especially for a game like Dominant Species, which requires a serious time commitment and isn't one most people are getting to the table that often. It's a big, meaty game and to me is worth far more than $5, especially if I can learn the game using it and then get some good games out of it.

I really wish FFG would jump more on board with iOS other than the underwhelming (to me, I know some people have boners the size of the Bennington War Monument for it) Elder Sign. I know my secret hope of iOS Death Angel is an impossibility, but I'd love me some Arkham Horror, LotR or Rex.

I know that as an person who likes mobile board games but uses Android I am the equivalent of a guy complaining about linux gaming 10 years ago, but I have to admit that every time someone forgoes using Gamecenter I get a little more hope that someone can put together some type of decent crossplatform gaming system that these board game developers can use. If gamecenter becomes the standard, those of us who cant afford Apple (or dont use it for other reasons) are pretty much cut off because Apple will never let someone put hooks to that system that lead outside of iOS.

Yeah, I know. If I want decent mobile board games, I should switch to iOS...

You could always pray for the ascendency of Goko.

BURN THE HERETIC!

I said "decent"

How good is the AI in the game now?

There's the beginner AI for learningt he game, against which people are reporting 300+ point blowouts.

Then there's the intermediate AI, which people say makes some pretty questionable action choices but makes decent moves. People are still beating the shit out of it, though.

This is one of those things where bad AI wouldn't be that big of an issue if there was asynch multiplayer out of the gate. No one's really pushing Gary Games to work faster on level 3 difficulty for Ascension because no one really cares. But if AI's the only way, it needs to be a challenge.

What aspect of it do you find underwhelming? The board game itself? In terms of presentation it's easily the best I've seen and it's a joy to look at, even if the dice rolling mechanics are a little simplistic and random.

I'm one of them, but I prefer comparisons to the Washington Monument myself. Just downloaded the patch with extra content. Tried to take Cthulhu out, but that didn't go too well. Blub blub blub...

Isn't this being planned? Though I can see why they may not want to with ES:O

This would be amazing, if they could implement it.

Ambitious.

It's especially weird when the game was crowd-funded. I'll bet they would have raised more money if asynch multiplayer were part of the spec. And yeah, I'd definitely pay more than $5 for a good iOS board game that has both good AI and multiplayer.

It's a dull, simplistic game with top notch visuals that do nothing to mask that Yahtzee isn't fun anyway and is way less fun if you're not even getting to actually roll dice you get to hold in your hand. And frankly, it's not hard to find an iOS board game adaption with top notch presentation that isn't an adaption of an already braindead property. Ascension, for instance. Hell, just about anything Playdek does has a great presentation, even shitty shit like Food Fight.

Not that I know if. They have an Arkham Horror helper app, but that's it.

Can't imagine it'd be hard. Hell, they wouldn't even need to program AI.

Also nearly impossible given how much extra-table chatter there is when it comes to cease fires and bidding.

Though once my year long adventure in Twilight Imperium via VASSAL is over, I think I might try and run a PBF Dune game.

Dominant Species was crowd-funded?

That's not really a fair assessment of how the game plays, though. Elder Sign's central gameplay mechanic is resource (and time) management, not the dice rolling. It does use the Yahtzee model for rolling dice, but so what? Yahtzee is a terrible game because the dice rolling is all there is to the game. In ES, the dice challenges are placed into the context of a system in which players collect various resources for completing challenges, and then must determine how to most effectively spend those resources on subsequent challenges, all under the shadow of a doom clock that is constantly winding down. IMHO, it turns a dull dice game into a much more interesting rick/reward challenge.It's a fairly simple game, to be sure, but it's not Yahtzee.

Whoops! I thought he was talking about Alien Frontier.

I've played the game. Physical and electronic. I was asked for my opinion and I'm standing by it. By no means do I think less of anyone who does like Elder Sign. I just wish FFG would make apps for some of their better games.

I believe you! But the game is not mainly about rolling Yahtzee dice, any more than Ascension is mainly about drawing random cards.

I'm sorry, I know we disagree (quite massively) on Elder Sign: Omens, and I can see it isn't for everyone (though I think it's the best game, electronic or otherwise, that FFG has produced in a long time), but simplistic is really not the word I'd use. However, I have heard others slight it in other ways before they figured out that it has some depth and encourages tactical decision-making. And to knock Ascension for being like the truly brain-dead Dominion is like knocking Michelangelo for making the David, which, after all, is modeled on a human. Ascension is still the best iOS game, imho.

Well, there you go. How about an iOS TI3 game? Problem is, once it was made, no one would play the real thing.

I can't imagine being happy with async play in Dominant Species. It's a long game on the table but on mobile devices games would take six years to complete. Most turns you're just doing worker placement, which will take you five seconds to place a pawn then wait a week before your next five second turn. It'll be even worse than Le Havre (a game that I really like as a board game but can't stand as a multiplayer app).

I think the app looks nice, though, and I'd love to be able to play a challenging AI. Plus I'm all for supporting GMT's first iOS app. omg just skip Twilight Struggle and make Washington's War plz kthx.

I am truly astonished that GMT did not make Twilight Struggle into an iOS game but instead went the over-priced PC route. But maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, since the pre-orders are going very well.

The patch for Alien Frontiers dropped yesterday and made some dramatic improvements. Full Retina support, for example, but the main one I was interested in was a tweaked Pirate AI that favors targeting the player instead of other AI opponents. I just played against two of them and lost. They are bad-ass.

I think the dev should make some more tweaks so the AI favors expanding into new territory before it starts messing with the player, but even the small changes he made have had some dramatic impact on the AI. It seems to drop colonies a lot more often now as well, which really helps things. Definitely recommended at this point, especially for the pittance they're charging.

Awesome! Time to fire it up again.

So wow, that patch totally changes the game. Thumbs up! The Retina graphics are nice, too. I really like the UI in this game, as well (not a patch addition, just worth mentioning). Undo button plus turn log = awesome features that I wish every iOS board game had.

On the subject of FFG, they just announced that they're bringing Talisman (sort of) to PC and mobile devices through Nomad Games. I'm at school and on my iPad, so this link will have to suffice, but apparently they're on Steam Greenlight: www.talisman-game.com

EDIT: looking at that link, apparently it's supposed to be out on the 22nd, nothing in the FAQ about what mobile devices it'll be on, and you can preorder it for $10 and get the beta, the soundtrack and a Windows theme, or for $100 you can get all that and YOUR NAME IN THE CREDITS!!11!!

I am wearing out the virtual keyboard on my iPad searching for Phantom Leader in the App Store. Sometime between now and next week it will drop, and I am determined to be the first to play it.

Hope it's great and sells enough copies for DVG to convert Thunderbolt Apache Leader. That would be heaven.

Have you played both of the board games? I have Hornet Leader and I got pretty sick of it pretty quick. There's just not as much variety as I thought at first. Each mission plays out, IMHO, too similarly. Thunderbolt Apache Leader looks like, with the terrain changes, it will play better, but I don't want to pay for it and end up disliking it (especially given the price tag).

The only DVG game I've played is TAL. I avoided Hornet Leader because I didn't care for the way the missions played out, and I avoided Phantom Leader because although the historical period it covers appeals to me immensely I thought it would get stale pretty quickly due to a lack of cool weapons. TAL seemed to hit the sweet spot by keeping the pilots separate from the planes, offering up a ton of awesome hardware, and focusing on missions that require playing a little randomized wargame down in the weeds each round. I was not disappointed.

I'm really curious about the U-Boat game, but I have so many solo games to play and review right now that I'm only going to look at it if I somehow get a review copy or it comes to iOS.

Phantom Leader is up on the iTunes store, but holy crap! $15. I love the idea of a "Football Manager for fighter jets" game, but I may wait for someone else to be a guinea pig on this one. Owen_magnetic perhaps?...

I will gladly do it. That game is friggin expensive in its cardboard incarnation, and the fact that it's a solitaire design to begin with means it will have no AI or network multiplayer issues to vex me.

This is precisely the business model I think these companies should use. Charge more than standard iTunes rates to a niche audience that is used to paying five times that or more for the cardboard version. Alien Frontiers for $5, for example, is ridiculously inexpensive.

DO EEEEEEEEEEEEIIIIIIT!!!

Like I said, I love the concept. Thunderbolt-Apache Leader sounds even cooler; maybe if this one does well, they will make an iPad version of that.

Of course, at $15, I fully expect this game to sell approximately one copy. Two, if I buy it.

That said, I can understand the pricing. I mean, this is arguably siphoning sales directly from the board game, because why would you need to own both? It's a solitaire game, so the only real difference between playing this and the physical version is that this version handles all the setup and bookkeeping for you. I know a lot of board games on iOS price cheaply because they figure that people will pick up the iOS version and, if they like it, possibly the board version as well. That's probably not going to be the case with this game, though.

Yeah, it likely won't sell much. It doesn't have the broader appeal of something like Battle Academy, but I'm afraid if they lowered it to $5 it would sell just as many copies for little return. The rules complexity and overall design is likely to turn a lot of people off.

But you never know...

Early impressions after one quick 2-day campaign:

This game is ugly (and has no retina other than certain text)
There isn't a decent tutorial
A rule book is included, but the PDF version is better
The dice rolls are handled awesomely, with 3D dice rolling across the screen just as they would at a table
Gameplay is brutal. My pilots got hammered.
There is a nice assortment of weapons and planes, available during appropriate time periods
I much prefer the TAL strike mission mini-game, but this is a nice abstraction of Nam ground pounding
I much prefer how TAL separates the pilots from the planes
Fast pilots rule

I plan to review this in-depth soon, and maybe make a brief strategy guide (once I learn my way around). For $15 this was a terrific purchase for me because it saved me at least $40 on the physical version, and having the rules enforcement makes it very quick to play relative to playing at a table. Most people will not like this game, though, so know what you getting into. It really helps to know about the Vietnam air war in general and planes/weapons in particular because the game doesn't do a lot of hand-holding.

EDIT: Apparently this game won't even load on an iPad 1 due to a memory issue, so definitely don't get it if you have one of those.

I finished my review. Normally I only link to the version at BGG, because that's where all the discussion is, but the bastards rejected the eight images I sent them so if you want to read the Limited Edition Illustrated Edition you'll have to do so at my blog.

The tl;dr version is that it's a diamond in the rough at this point, but well worth it for fans of the Leader series or people who want to see if they might be fans without dropping a ton of dough and fiddling with chits all day.

Donald X Vaccarino's 2012 SdJ winner Kingdom Builder just hit the app store. I didn't even know they were making it.

I can't stand the board game, and I've heard this is buggy, so I'm passing.

I got Dominant Species from the GMT Fall Sale. I played a "practice" game with a friend that we shortened by about half. I loved every minute of it and couldn't stop thinking about it, so I bought the game app.
It's a decent adaptation, but there's something, aside from the AI being lackluster (I've barely beaten the AI, but I'm doing much better with every game), that keeps me from wanting to pump hours into the game. When I'm done with 1 game, I want to quit playing. It isn't just that the game is a brainbuster, either.

Has anyone else actually played the app?

It does remind me how much I would LOVE a mobile version of BIOS: Megafauna. I like the more science-based play of that, I think, a little more. They're totally different games, DS being a euro and B:M total (beautiful) Ameritrash. But, I can't help but compare them.

I'm sure everyone is super excited about Playdek's latest, Fluxx, coming out next week!

Right?

Right?!

Pocket Tactics drew my attention to this Pinterest link. A list of Mobile TableTop Games.

The Space Hulk for iOS announcement has its own thread, but just in case the stupid thread title meant you didn't notice the announcement, hey, Space Hulk for PC and iOS in 2013.

Stone Age will be out for iPhones (with a universal update to come later) on Wednesday.

And, dumb question here, but is the Dan Verssen Games that makes Phantom Leader related to DanVerssen who used to post on QT3?

Edit: Yes. That's a super dumb question. I now remember that DanVerssen is the guy from QT3 who basically posted 90% ads for Dan Verssen Games. QUESTION ANSWERED!