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Tag: Card, Board, & MahJong

  • Lords of Waterdeep Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Lords of Waterdeep Review

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    Board games today are so much more than the simple Parker Brothers games of our youth. Moving pieces around squares with the occasional twist is where most of us start our cardboard-and-plastic careers, but it's hardly where it ends for the hardcore enthusiast.It's strange that Lords of Waterdeep feels like exactly that. With the Dungeons and Dragons brand behind it you might envision stat sheets, character creation, inventory management - that's what I expected, anyway. Rather, it's more Monopoly by way of Game of Thrones than 2nd Edition AD&D.Waterdeep goes decidedly off-brand almost immediately. You don't play as a determined adventurer, winding your way through one of the many D&D universes with a light purse and a heavy hammer. Completing adventures is beneath you. As a lord of the titular city, you make adventures happen.
  • Gary Chalk’s Gun Dogs Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Gary Chalk’s Gun Dogs Review

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    For gamebook fans of a certain age, Gary Chalk is a name to conjure with. He got co-author credits for the illustrations in the early Lone Wolf books, probably the best loved of the many gamebook franchises that thronged bookshelves in the mid-eighties. Times have changed, and digital publishing is all the rage, but Gary's art has not diminished and he's here with a brand new outing, Gun Dogs.This is the latest title in Tin Man Game's Gamebook Adventure series and it shares a lot of mechanical similarities with its predecessors. You'll read through a paragraph of text, often be presented with some choices at the end, and occasionally have to check one of your stats against a dice roll, or fight a monster."Battles are decided by throwing a number of offensive and defensive dice and comparing the highest of each to see if a blow is landed. If so, the difference between the totals is the damage inflicted. I've never liked this system: it's functional but leads to a lot of indecisive rolls followed by colossal sums of damage. But as the Gamebook Adventure series has gone on, Tin Man has found a number of ways to improve the basic mechanics. Here, as the title suggests, you have a gun.But this is a fantasy adventure, so it's a slow hand-loaded pistol. That's used to set up a number of tense and interesting choices in the book where you might - or might not - have had the chance to load your weapon before venturing into danger. Whether you actually hit with your gunpowder weapon or not is, like many other things in the story, decided by a dice-based stat test.
  • Demon Tribe Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Demon Tribe Review

    By

    Demon Tribe is an ambitious attempt to combine collectible card battle games with MOBA-style action, and it works quite well - as long as you have the patience to figure out what's going on. I've played a lot of CCGs in my time - one of the hazards of the job - and I expected more of the same with Demon Tribe. It's not exactly a genre known for innovation and original gameplay, after all, and a quick, cursory glance offered little to suggest that this game would be any different. So it was a surprise to find that it boasts a far greater degree of complexity than I'd anticipated, and that my CCG autopilot would be of limited use.You begin Demon Tribe under rather hazy circumstances as the newly-chosen director of Omega Surveillance, a sort of secret, supernatural agency charged with monitoring the fragile border between the Waking and Dream worlds (or something like that - the introductory tutorial is pretty heavily loaded and blows by quickly); and long story short, the job of keeping our world from being overrun by demons is now in your hands.You don't defend the border directly, however. Instead, you direct a squad of agents into battle, controlling their actions in single-player "assault battles" as well as multiplayer co-operative battles and PvP brawls of up to six players. Each agent is a unique character and carries a "deck" of demon forms that they can assume during fights. This is where the CCG angle manifests: demons are "summoned" with gems that are acquired as you play and then added to your agents' repertoire. In a way, it's a bit like having multiple custom decks that can be used to handle different situations and combined for bigger battles.
  • Tic Tactics Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    Tic Tactics Review

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    The title gives Tic Tactics away. It's the age-old game of Tic-Tac-Toe with a tactical twist, spread out across nine separate Tic-Tac-Toe boards that collectively form one mega, meta-board. You control where your opponent moves, and your opponent controls where you move, and in spite of that rather oddball description it's actually very simple to play, and also insidiously entertaining. Understand?Probably not. Okay, imagine a Tic-Tac-Toe board - perhaps better known to some of you as X's and O's. Now imagine that each of the nine squares on the board is comprised of another, smaller Tic-Tac-Toe board. To claim one of the squares on the big board, you must win the game of Tic-Tac-Toe in that square. Win a game, claim a square, and when you've claimed three squares in a row, horizontally, vertically or diagonally, you win. Easy peasy - that's Tic Tactics."But there's a catch! Oh, isn't there always? You alternate turns with your opponent, chosen at random, from amongst your Facebook friends or in a "pass-and-play" game with a real person, and where your opponent plays determines which of the nine boards you'll make your succeeding move on. Say, for instance, he plays the upper-left square of the board in the middle - you must play on the board in the upper-left corner. On that board, you play the middle square in the bottom row, and so your opponent must now make his move on the board in the middle square of the bottom row. So it goes, back and forth, until victory (or a draw) is declared.It's simple (really, it's one of those things that's easier to do than to explain), but it encourages devious play. It's not easy keeping track of the possible consequences of every move you make, and it's sometimes preferable to pass up on an advantageous square in order to force your opponent into an even more disadvantaged position. Even if a square is won, you can still be forced to play on it, but if your opponent tries to make you play on a board that's full, you'll be allowed to make your move anywhere you like.
  • Drive on Moscow Review
    Reviews
    • iOS
    Drive on Moscow Review

    By

    Shenandoah Studios burst onto the scene last year with Battle of the Bulge, a title that set a new standard for strategy games on the iPad. The follow up, Drive on Moscow, is now out, and the big question is whether it can live up to the billing of its illustrious predecessor.It runs on the same mechanical lines as its antecedent, but the scenario is different. This covers the German attempts to take the Russian capital in late 1941; a pivotal action that some historians believe determined the outcome of the conflict on the eastern front."The interface is grandly styled but easy to use. The map is divided into adjoining areas, and you move units by tapping them and selecting a destination. If the target area contains enemy troops, you're given battle odds and if you commit, the fight plays out. But you'll often do better to try and isolate the enemy by cutting their supply routes.But the apparent simplicity of getting into the game belies a deep pool of strategic depth beneath. There are always too many things to do, too many options to consider in terms of picking off weak enemy positions, outflanking stronger ones, and claiming victory hexes.
  • MONOPOLY Bingo Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    MONOPOLY Bingo Review

    By

    My day job is in a casino, so I've seen on slot machines how the Monopoly brand gets people excited. EA is hoping to tap into that feeling in a different way as it unleashes Monopoly Bingo,a freemiumgame for mobile devices. The mash-up between iconic board game and number-marking pastime is exactly what it sounds like, yet somehow still falls short of what it could be.Let's assume for the sake of argument that you already know how to play bingo. Monopoly Bingo certainly figures that's the case, throwing you right into the action in the first of many different rooms, each of which is themed after one of the Monopoly properties. The visual trademarks are all present and accounted for, from Mr. Monopoly to the sad inmate who is in jail and not "just visiting."The overall goal is to level up and unlock more rooms/properties. In each round, you're competing live against other players attempting to do the same thing, and there are only so many total bingos that can be scored before the round ends. Every number you mark earns you experience points, and bingos pay off with coins and extra rewards, particularly if you hit them early.
  • Eon Altar Preview
    Upcoming
    • Android
    • iOS
    Eon Altar Preview

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    Eon Altar is one of those ideas that immediately makes you wonder why somebody didn't think of it ages ago. As most such ideas are, it is both ingenious and remarkably simple: a tabletop/video game RPG hybrid, played with smartphones that are linked to a central tablet serving as the "game board," through which the story is told. The machines crunch the numbers, handle the character management, perform the virtual dice rolls and more, but the experience is more akin to an old-school pencil-and-paper RPG session - the best of both worlds.Eon Altar supports face-to-face gaming in groups of two to five, with each player accessing the game through an iOS, Android, or Windows smartphone. Each phone in the group is connected via Wi-Fi to a tablet or PC which displays the game world, combat, and other cinematic aspects of the action, and also saves the progress of the campaign, which will unfold episodically over nine modular "adventures." Each adventure contains enough content for at least three sessions, and will be released every four to six weeks after the game launches.""Once we are finished [with] our first story, over nine adventures, we'll evaluate and see where we want to take it - whether we'll continue the same characters in further adventures within Eon Altar itself as further campaigns in the same structure and engine, or if it'll be time to do an overhaul of the game itself and evolve it into an Eon Altar 2," Edward J. Douglas, the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Vancouver-based Flying Helmet Games, said. "It will really depend on where the technology is at and how players enjoy using it. It moves so fast! Our world is large and we have a lot of story planned after this first campaign, lots of challenges ahead for these characters."
  • Combat Monsters Review
    Reviews
    • Android
    • iOS
    • PC
    Combat Monsters Review

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    Combat Monsters, the virtual card battle game with echoes of Magic: The Gathering is now in full release, and if you played and enjoyed it during the beta period, you'll be pleased to know that very little has changed over the past couple of months. And if you haven't, you probably should - it's a fun, challenging strategy card game, and while some of the multiplayer features are lacking, it gets the free-to-play formula right, a rare accomplishment these days.Even if you have only a basic idea of what Magic: The Gathering is, there's no mistaking the similarities between that famous card game and Combat Monsters. In fact, Paul Johnson, the co-founder of Rubicon Development is an "avid player" of Magic, but wanted a video game with a more tactical experience. Thus, Combat Monsters, in which you not only collect virtual cards of various types and abilities and deploy them in single and multiplayer duels, but also maneuver on a 3D game board, complete with special hexes that can amplify your powers - or your enemy's."Combat Monsters is very much an "easy to learn, tough to master" game. You begin by choosing a hero - a warrior, an archer, or a mage - who will serve as your personal avatar, and are then given a basic starting deck with which to play. The bulk of your deck will, initially at least, be composed of various fantasy monsters like orcs, minotaurs, elves, zombies and so forth, each of which belongs to one of the three character classes; there are also cards for weapons, armor, equipment, spells, and magical runes. Some "supplemental" cards only work with specific races or classes, and some monster cards have special abilities that manifest under the right conditions: zombies gain health whenever a monster on the board dies, for instance, while orcs gain an attack bonus for every friendly orc in play.