AppCraver » Board Games

Battleship By Pen – Sink or Swim?

Jennifer Beam — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:30:40 +0000

If you ever played battleship as a kid, then no doubt you can appreciate Battleship by Pen. Created by RedMadRobot, Battleship by Pen gets bonus points from me for originality in design. An app that appears to have been drawn entirely by hand on graph paper with a blue Bic pen, Battleship by Pen is the same concept as the original board game, but with some original features of it’s own.

Players choose where to place their battleships, which are really just groups of squares outlined in pen with Xs inside, and deploy their fleet onto the graph paper grid to begin.

In Battleship By Pen you can touch and drag the ships to position them and tap them to change orientation. When it’s your turn to try to find and destroy your opponent’s battleships, you simply select and tap a square on the screen. If it is a hit, an X will mark the square and if it’s a miss, a small dot serves as a marker. The first player to destroy their opponent’s entire fleet wins.

As I said, I give points for complete originality in the design of Battleship by Pen. Everything right down to the instructions and navigation buttons have the same hand-drawn appearance. It’s obvious the designer was going for casual and the pen and paper graphics combined with the recorded voice sound effects achieves a result somewhere between aloof casual and unintended comedy. The sound effects can’t even be explained in words, except to tell you to ask a ten-year-old what it sounds like when something is blown up by a missile.

Humorous as it is, the sound effects in Battleship by Pen actually got on my nerves after awhile, but not as much as overall stability of the app. While I enjoyed the game immensely despite the eventually nerve-grating sound effects, the single-player mode crashed every time I played. I tried to remedy this with a restart and tested it out on both iPhone with 3.0 OS and iPod touch with 2.2.1 – both yielding the same result. As for the multi-player mode, I didn’t care all that much for it, but the implementation of a wi-fi mode is a great expectation and should prove to be a positive improvement.

Battleship by Pen is a highly creative rendition of a classic game and the developers definitely bring their own unique flair into the mix. It certainly has huge potential, but unless the stability of single player mode is improved and the wi-fi game mode brought to fruition, Battleship by Pen may die a slow, silent death as it sinks into the unknown murky waters of the App Store.

rating: 7/10
app_name: Battleship by Pen

Clue: No Longer a Boring Board Game

Casandra Armour — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:00:08 +0000

An update of the classic Hasbro board game, Electronic Arts‘ Clue is a killer modernization of the old-fashioned who-dunnit. The pace is fast, the women are faster, the men and the weapons are cool.

Slick graphics seem to mimic the Rockstar Grand Theft Auto franchise’s signature character styling with smooth outlines, shadows and highlights. Art Deco blocks on a red and grey background slide across the screen as a simple, cool, jazz loop set adds the finishing touch to a James Bond style interface. And, that’s just Clue’s opening.

As a reporter on assignment — the gruff and aptly named Braunman — your goal in Clue is to solve the murder of “the fantastically rich Mr. Boddy,” who was hosting a glamorous party when he met his untimely demise. Upon receiving your assignment, a 45 minute timer begins. You can move about from room to room, search the guests’ belongings and interview them to glean information.

Use the Crime Map tab to survey suspects, weapons and rooms. Guest interactions, including suspicious arguments, are mentioned in interviews and logged in your Notes tab. The Suspicions tab lets you organize ideas and narrow down your accusation. With these easy to use tools at your disposal, gameplay is concise, clever and moves well.

The Game Tips are helpful as you learn the ropes. But even after deactivating the tips, Clue still tends to lead you in the right direction — a lot. For example, you enter a room and click on your flashlight and the suspect’s belongings are automatically highlighted indicating you should search there. A few may be dead ends, but more often than not those leads are a valid clue.

Extras include character biographies, vignettes on each suspect, as well as individual game statistics and achievements. Ten levels of play are available in Clue, graduating from Internship through to Senior Reporter.

The hip new character and game styling combined with quick, easy, play make this old favorite a new one too.

rating: 9/10
app_name: Clue

Build from Start-Up to Web Mogul with iNetMania

Michael Alexander — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 16:30:42 +0000

Fans of Monopoly (either the board game or app) will probably like TechPad Productions’ iNetMania, its first game for the iPhone and iPod touch. iNetmania is based on TechPad’s ServerMania board game.

Think of it as Monopoly for dot.com moguls. The object of iNetmania is to build the most successful Web site, defined by the amount of traffic your site receives. As in real life, traffic translates into cash and the person with the most cash wins.

Up to four people — flesh and blood or computer-generated kind — can play.

You begin iNetmania as a start-up with $50K and 4,000 visitors. Roll the die using the accelerometer to move around the board. Your strategy and game play are dictated the squares you land on.

For example, when you’re within six spaces of a Marketing square, you can opt to spend $50,000 for a marketing fee to hold on to your number of visitors or forego paying the fee. If you pay the fee and land on the square you double your visitor count. If you decide not to pay and you land on the square, you’ll lose half your visitor count. Either way, it’s a gamble, just as it is in real life.

The cash from marketing fees and other penalties goes into a CEO Bonus pile. Land on the right square and you get the cash.

You want to avoid Slumps, which kill traffic, and land on Spikes, which boost traffic. The more traffic you get, the more money you’ll make, and cash, like with real Web sites, is what matters at the end of the day.

iNetmania has great graphics, with a pan, tilt and zoom modes. It’s one of the few games that I’ve seen that really captures the feel of playing a real board game, at least in the visual sense. The concept is essentially a reworking of Monopoly and there’s at least as much luck as strategy to iNetmania , which makes it less fun and challenging than the well-known board game.

Still, iNetmania is very well done and if you like board games, this one is hard to beat.

My only quibble is that iNetmania has a “limited-time offer” of $2.99. It’s a strategy that many devs are increasingly relying on. The fact that there’s no mention of when the special is over, is just playing games.

app_name: iNetMania
rating: 8/10

Beast Brings Retro Monster Crushing to iPhone

Derek Walter — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:30:51 +0000

Beast, a remake of a 1984 DOS game, seeks to capture some of the retro game love flowing from the App Store. Games like Candy Wars have shown that it isn’t just the console ports that are grabbing all the attention. Unfortunately, Beast is a bit too buggy to live up to the hype. A few freeze-ups while playing the game keep it from living up to the promised potential.

The game play itself makes for a good challenge. You must crush a series of “beasts” by moving around blocks until they reign destruction on the enemies. Beast is not as easy as it sounds, because there are various rules governing which ones can be destroyed depending upon how the blocks are configured. It takes a while to get used to which blocks you must hit in which manner, but it should come around after playing Beast for a while.

But where Beast falls short is in some of the bugs that hang around during game play. When starting a round there is a significant lag as the game is frozen before the playing begins. I tried all types of ways to tap the screen in the beginning to try and get it going — holding down the screen, not touching it at all, tapping repeatedly; all with limited success. The game did eventually run as it was supposed to, but it was quite an irritation to have the beginning of each round be so unpredictable.

As for the rest of the game play Beast was fairly solid. The graphics struck the right balance between paying homage to the original game and having a clean, updated look befitting the iPhone.

With some bug fixes Beast will be a game worth having if you are looking for some challenging puzzle action or like the novelty of having older games from a bygone computing era on your iPhone/iPod Touch.

Watch Beast in action:

app_name: Beast
rating: 7/10

Chess Club Plays To A Draw

Keith Lewis — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 20:30:04 +0000

Chess Club iPhone app by Visionary Bits is an online chess game that allows you to play chess from your iPhone against anyone around the world. The company states that they have more than 13,000 members. I enjoy a good game of chess but I don’t often play on computers, online or my iPhone. I’m fortunate enough to have friends nearby that I play regularly so I can usually get a game or two in.

I played quite a few games on the free version of the Chess Club app and found it to be fairly enjoyable and even challenging at times. It comes with a number features allowing you to personalize your chess game including a customizable chessboard layout, real-time clock and resign or draw features.

The paid version, at a cost of $3.99, includes all of the standard features installed on the free version plus additional features such as creating a game room to play specifically with friends, and allowing games to be saved and accessed later through the Replay feature. It also contains a collection of games from past Grand Masters.

I found the chessboard to be slightly small for my comfort. On a few occasions while attempting to move my pieces along the back row I accidentally tapped the key requesting a draw or attempting to resign. Another issue I had with Chess Club was not being able to ascertain the ability (or ranking) of the player I was playing.

During one game I had an annoying glitch. My opponent was close to being timed out; suddenly he mysteriously acquired additional time. This occurred several times during Chess Club. I used the chat feature, which I hate, and asked how he was accomplishing it. He said they didn’t know.

Finally, the chat feature is probably my most hated feature on the Chess Club app. I see the necessity for it to some extent but several people I played felt the need to attempt to carry on a conversation throughout the game. Besides just being annoying it requires you to bring up your keyboard to text during which you are unable to see and study the chessboard.

Those few issues aside, I can understand how Chess Club can be a lot of fun for the avid online chess player. I found many of the games enjoyable and don’t mind using this app on occasion. But personally I prefer playing my chess sitting directly across from my opponent with limited chatting.

app_name: Chess Club Free
rating: 6/10

Mahjong Epic Stacks Up Against Similar Tile Games

Michael Alexander — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:30:01 +0000

Add Kristanix Games’ Mahjong Epic to the the stack of 20-plus Mahjong games in the App Store.

Mahjong is so popular, not just on the iPhone/iPod touch, if you were to throw a stone in any direction, there’s a good chance you’d conk a Mahjong player in the head.

Mahjong is said to be hundreds of years old, although historians don’t agree on when the game came into being.

Mahjong apps come in all variations — some allow you to play against opponents over Wi-Fi, others give you the option of customizing the playing surface. The list goes on.

The game is simple to play. The object is to remove all the tiles on a board in pairs. You can remove the tiles on top of the stack. You cannot remove tiles that are covered by other tiles or have tiles on either side them. If you get stuck, you can undo your moves all the way to the start. There’s a bit of strategy involved, but in general, Mahjong isn’t going to turn your brain into gelatinous goop due to your over thinking.

Mahjong Epic is a good-looking iteration of the classic game. You can get get hints, choose whether the accessible tiles are highlighted, undo moves, change the volume of the Asian-sounding music and other features that are typical of Mahjong games. The boards and tiles depicted in Mahong games for iPhone/iPod touch apps are small and so having the ability to zoom in/out is a must-have feature for fat-fingered folks like me.

Prices for Mahjong games in the App Store are all over the place, ranging from free to $9.99. Try a few free ones before buying. You might like the look of one over the other. That’s what it will come down to, I think.

The tiles and backgrounds are well rendered. Mahjong Epic features 100 unique boards. In addition, you can design your own. I haven’t seen that combination in other Mahjong games I’ve looked at. That doesn’t mean those features are unique — I haven’t looked at all 20-plus games in the App Store.

app_name: Mahjong Epic
rating: 8/10

Mancala: FS5 (Free) — Marble Game Gets Everything Right

Joel Benjamin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:30:49 +0000

Mancala: FS5 (Free). For those of us that didn’t already know, “The word mancala comes from the Arabic word naqala meaning literally ‘to move.’ There is no one game with the name mancala; instead mancala is a type, or designation, of game.” (Wikipedia)

This is a wonderful game that I remember from my childhood and it brought a smile to my face to see it in the app store. But wait… it’s free! This is not a “Lite” version, it’s not stripped down at all, and frankly, the developers have done a fantastic job.

The object of Mancala is to try and capture as many marbles (seeds) as possible and get them into your “Home Pit” where, hopefully, you will have more at the end of the game than your opponent. You do this by moving marbles from pits on your side of the board into your “Home.” In fact, in this regard, it is similar to Backgammon. Sometimes your marbles will need to travel through your opponent’s side of the board before you can bring them home. If you land your final marble in a pit that was previously empty, and the pit opposite it (on your opponent’s side of the board) has marbles in it, then you will have “captured” them and they get moved to your home pit.

The fundamentals of the game are simple yet the nuances are complex and lend themselves to a rich playing experience. Really good players who have mastered the logic of the game will consistently beat someone of lesser experience. Mancala: FS5 has modes for one player, two players, network, Internet, and AIM.

The home page of Mancala: FS5 is intuitively laid out with useful and separate “Help” and “Settings” buttons. The graphics are great and the interface is snappy and clean. All in all, this game has been executed to near perfection and best of all, it doesn’t cost a dime.

Mancala:FS5 (Free) is ad-supported. Users that prefer to avoid the ad can also download the paid version of Mancala: FS5 for $1.99.

rating: 9/10
app_name: Mancala: FS5 (Free)

vConqr: World Domination is Closer, but still Just out of Reach

Derek Walter — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 01:00:48 +0000

The Risk knock-off vConqr has undergone quite the revamping since our original review of the game when it was known as Virtual Conquest. This version is more playable and should appeal to both Risk fanatics and iPhone/iPod touch gamers. But even with some improvements the app still feels a bit constrained and lacks options.

There really is potential in vConqr. The graphics are excellent and the UI of the game board works quite well. And, compared to the original version, the AI is much improved. Gameplay against the computer enemy is actually a challenge when selecting the most difficult level.

Unlike mobile games that you can just pick up, swipe a few times and play, with VConqr most users will need to use the tutorial embedded within the game. This is especially true if you are not familiar with how Risk works. The object is to move your armies around the game board and defeat the enemy (or enemies) in battle. It takes strategy in army deployment, attacking, and of course, a bit of risk to win.

vConqr lets the user create human or computer players. The gameplay then involves moving armies, attacking, and re-locating troops after the carnage. But playing against the computer may result in eye damage — the maneuvers and explosions from battle move at lightning speed. While the goal of quickening gameplay can be appreciated, it makes it hard to analyze what the opponent did. And some of the options are a too constraining for beginners. Tap in the wrong play when deploying armies or attacking and that option is gone until the next turn.

Some of the other features of vConqr are either hard to decipher or missing entirely. You can save a game, but doing so means just closing the app with the home button (not intuitive at all). When restarting the app there is an option for resuming a game. Also, creating a human player is done by choosing “none” on the AI difficulty, not simply selecting a human/computer option. And some of the best features are promised but not yet available — downloadable maps, online play and tournaments.

The improvements are definitely welcome and make vConqr worth its $2.99 price. The game is better — but with improvements could be great.

rating: 8/10
app_name: vConqr

Coins N Rainbows – Coin Sliding Fun

Andrew Portela — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:00:12 +0000

Coins N Rainbows was an original idea that involves the user having a coin and sliding it along the board to land on rainbows. The user would take his or her iPhone and slide it forward which sends the coin along the board and depending on where it lands on the rainbows, determines how many points the user gets.

Although Coins N Rainbows is a great idea for a game and reminds of my childhood days playing ski ball, it falls short in many ways. First thing I noticed of course is that there is no way to shut of the sound. Not only is there no way to shut off the sound but there is no options page in general. There are no instructions on how to play the game either. It took me a couple minutes of trial and error to figure it out.

Another thing that bothers me about Coins N Rainbows is that it is very hard to gauge the distance you are throwing the coin making it difficult to throw. It is also almost impossible to score because if any part of the coin is touching a black line the points don’t count. The color areas of the rainbow are barely bigger than the coin so in order to score points the user has to get lucky.

Coins N Rainbows has a lot of work to do in order to compete with the other apps. The app is a great start and a great idea, it just needs some elbow grease to get it right.

app_name: Coins N Rainbows
rating: 4/10

Scrabble, Just Right for Tough Times

Michael Alexander — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 23:30:40 +0000

Scrabble was invented by Alfred Mosher Butts, an out-of-work architect, during the Great Depression. Hmm, I wonder whether it’s coincidence that Electronic Arts has just released its version of the popular word game for the iPhone, or a sign the economy is set to go further down the drain?

If you know how to work a crossword, then you know how to play Scrabble. How true is EA’s version to the real thing? Pretty close, with a few extras mashed in.

The app’s rules are almost the same as those of the Scrabble board game. Both rely on the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, 4th Edition. Some significant differences between the virtual and real: If you attempt to spell a word that’s not in the dictionary, you can recall your tiles and try again. I didn’t catch the computer making any mistakes for me to challenge either! Finally, there’s a “best word hint” mode that leaves it to the computer to figure out the best combo of tiles you should play. No self-respecting Scrabble player would want those features.

Still, game play is high-class. You double tap to zoom the board and drag and drop tiles. You’ve got a shuffle button if you want to mix up your tiles automatically instead of manually. Shaking the iPhone scrambles the tiles in the bag. In sum, this Scrabble app takes advantage of all the iPhone’s capabilities in a way that simulates playing the physical board game.

The one thing I’d like is to be able to pick up and drop a tile. As is, you can’t point at a tile and then the square where you want it to go. It’s not a deal breaker, but the option would be useful.

With Scrabble you can play against the computer or against another player over Wi-Fi. There are three levels: Easy, Normal and Hard. I’m a regular Scrabble player, although no where near expert level, and I found the Normal mode too easy. My iPhone average was 50-60 points higher than my board-game average.

Earlier, App Store reviewers complained about load times and flaky app behavior. I’m playing version 1.0.53 and find it loads in about 10 seconds. It hasn’t crashed on me yet, either.

app_name: Scrabble
rating: 9/10