You might remember Alan Newman as that board game designer who has an awesome last name but spells it all funny. You should also know him as the designer of the rather great two-player title Sun Tzu, which was formerly known as Dynasties. That’s in Cardboard Land. In Digitalville, it’s still known as Dynasties and it’s just been updated to improve a very important mechanism: asynchronous play.
Dynasties pits two players as rivals trying to control the five main provinces of ancient China. To do this, you’ll deploy troops around the country based on card play. Each player will play cards into a province with the higher card adding troops and the lower one running for the hills. Cards can only be used once, so picking the correct timing is crucial to pulling out a victory.
The digital version has solo play vs. an AI as well as pass-and-play multiplayer. With version 2.1, the app now also has online, asynchronous multiplayer and play matching as well as notifications that actually work the way they’re supposed to.
Alan Newman’s Dynasties is available for iOS Universal for $3. The developer, Rational Brothers, was kind enough to sport us five codes, however, and we’re going to give them away. The first five commenters who mention Dynasties in their comment will get a code, the rest of you will have to pick it up the old fashioned way at the link below.
Dynasties sounds great, I’d love to try it out.
Never even heard of Dynasties or the cardboard version, but I’d love to give it a shot.
Never heard of Dynasties too, but sounds interesting and I can’t say no to async play!
Just new here
Dynasties looks promising 
Looking forward to check out Dynasties
Crumbling Dynasties…
Only ruins left for me.
I bought dynasties a long time ago, so I dont need a code
Me too, I have the game too, but haven’t played it for ages. I can’t remember much about the game, just that I liked it. Hope the MP is good enough to play a tournament here soon.
Just played a few games. Oh is this hard.
Thanks Dave and Rational Brothers for the code! I’m new to this game and just downloaded and played through tutorial and am learning against the AI. Seems like one of those games with deceptively simple rules that still offer loads of deep strategy. Seems perfect material for a tournament now that they have async multiplayer.
Nice update
To bad the multiplayer lobby is always empty…
lots of ongoing games. i’m involved in 3 games eg
couldn’t you create an async game so that anyone can join when coming along?
Rational Brothers are giving away more codes, so hopefully you’ll find some players in the lobby eventually. You can play versus friends, of course. I’m in three games right now, but none from the lobby. If you find me there, I’ll definitely play.
I should have added I’m amn624 in the Gourmet Games system. I’d be happy to play.
hello @JMH.75,
i tried to invite you but you have not registered on the Gourmet Gaming server.
best way to go as the GC friendslists become more and more outdated.
feel free to invite me to an async game.
you only need to type in my GG username JammaTal.
I tried to register, but both on the iPad as on the PC I did not receive an email with the password for my account. I will contact support, see what they can do about it
so you had an old account already and just forgot the password?
but when i typed in “JMH.75” i got an “invalid user” message.
I don’t have an old account, I just tried to create a new one from within the game on the iPad. The new one is JMH75 without the dot, because that is somehow not permitted. It says it will send an email with the password, but that email has never arrived in my mailbox. I tried it again using a PC this time, but without luck.
So at the moment, I’m just using my GC account.
Try checking out the Gourmet Gaming website, http://gourmetgaming.com. You can register there, or if you need a minimum six character user name or something like that, it should tell you. Anyway, if you register there, you’ll be fine.
ill reach out to him by email to see what might be holding it up.
I don’t need a code; I was a Day One purchaser back in the day.
I will say that I’m hugely skeptical of Gourmet Games’ ability to handle multiplayer, especially given how badly they screwed up Battleline for so many years.
OTOH, it’s not their fault that GameCenter first sucked, then was abandoned …
i have played 4x Dynasties and 5x Battlelines with the new versions now.
notifications were reliable.
no broken game.
much much better than before.
only minor quibbles left, except one major for BL.
Battleline still does not succeed in marking the last played tile correctly.
in times of multitasking it’s easy to overcome with a screenshot. i can swipe the photo in when playing.