We’ve known about the flood of board game ports that tabletop giant, Asmodee, is planning on brining to digital. Time to grab your galoshes, because the flood is beginning today with the release of the 2015 SdJ winner, Colt Express.
Over the past few years the French board game publisher Asmodee has played the role of Pac Man with the rest of the tabletop industry being small white dots. Publishers like Days of Wonder, Fantasy Flight, and F2Z Media have all fallen under the Asmodee umbrella. One benefit for us is they seem intent on porting as many of their titles to digital as possible. Colt Express, Potion Explosion, and Mysterium are all planned for release before the New Year and they also just announced that Spot It! will be coming to digital in early 2017.
Everyone hates words games. It’s true. Well, almost everyone. Your grandma still loves Scrabble, and so does that one tool who’s memorized every two-letter word that begins with “Q”. Do we want to game with those people? Hell, no! (Grandma excluded. It’s fun to game with grandma!) What if I were to tell you that there was a word game that didn’t suck? What if we took one of the most popular games of the past 10 years and mixed it with word games? How would that work? Let’s take a look at Paperback.
While the mac daddy of Commands & Colors games, Memoir ’44, is stubbornly staying away from our tablets, it looks like we’ll have plenty of other options using Richard Borg’s iconic war game system soon. We already have Battlelore from Fantasy Flight and, recently, GMT Games announced that they’re moving forward with C&C: Ancients and C&C: Napoleonics. We had heard last year that HexWar was going to be working on the World War I themed title, The Great War, but yesterday we learned that it’s going into closed beta.
Much like my patience, Pathfinder Adventures is slowly coming to an end. Not the end, just an end. Last week saw the release of Deck 5 of the Rise of the Runelords campaign meaning that we only have one deck remaining before the adventure path wraps up. Will a new adventure path follow? We can hope, but for now let’s revel in the fact that there’s new stuff to do in one of 2016’s greatest ports.
Earlier in the week I managed to track down the latest winner of the coveted Spiel des Jahres award, Vlaada Chvátil from Czech Games Edition. You might remember him as the prolific designer of board games such as Through the Ages and Galaxy Trucker. You might also remember that Through the Ages has been in the works at CGE for some time with an expected 2016 release. As 2016 nears its end, where do digital versions of TtA and other CGE games (such as the much awaited Codenames port) stand? Lucky for us, Vlaada was happy to fill us in on the details.
Of all the game genres to come to touchscreens, real-time strategy has probably been the least well served. There’s too little controllability when you’re dealing with your stubby finger as opposed to the fine maneuverings of a mouse and keyboard. To compensate, many iPad RTS games lower the amount of units available so the game becomes more manageable for your finger. That’s not how Rome: Total War is going to handle things. Out today for iPad, Rome: Total War is a port of the PC title that includes everything the desktop version has, even the thousands of units clashing on screen at any given time.
Thanks to our intrepid undercover reporter, [redacted -ed.], we knew that Image & Form was close to releasing their super-popular 2D shooter, SteamWorld Heist on iOS very soon. What we didn’t realize is that “very soon” meant “now”. That’s right, the much anticipated SteamWorld Heist is now available for iOS Universal.
If you’ve ever played Mysterium I’m sure the last thing on your mind was if a digital version was in development. It’s a great board game, but it involves players all discussing strange images that have been handed to them from another player. Thus, it seems to be most at home around a dining room table or the like. Well, Asmodee Digital is saying whatever to all that and is going forward with a digital version of Mysterium anyway. After reading what they have planned, I have to admit I’m actually excited to see this on my iPad.
Since I have no Android devices in my home, I seldom have much need for keeping up with what’s happening with Humble Bundle. If you’re not aware, they package up a ton of games and then allow you to spend what you’d like to unlock more and more of the bundle. Oh, and the money all goes to charity, so everybody wins. The latest bundle is near and dear to my heart and, if you’re an Android gamer, one you should definitely be looking into.