Despite the recent death of SolForge, there’s still hope for mobile CCG fans who don’t want to go crawling back to Hearthstone. Duelyst has been around on PC/Mac for a bit now and it’s one of the few CCGs that can actually hold my interest. Lucky for us, it appears to be coming to mobile in Q1 of 2017.
Despite what you might be hoping, Avignon: A Clash of Popes does not feature Stephen IV and St. Peter performing the fish slapping dance. Nor does it feature Boniface VI riding a pegasus while holding the severed head of Sixtus II. Despite that, it sounds like a pretty great game.
One of the more popular CCGs on the App Store that wasn’t Hearthstone was SolForge from Stone Blade Entertainment. Turns out it wasn’t as popular as we thought. Yesterday, Stone Blade bigwig Justin Gary announced that not only was SolForge suffering from a terminal illness, but that it only had a few weeks to live.
I’ve spent the last ten days doing not much more than yelling at children and trying to drink away this never-ending headache. No luck thus far, but tomorrow the sun shines again and the house belongs to me and me alone (and the dog, but he’s way less annoying than the kids). As such, I can start looking at the App Store again to see what I’ve missed. In theory, there shouldn’t be much as the App Store has been shut down over the holidays. You can imagine my surprise this morning when I awoke to find that an expansion to one of my favorite games was released early last week. Pretty sneaky, sis.
I love me some Martin Wallace and Steam: Rails to Riches is one of his finest contributions to game shelves everywhere. A digital version was released last year from Acram Digital and it was polished and shiny with one glaring exception: no online multiplayer. Today, that’s been remedied. It’s just been updated to include asynchronous play and I think someone needs to organize a tournament.
I’ve not kept my admittedly somewhat disturbing love for Pathfinder Adventures well hidden since its release earlier this year. Despite its bugs and garish, in-your-face pleas to spend money, I simply haven’t found a better game on mobile all year. Despite being a card game that feels awfully themeless on the tabletop, Obsidian managed to create what might be the best RPG experience currently available on an iPad when they ported Pathfinder over. The only thing holding it back was the slow leak of new content. Over the past few months, that slow drip has turned into a steady stream and yesterday we finally reached the end of the road. The sixth and final adventure deck in the Rise of the Runelords campaign has been released.
Season 2 of new content for the super heroic cooperative card game, Sentinels of the Multiverse, is underway in full force with the just released mega-expansion, Vengeance, which is live on iOS, Android, and PC/Mac.
If a gaming website were to have some type of “Best of” at the end of the year (spoiler, we’re doing it the week between Xmas and New Years), I think you’d find at least one writer putting in a vote for Twilight Struggle. If not the best app of 2016, it’s near the top and yesterday we learned that it’s going to get better before 2016 ends. Playdek announced that not only is the game making its long-awaited debut on Android, but it’s bringing with it an expansion pack and more. Oh, and it all happens next Monday.
Talisman may lack deep strategic or tactical gameplay but it more than makes up for it with the fun of exploration and so much damn content. Seriously, it’s gotten to the point that I can’t keep track of all the expansions for this beast. Dungeons, Cities, something called the Highlands? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s all good as every new expansion adds more unknown to each game until you never know what you’ll draw. That’s when the game gets really fun. Today, Nomad updated Talisman yet again with more content, two new characters to play with: Martial Artist and Saracen.
Carrier Battles of Guadalcanal is the best war game on the App Store that involves carrier battles in the Pacific that have Guadalcanal in their title. I joke, but it’s actually a pretty amazing little war game with a ton of depth and character which belies its one-man development team. It’s also updated with new content so regularly that when a new update hits, it’s barely news. Last week the latest update arrived and it’s a doozy.