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.
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.
2016 has been a great year for digital board games, so much so that it’s easy to lose track of every great release. Luckily, some of them are aware of this and keep bubbling to the surface of our consciousness by releasing more content. The latest example of this is Peter Kossit’s one-man triumph, Baseball Highlights 2045. It was just updated with the requisite bug fixes, but also includes a new expansion pack that includes my favorite part of baseball, errors.
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.
Colt Express has two things I adore: an Old West theme of bandits robbing a train, and programmed movement with character decks. Westerns are in sort of a tough place right now. The themes common to westerns are largely in tension with some now-common values, so it’s difficult to make them without effectively taking a controversial political stand (either to support those themes, or explicitly reject them). As a result, family-friendly western content is rare these days. Admittedly, I have never seen Sheriff Callie’s Wild West, but Wikipedia tells me it occurs in the town of “Nice and Friendly Corners”. I am now imagining Fred Rogers in a poncho, chomping a cigarillo, and my attempt to deride the western credentials of the Disney Junior show has gone totally off the rails as I embroider that fabulous image.* Anyway, a western family game stands out.
I love geeky tabletop games, especially the kind with a dozen different decks of cards, scores of specialized counters, multiple boards and player reference cards with charts and tables. Call me Ameritrash, but that’s the way I like it. Unfortunately, I have young children: my oldest is taking an interest in games now, but at age 5 he’s not ready for Twilight Struggle or Terra Mystica yet, and my youngest is mostly interested in teething on the pieces. As a result, I mostly play my board games on a tablet these days, and keep notes on which ones I might want to pick up when the kids get older. I say this because Space Food Truck is a digital board game. There’s no print edition yet, and that’s a shame because if there was, I’d have purchased it and put it in a place of honor in my collection, there to wait for the day we can sit down as a family and play together. If you haven’t picked up on my subtle hints, what I’m trying to say is that I love this cooperative multiplayer game.
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.
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.