PC – Page 3 – Stately Play

All the news we missed last week (and maybe even before that)

March 25, 2019 David Neumann 8

It’s been a crazy few months at Stately Play HQ. Work, family, and life in general have been putting up huge detour signs whenever I’d sit down to pen a poorly written screed about the latest Big Thing. You may have noticed. I’m on vacation this week (my kids are on spring break, which seemed as good of an excuse as any) so I’m hoping to have a little more time. I’m hoping this extra time stretches into the future even when I’m not sitting outside in 72 degree weather with a lovely ocean breeze to keep me cool. Work should be dying down a bit and the end of club volleyball is in sight. We’ll see, but I’m hoping for a more energetic front page in the coming weeks and months. A lot of stuff in Gameland has been happening and, instead of forcing you to read one dreck filled post of mine after another, I thought I’d pile all the dreck into one easy-to-digest morsel. See what’s been happening after the break.

BATALJ, Silent Running

March 4, 2019 Alex Connolly 0

PC BATALJ, henceforth stripped of exuberant capitalisation, has released. It features three distinct factions, WEGO combat, a crisp aesthetic and the seal of quality you’d expect from DICE alumni. It is without a doubt one hell of a game. At least. I think it could be. Possibly one of the year’s best, caught in the right light. But so far, in this online-only game, I’ve yet to find a single match.

Mystic Vale gets more Vale. The amount of Mystic remains unchanged.

March 1, 2019 David Neumann 8

PC/Mac If you need proof that we’re living in a Golden Age of digital board games, I offer up Mystic Vale as evidence. Releasing less than a month ago, I’m guessing many of us have already moved on to other games like Evolution or the latest darling, Castles of Burgundy. If a game with the name recognition and polish of Mystic Vale had appeared back in 2013 our heads would have exploded. To bring Mystic Vale back to our collective subconscious, today Nomad Games released its first expansion: Vale of Magic.

Castles of Burgundy coming on Thursday

February 26, 2019 David Neumann 66

iOS, Android, PC/Mac Remember way back in 2015 when we’d be lucky to get 3-4 board game apps released a year (and half of them would suck)? Times have changed. Hot on the heels of Evolution from North Star comes The Castles of Burgundy from Digidiced, releasing for iOS/Android this Thursday.

After an epoch, Evolution has been released

February 12, 2019 David Neumann 54

iOS, Android, PC/Mac I like to poke fun at the guys from North Star Games for being the Blizzard of board game app development. After all, it took Blizz 10 years to bring us Diablo 3, whereas North Star has been working on Evolution for the last five. Of course, that’s board game years, so its roughly equivalent. Still, Blizzard games are known for their polish and sheen right out of the box, and that was North Star’s plan with this elongated dev cycle: make the board game app that all others will be (unfavorably) compared to. Well, it’s out in the wilderness now, so you can go see if they accomplished their dream.

More viking game goodness appears to be on deck

February 8, 2019 David Neumann 2

PC/Mac Sorry for the lack of content this week, folks. Real job getting in the way of fun these days. Thus, I don’t have time for a lengthy post bemoaning the rise in viking-themed pop culture stuff and will, instead, just bring the thunder up front. Champions of Midgard is a viking-themed board game of worker placement and dice chucking and, apparently, it’s coming to digital.

Hiding in plain sight: Victory Point Games’ Gem Rush is worth a gander

February 6, 2019 David Neumann 13

I was a backer of the Kickstarter for Victory Point Games‘ recent release of Gem Rush Second Edition. I had never played (or even heard of) the first edition, but I love the “premier” stuff VPG has been putting out recently not to mention that most (all?) of their games are playable solo. Oh, and the designer is Jeremy Lennert, who I fell in love with via a previous VPG title, Darkest Night Second Edition. My copy of Gem Rush arrived before the holidays and has sat, untouched, since. Not the game’s fault, just my crappy time management. Anyway, I had forgotten (until prompted in the forums) that the Kickstarter had mentioned a digital version. With little to no fanfare, the digital version of Gem Rush was released way back when and has completely slid under our radar. Time to fix that. Gem Rush is a polished, tight app of a pretty great board game that no one is aware of. Let’s change that.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 now available for Mac

February 1, 2019 David Neumann 1

-PC/Mac I’m not sure how this happened, but suddenly I have two very good RPGs to play on my Mac. Of course, I don’t have time to play either of them, but they’re both downloaded anyway, just in case. One of them is Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire which added turn-based combat support in a patch mid-January. The other is the one right up there in the headline. Divinity: Original Sin 2 has just been released for Mac.

They that sow the wind shall reap… a bundle?

January 30, 2019 Tof Eklund 3

PC We don’t post a lot about bundles and sales here. I largely agreed with simulation maven and long-time indie dev Cliff Harris that unplayed games are a blight upon developers and players alike, and that we might all be better off if we just paid full price for games we really want and then played the mess out of them. My moral authority on this topic, however, is about nil: I have literally dozens of unplayed games installed on my PC, hundreds I’ll never touch in my Steam library, and, even after the 32 bit app-ocalypse, enough mobile games to last me a lifetime, if push came to shove.

I lied, and I’m sorry

January 28, 2019 David Neumann 7

PC/Mac/Linux Last Friday we returned to our weekly glimpse into the future and I stated that I would be playing the hell out of Divinity: Original Sin 2. Well, I lied. I didn’t even open D:OS2 all weekend. I have a good excuse, though. You see, no one told me that a little card game called Slay the Spire had left Early Access last Thursday. If I’d known, I would have been forthcoming with the fact that I planned on playing the living hell out of Slay the Spire all weekend long.