Stately Citizen Journalism

#4356

Hero Realms updated this week to include its first expansion, Call to Arms.

Of all the “Realms” games, this one has the best single-player experience by far. The since your characters level up and your deck improves over time, you won’t find yourself stuck at a seemingly-impossible mission for too long. Plus, the progression keeps things interesting.

The digital game is light years behind Star Realms in terms of content and suffers from being a more generic theme, but it might be my preferred “Realms” deck builder. I haven’t given Cthulhu enough time but the iconography in that one makes me impatient.

At the table, I’m a Hero Realms fan for supporting more players out of the box and for being the first of the series to include asymmetrical starting decks and a co-op campaign.

2 Likes
#4357

Saw an email that Darkest Dungeon 2: The Darker Dungeon (@OhBollox) is out on Steam. Haven’t purchased yet as the day got away from me, but I’m certain it will be as full of despair and failure as the first.

5 Likes
#4358

I’ve played a fair bit of dd2 on epic. In some ways it’s a more straightforward experience. You make your party then you run them until the die (or win, I suppose?). Then you spend some points on meta progression and off you go again with a new party.

For me, the rough edges that were sanded off were not a core part of the gameplay experience, but your mileage may vary. I think dd2 is probably a better start point for new players than dd1 as the mental load of working out how characters work together is substantially streamlined.

6 Likes
#4359

Hell yes.

6 Likes
#4360

Too bad it’s going to be late in 2024 before this comes! But I’m here for it when it does.

#4361

Yeah, that wait seems like forever. But this is a no-brainer day-one purchase.

1 Like
#4362

Twilight Struggle: Red Sea has been released on Steam. Anyone up for a game?

3 Likes
#4363

Definitely, as soon as I grab it I’ll let you know

#4364

So is this compatible with the original, letting you mix cards with it?

#4365

From the brief portion of the tutorial I went through, there’s an optional variant with a 3rd turn of the game that includes some previous cards, but I wouldn’t say it is “compatible” with the original.

#4366

It looks like Talisman: Digital Edition is currently free on iOS. I’m not sure for how long.

1 Like
#4367

Apologies, got the invite but the game (TS:RS) won’t load on MacOS, despite the Steam blurb to the contrary. Trying to troubleshoot it here but it may have to wait till Tuesday when I get back to work and a PC.

1 Like
#4368

At the moment, Marvel United is only $11.99 on Amazon (US). The game really shines with the other sets but for this price, it’s worth checking out. Heck, for this price it is worth it for the minis alone if you want to paint them.

Good game for family game night, too.

5 Likes
#4369

Yeah, Amazon’s prices for this range from decent to terrific for some reason. I bought it and a couple expansions to paint and give to nephews as gifts, and it was genuinely delightful for a crappy painter like me to actually be able to do faces, because they’re so massive. I tried the game at a friend’s, and it’s decent. It seemed like you could select a team and enemy to give you whatever difficulty you wanted, which is great once you know the game. But since my friend is a completist and has tons of characters to choose from, the task of strategic selection was a bit overwhelming, so we just chose thematic favorites. That resulted in some game states that seemed excessively challenging.

Even then, though, it didn’t reach the level of un-fun, just instructive. And it plays so quickly that such a game can feel like taking your first move in solving a puzzle. A bit frustrating, since I only see that friend rarely and wasn’t able to plumb those depths with him, but it made me think it’d be a game I’d be happy to have in my collection, and I only have held off on making that a reality because I also recently got into Marvel Champions, and two Marvel games I’ll likely play exclusively solo seemed silly. I don’t like Marvel THAT much.

#4370

Similo updated on iOS 1d ago to announce that Horrible Guild is back online and that online integration is complete. I don’t have Railroad Ink installed so I can’t check it at the moment but the app hasn’t been updated in the store.

#4371

I didn’t want to start a new thread over this, as it is a journalistic question no doubt. But kindly feel free to redirect me to another thread if you feel my topic misplaced.

I was just asking myself, if anyone wrote down the early development history of digital implementations of boardgames, especially after the touchscreen boom (I guess around 2010?)

I mean, it seems intuitive now, to just flip your card on the screen to put it from your virtual hand to the table, but how was it in 2010? I must have been quite challenging for the developers of those games to come up with the ideas at first place, right? Or did we have games on PC/Amiga? PS etc that did it before that? I really can’t remember…

I remember how I first discovered Ticket to Ride (and loved it) on my first iPad back in those days, and how I quickly expanded to Carcassonne, Ascension, Tigris, Through the Desert… and many others thereafter. It also seems to me, that those “pioneers“ must have burned a lot of brain juice to implement those games on touchscreens and establish the necessary infrastructure for online gaming. A effort that I believe unfortunately never paid out for them financially, as the customer base was fairly small back then.

I was always aware of that, but getting back to playing Ascension, Le Havre, and other “oldies” the past weeks made me realize how amazing those implementations are still today and what an achievement they must have been back in those days. For me, personally, the implementation of many of those games is superior to many games I see come out today.

I hope one of you guys at SP finds the time someday to write down this part of gaming history, make some interviews with the people behind Playdek, Codito, Coding Monkeys, etc… let them tell about how they came to developing those games, how they approached board game publishers, what difficulties they faced, where they took their inspiration for the UI etc. Maybe even a podcast? That would be cool… but it’s late here and I am getting carried away…

4 Likes
#4372

I still remember being impressed by the offset selection mechanism from Stone Age. It didn’t really catch on the way I expected, typically being replaced by more context-sensitive taps and less dragging, but at the time I thought it a brilliant bit of UI design for touchscreens.

2 Likes
#4373

I still remember how excited I was nearly a decade ago and how great an experience games like Ascension and Carcassonne were and how amazing I supposed the asynchronous board game industry was going to be in the future (read: now). Fast forward ten years and I am continually shocked when developers fail to meet the standards set a decade ago.

5 Likes
#4374

absolutely 100% agreed. it’s shocking! and depressing :tired_face:
no learning curve!? no expertise!?
even companies who did it well in their own games before can fail miserably in new publications.
i’m looking at you, Acram (bad async in Unmatched) and DireWolf (bad UI in Everdell).

2 Likes
#4375

Just started to learn this version of TS. Invite has been sent.

1 Like