Given that there are so many good boardgame ports available, it’s a pretty lousy time to sell a lousy boardgame port.
Blockquote
If I wanted to play Tales of the Arabian Nights, which I sometimes do, I will play Tales of the Arabian Nights.
Blockquote
Nitpicking here, but it should be:
If I wanted to, I would. ( 2nd conditional sentence)
If I want to, I will. (I would say 0 conditional)
Your meaning is clear. I can’t help correcting it, as it’s my job lol.
By the way, excellent use of thw word “vapid.”
Dude, not nitpicking at all. I love being corrected on this stuff. As I’ve said before, just as I would want you to tell me if I had something in my teeth, I want you to point out errors!
-Tom
Also, for a Laukat game, that interface looks pretty ugly. Thanks for waving us off this one. I’ve been considering whether to drop the $10 for the new Through the Ages port, and have been teetering because I’m a sucker for board game apps, and they mostly end up being not great. (It took 10 minutes with the Terra Mystica app to wonder why I’d use it rather than Juho Snellman’s minimal, but elegant interface.) You’ve inoculated me against 8ME breaking my heart.
The Through the Ages app is outstanding, perhaps the best board game adaptation to date. I challenge one to name a board game app with a better tutorial, as well. It’s a steal for $10.
This is why the Ticket to Ride port is the worst game ever. On top of the game itself being awful and insanely overrated, you can only play on the U.S. map which even fans agree is terrible. But in order to play on other maps you have to buy them. So you buy them, and now you have a fractured player base and good luck finding a game using those maps because no one else is playing them.
‘The’. :)
100% Agree
Agreed. So glad I avoided this one and went for TTtA instead.
‘The.’ Quotation mark after the period. :)
It looks wrong. But you’re right. Or is that ‘your write?’
The problem is that the set-collection economy is fundamentally broken in a way that a game designer should have noticed.
Tom: Can you elaborate?
I just purchased this game! Yikes!!
RE: Above and Below, you know how you stack up goods as you get them, with the value determined by how far along the track they are, which is then multiplied by the number of goods you have? The idea is that the economy will be dynamic as players put goods into the track. But there is no compelling reason to place goods as you get them. The minor income hit is more than made up for by the huge scoring difference it makes to wait until the end of the game, when you can see how many of each good you have.
This means the plentiful goods, which should stack up early on the cheaper end of the track as players earn them, end up being the most valuable. Amethysts? Pfft. Fish win the game! Get lots of fish, get a few lone goods so you can push fish toward the end of the track, and score big.
It’s a inane oversight and once you see it, the economy gets really weird. Now the buildings that are supposedly tuned to rare good being more valuable than common goods are completely topsy-turvy. It’s the kind of amateur design mistake you’d see in a Kickstarter game from a first-time game maker who couldn’t get any help playtesting.
I think we tried to “fix” it by making it mandatory that you place goods as soon as you earn them, but I don’t recall if that messed anything up or made it better. There’s something weird thing about storing a good for trade, but I don’t remember how that figured in.
-Tom
I’ve played this on iOS (it’s ok I guess) but I have no idea what you mean here. The value isn’t multiplied by the number of goods. And you make it sound like there’s a shared track for all players, which there isn’t. The track fills in automatically. There’s no placement involved. There’s nothing dynamic about the economy at all. Wait…buildings? What game are you playing?
I was confused about that too, but I looked back at the review, and Tom was contrasting 8 Minute Empire to the designer’s previous game, Above & Below.
It wasn’t clear in the post I was responding to, but it quoted something I’d written in the review about Above and Below. Sorry if that was confusing.
-Tom