The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Dungeon and Coin is a trap.

I was preparing that list of iOS games yesterday, using the Appshopper site, and they had an ad on the side for a game called Dungeon and Coin. I thought I remembered hearing about this game somewhere, and it was free, so I downloaded it. Then, it consumed me.

Thing about those coin-pusher games. You know, the ones Essner can’t play enough of every time we go to Lambert’s? Picture one of those, only when you make coins fall down in a certain place, it spins a slot machine. This slot machine picks magic spells for attacks on enemies, who die and throw orbs and goodies on top of the pile of coins, which you can push off to collect and make more happen. You can use your coins and items to unlock new spells, new wheels on the slot machine, and so on. When you aren’t playing, you will build up about 35 free coins over time. You can buy more, of course, but really, I always won enough that I didn’t feel like I’d ever have a need to do that.

Seriously, though. This game is just fucking AMAZING at mesmerizing you. Shit is always happening. Spells are going off, throwing coins on top of coins, making them all bounce, and you’re getting combo bonuses for knocking several orbs off of the play area at a time and your little wizard is throwing magical spells and oh shit, a minigame just started and a big chest just appeared and pushing that chest off the side makes a bunch of little chests appear and OH SHIT, I JUST GOT A JACKPOT, WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, I DON’T KNOW, BUT THERE’S A JEWEL NOW, GOTTA GET THAT JEWEL! It just keeps going and going. It’s relentless.
At the same time, it’s mostly going without your input. You can drop coins where you want, sure, but you normally have so many that you just flood an area with coins and make more push off. It kind of lacks the actual tenseness of “I have two quarters, can I win this?” that an actual coin push machine has. It’s just bells and whistles going off constantly. It’s Peggle’s Extreme Fever without having to win at a game first.

It’s free. Try it if you’d like. But even though I’ve probably put like 3 hours into this stupid thing at this point, I want to say that you shouldn’t play it. It’s really just not a game, perse. Still, it’s free, and it’s not restrictive enough to really force you to do it’s microtransactions, so there is that.

Just… man. I can’t believe I’ve played this game so much. Goodness.

Cara was all like, “Man, I really want to game! Video game! Games!” and I was trying to think of things she’d like. It was then I realized that she has one of the greatest current gaming consoles: an iPad. So I decided I’d make a list of games she should get in order to get going in gaming. This is that list.
Goals of the list include getting cool games, not spending more than $20 bucks, and also getting a general game education, which is something she seems interested in. Let’s do this! In no particular order:

AppShopper
Cost: Free
Pros: Not a game, but anyone who is serious about iOS gaming needs this. There are so many sales and one day free giveaways on the App Store that it’s really worth your time to tag all interesting, but expensive games in AppShopper and wait for it to tell you that they’re on sale for a buck.
Cons: I find the fact that it dings you on app updates a bit annoying, even after I set it to do otherwise, but it’s a minor inconvenience in a great app and website.

Capcom Arcade
Cost: Free
Pros: A selection of old school Capcom awesome. One of them is Puzzle Fighter, so that’s fantastic. They keep adding more stuff, too.
Cons: Can only play a few times a day without paying to “buy” a game, though I feel that’s pretty fair. Interface to select games is kind of ass.

Word Ace
Cost: Free
Pros: A really brilliant online multiplayer word game. I’ve had a ton of fun with it.
Cons: If you lose a lot, you’ll run out of chips and can’t keep going. Game tries to default you into high-stakes games so you will want to buy chips, which is unfortunate. Constantly has a notification icon I can’t get rid of, which bothers me.

Peggle
Cost: $2.99
Pros: It’s fucking Peggle. Simple, fun, addictive, best use of ode to joy. Can purchase Peggle Nights expansion from the app, if you’d like.
Cons: I guess it’s expensive for the app store? But I mean, it’s Peggle.

Frotz
Cost: Free
Pros: A fine way to play Interactive Fiction on the iPad. Hooks into the IF archive, so you can download tons of games.
Cons: Typing on the iPad is not super great. Interactive Fiction, for all its charms, is super obtuse, even in modern forms of the genre, so it’s not very newbie-friendly.

You Don’t Know Jack HD Lite
Cost: Free
Pros: You Don’t Know Jack is awesome. I’m cheating and putting the free version on the list, but they even update the demo with new episodes every once and awhile. A treat.
Cons: No multiplayer still sucks. Jack is better with friends!

Words with Friends Free
Cost: Free
Pros: It’s scrabble, with the best online multiplayer on the platform, save for Carcassonne, which uses the same sort of multiplayer.
Cons: The ads really bother me, but, you know, you can always throw money at that problem if you want, like I did!

Spider: Bryce Manor HD
Cost: $4.99
Pros: One of the best controlling games on the platform, it’s a ton of fun. You get to explore, you get to master leaping about, and there are challenge modes if you want. What more can you ask for?
Cons: Expensive? I guess? Could always wait for a sale.

Robot Wants Kitty
Cost: $.99
Pros: An introductory Metroidvania game. Not too difficult to build those sorts of skills, but a lot of fun.
Cons: One song over and over forever ahhhhhhh!

TapDefense
Cost: Free
Pros: Not the best Tower Defense game, but a good introduction to the genre and extremely playable for the cost of free.
Cons: Not a lot of challenge variety, but hey, free game, so…

Mouse House
Cost: $1.99
Pros: A great clone of Lolo that I had a lot of fun with back in the day. Puzzle rooms ahoy! No real twitch skills required.
Cons: Controls are a little iffy at times. Doesn’t ruin the game, but could be better.

Cut the Rope
Cost: $.99
Pros: Cute as fuck. Constantly changing up the various toys you’re playing with, but in a way that makes sure you always know what’s going on. Uses the touchscreen fantastically.
Cons: Uh, no idea, really.

Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift
Cost: Free
Pros: A unique set of Cut the Rope levels, for free. Use it as a demo, or enjoy the fresh levels if you already have the rest.
Cons: Even less cons than Cut the Rope.

Super QuickHook
Cost: $2.99
Pros: Amazing arcade action. Charming and funny as hell, with lots of subtle improvements over Hook Champ (which is why I pick it over Hook Champ, though they’re both fantastic) and a nice progression to work through. Super-tight controls. A joy to play.
Cons: For-pay costume DLC? Doesn’t bother me. Maybe it bothers you? I’m looking hard for a con here. It’s a game I love so much, it’s hard to find one.

100 Rogues
Cost: $.99
Pros: An excellent introduction to the Roguelike. The easy mode is perfect for beginners. The normal mode is a solid challenge for roguelike fans. The interface is fairly great on the iPad, too.
Cons: For-pay character classes, though you get two fine ones to start with, so not a big deal. Occasional control problems, even with how good they are. Roguelikes are hard.

You Don’t Know Jack
Cost: $2.99
Pro: Fuck it, I have money left, and this is quality trivia action.
Con: I guess you’re not getting the HD version because that’s more expensive? But who cares, it’s text on a screen and voices.

That’s all I’ve got. I want to, say, put Final Fantasy on there, just for the history lesson and introduction to RPGs, but $8.99? Give me a fucking break, SquareEnix. I also know Cara likes car games, so I’d love to put a driving game on there, but I’ve never played any on the platform, and I don’t want to suggest something that may suck. Also, Cara, I know you downloaded Puzzle Quest when it was free. Play more of that. That’s good shit.

Wandering about on the iPad, I sometimes come across games that are neat and stuff. Recently I noticed that Enigmo HD was a buck. This, in it’s non-HD form, was one of those early iPhone games that everyone said you had to play, but I had never played it. I thought it would be a good idea to give it a try.

Enigmo HD is really terrible.

In theory, it’s not. The idea is that you have streams of various liquids, and a certain number of tools. You need to get those liquids into their respective bottles as they stream out of the start point by putting things in the way of the stream. There’s stuff like a little tube that makes the liquid shoot out faster, a little trampoline that lets you bounce water off of it, and walls to stop water in it’s tracks. Each of these pieces can be moved and spun about in order to solve the level. That seems like a fine idea for a puzzle game.

However, the controls are complete and utter garbage. I mean, just completely. There is a ring around each object when you tap on it to spin it around and rotate it, but if you tap and drag on the object itself, you move it. However, I would say 90 percent of the time when I went to move one of the objects, it would start spinning it instead. You had to be so extremely precise, you couldn’t actually do it. This just baffles me, as they have this ring on the screen that just tells the player “PUT YOUR FINGER HERE TO ROTATE, OR INSIDE TO MOVE THE PIECE” but it doesn’t actually work like that. Moving the pieces into position is an exercise in frustration.

That could maybe be forgiven if the game wasn’t brutally time-based. There’s a timer ticking down with bonus points when you start the level. I have nothing against bonus points for solving things quickly. However, when that bonus point meter runs out, you lose the level and have to start over. This is a puzzle game, where you want to sit down and look at the level and ponder and think about how to solve it. Having a strict timer like that just goes against what I enjoy in these sorts of casual puzzle games. Add to that how you can’t actually manipulate the puzzle in an efficient way and thus will run out of time and, well, fuck this game!

Enigmo HD is not good! Not good at all. Maybe the original version was less stupid, but this is one of the worst iOS games I’ve played in a long time. I don’t often wish I hadn’t spent a buck on an iOS game, because it’s such a little investment for something I want to try, but this made me feel like I had wasted my money. Don’t touch it.

As far as iOS games you should play go, you should probably play Spirits.

Basically, think of Lemmings. This game is that. I even just searched for “Lemmings” on the app store, and Spirits was the first search result.

You control a bunch of little forest spirits. They’re cute and well-animated. They’re trying to get to a little magic vortex. Any plants they touch along the way spring to life. You tap on them to make them change permanently into things, like a vine bridge, or a cloud that blows wind to move the spirits around. Your objective is to get a certain number of these spirits to that vortex, while bringing to life as many plants as possible along the way.

Seriously, it’s Lemmings. But it’s not just a rip-off. It does what Lemmings does well, but it adds its own interesting twists to the mix. Your little spirits are really light, so being able to blow them about with the wind is really a completely different sort of puzzle mechanism than most of Lemmings. Many levels revolve around how they all float naturally. You also don’t have a good way to block the spirits from moving around, a la the blocker role in Lemmings, which makes setting things up often a race against time, more so than I remember Lemmings being, where it was often me setting up a path ahead of time, and then blowing the blocker up to let everyone go to the door.

It’s a loving tribute to Lemmings, looks beautiful, and is a lot of fun in its own regard. If you like that kind of puzzle game, buying it really shouldn’t be something you worry about. Granted, I grabbed it for free during a one-day event, so I get the benefit there, and it is a bit pricy for the app store at $5. Still, it’s the app store. Sales and stuff are all the time. This is a really polished gaming experience that’s worth your time. I’m about halfway through all the levels, and I certainly wouldn’t have regretted dropping some cash on it.

4th And Battery put out a new little free app. It’s called Candy Train: The Train of Candy. (Okay, it doesn’t have the subtitle, but it should.) Since I found Unpleasant Horse a rather fun little distraction, and it had the low entry cost of free, well, I decided I’d give it a go.

I’m glad they opened with Unpleasant Horse.

I mean, there’s nothing WRONG with Candy Train. It is a completely functional game. It’s just very boring. Much like Unpleasant Horse, the gameplay is very straightforward. There’s a little train, and a grid filled with train track pieces. You have to keep the little train going as long as possible by rotating the pieces to keep a continuous line going for the train to run on. If you get the train into a loop, the game will break it after one go round, so you have to keep adjusting the tracks. You can speed up the train for more points, if you want.

What Unpleasant Horse had going for it, though, was that you felt badass. The gore, the music, the expressions on the Pritty Ponies, they all made you feel pretty awesome. Every time you’d slam a pony to the sawblades, you’d be like “BAM! I showed that pony what was up!” The game gave you good feedback for doing well.

Candy Train does not. A point meter increases and there’s occasional little choo choo train sounds. The art doesn’t really pop out at you. You’re driving a train through candy land, sure, but it’s not a particularly badass or cute candy land. It just is. The track turns pink to show you how far you have a safe line going for the train, but the train just putters along and the score number goes up. It’s just not giving the kind of feedback I expect from a game so simple, and certainly not from a Popcap game. It’s just no fun.

Try it, if you’d like. I mean, it’s free. But it’s clear why this game is free: it’s not nearly as polished as Unpleasant Horse, which could have easily been worth a buck if they had, maybe, fleshed out some of the leaderboard stuff from more in advance. I guess that’s why you make a skunkworks team like 4th and Battery: some stuff works, and some doesn’t, but you try everything. Still, I’m not really a fan of Candy Train.

It seems difficult to top this review of Infinity Blade. In fact, I’d recommend you read it first. While not very “pro” on the game, it encapsulates the experience very nicely. So do check that out. Still, I’m going to give some of my own thoughts on it.

I think Infinity Blade is quite a fantastic little game. There are better games on iOS, but few have this level of polish and visual impressiveness, and it’s a fun little diversion besides.

The basic idea is that your father died at the hands of the God-King, and you have to go to his castle and avenge his death. By the end of your journey through the castle, SOMETHING has happened to you to end your journey, and years later, your son comes to the castle, ready to avenge the death of his father, only for some reason he has all the experience and gear his father had. Hm. In any case, as you saw in that review, the game is almost a time loop, of things happening over and over. That means there is little surprise to be had, perse, after the first few runthroughs of the game, but that doesn’t bother me too much. The main point of the game is mastering the mechanics.

The obvious goal of Infinity Blade was the developers trying to make Punch Out!! into an RPG. I think they did a pretty solid job of it. You have to watch your opponent to dodge and parry his attacks, and once you find an opening, you just start wailing on him, just like in Punch Out!!. You have a shield you can use to block attacks, but you only have so much “block energy,” and eventually you will run out if you don’t use dodges. It’s a nice little save for people not good at games, but since you can’t rely on it, I never leveled blocking up, and just focused on learning to dodge effectively. If you put a lot of points in it, though, and kept the “shield” spell around to refill your block energy, perhaps you could rely on it exclusively. I never did.
To mix things up, you have a magical ring, which you can use to cast gesture-based spells, and a “super stun” that will create an opening for you. Both of these recharge over time. Magic tends to recharge much faster, because you can put points into your Magic stat to make it regenerate moreso. They do a good job of making the more important spells have simple gestures, and the more risk/reward spells have more complicated ones. The powerful Light spell requires you to draw a star on the screen, while a simple fire spell just has you draw a circle. I never really felt like the game wasn’t recognizing my spell gestures (except, perhaps, once or twice with Shock, which required me to draw a lightning bolt) and the fact that they take time requires you to really think about whether or not you have enough time in your enemy’s pattern to get the spell off. It works really well.

Outside of battle, nothing much happens besides pretty cutscenes. You can look around the environment in the cutscenes to spot randomly scattered bags of money and health potions, which you can tap to grab, but that’s really about it. It looks impressive the first time you see it, and then you just kind of don’t pay much attention, looking for more money for gear.

What really keeps you going in the game is the leveling system. You have gear: a helmet, armor, sword, shield, and magic ring. Each of these gains EXP, just as you do. When you fill up the bar for these items, they are “mastered,” and you get a free skill point that you can put into HP, Strength, Blocking, or Magic. Leveling up gets you 2 points, so it’s to your benefit to be constantly cycling through equipment, mastering each one, in order to really get a lot of skill points and make yourself more powerful. If you’re a completionist, this game will drive you mad with trying to master each piece of gear, and they’ve been adding more gear through occasional updates.

In the end, the game isn’t the deepest thing in the world. Once you mastered the various types of enemies and their patterns (There are about 5 enemy “templates,” which lots of varying looks for them. One template may be a troll one time, and a clockwork golem the next, but the attack patterns are the same.) the game becomes a grind for stats, and once you’ve had your fill of that, you’re done with the game. Still, that gave me way more replay value than, say, the new Punch Out!! on Wii, and was just about as fun. I don’t know if it was worth the premium it debuted at, but at the 3 bucks I paid for it, I was very happy with my purchase. They even added a multiplayer mode I haven’t tried, and can’t imagine would be all that great, but at least they’re trying to make the game better. If you like Punch Out!! and swords at all, this really is a game you should try. It’s not the greatest thing I’ve ever played, and I would suggest many other iOS games before I would suggest Infinity Blade, but I had a lot of fun with it.

Let’s talk about a more “normal” app from me, I guess. You know, a game?

There’s been this game on all the top bought app lists called Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have To Burn The Rope, which is totally different) that is all the rage. As such, like just about anything, similar games start appearing. At least, I assume so. Because I’ve been playing Burn It All: Journey to the Sun, which has a lot of rope-burning, and I have to assume it’s similar. Is it a rip-off? I really have no idea. I want to say not, as this game seems to have been made by the same people who made the very nice Pix’n Love Rush, but it certainly seems similar just by looking at it. However, this one had the main difference of having a recommendation from a Talking Tyrant, so of course, I bought it! I’m glad I did, too. It’s pretty entertaining.

The main idea is that all flames are actually the children of the sun, obviously, because the sun is the biggest flame of all! So you are trying to guide the little flames upwards so they can go meet the sun. You do this by burning everything. The flame starts on a little volcano, and you drag the flame to what you want to burn. It then hops back to the volcano and recharges after setting the fire, which will slowly consume whatever you lit up. You attempt to set fires to do this as fast as possible, while dodging things like non-burnable stone, and water droplets which will make you have to recharge early. There’s a timer, and if you don’t burn it all in that time, you fail and have to restart. Do it really fast, and you get between one to three gems for that level, a sort of standard rating system for games on iOS these days (I think Angry Birds started that trend, but man, I don’t like Angry Birds, so I don’t even remember. It’s not a bad thing, though. I rarely care about high scores, so I rarely try, but I respect people who want to “ace” each level, and that’s a good way to entertain those people).

The game does a really good job of mixing it up as you go along. You start by controlling a standard “red” flame, but eventually you have levels with a “blue” flame who can light ropes on fire in the middle, instead of just at the end of them, and a “green” flame, who can pass through burnable objects and light multiple things on fire, but who recharges super slowly. These mechanics changes really seriously come at exactly the right time. I was getting bored of the simplistic red flame levels when they came along, and they do offer a lot of different scenarios while having the same basic pieces in play. Apparently, the game mixes it up even more in levels I haven’t gotten to yet, adding even more mechanics. It’s great the developers aren’t just grinding out levels, which you could probably do for this game with little issue, but instead is focused on making sure to maximize player fun.

The game also looks very pretty, too. The little flames are nicely animated and have character, and the fire effects look neat when they really didn’t have to. It’s also a universal app, but doesn’t look like they just stretched all the assets or whatever when playing on the iPad. I haven’t tried it on my Touch, but it seems much better suited to the iPad, too, because you have more precise control of where to drag the flame on the screen with more screen real estate, and some of the later levels can require really pinpoint movements to be really effective.

Really, the only problem I have with the game is something the developers can’t help all that much. All the time I’d quickly be moving my finger about to solve a level, and find out that my flame got caught on a rock early on in my crazy movements, and thus didn’t move how I wanted. This was really frustrating, especially since movement isn’t really confined to when your finger is on the flame. You can set the finger down wherever and drag it to move the flame about (I assume this is for the iPhone version). Thus, you miss one turn, but your flame doesn’t stop, but instead goes careening into something you didn’t want it to hit. There’s no good way to fix this without tactile feedback, which the game can’t give me, but that was really my main source of frustration with the game. It’s not a game-breaker, but it provided moments of less fun in the middle of my fun.

It’s a buck, and currently has like 100 levels or something like that. (I’m only through about 50, or so.) Of course, it also has the other iOS “More to come!” world icon after the ones that are there, but even if they don’t, this is plenty of fun game for a dollar. Well, at least to the level I value my dollars. If a fast-paced little maze game sounds like fun to you, do check it out.

Let’s just look at a little thing today. Unpleasant Horse.

Apparently Popcap made this little spinoff studio called 4th and Battery who exists just to be kind of a “make whatever you like and not be bound by the fact that we’re Popcap” kind of deal. Which sounds like a great idea to me. Popcap is obviously a genius company, but they’re kind of restricted by the fact that most of their hits are so casual. Plants vs Zombies was kind of a shock coming from them, as accessible as it was, as it’s definitely not a game that seems immediately pick-upable at a glance (though honestly, it kind of is). Giving some of those honestly really brilliant designers, artists, and such a bit more of a loose leash makes sense.

Their first release is a free iOS game called Unpleasant Horse, as I already mentioned. I honestly don’t know why it’s free. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to make money from it built in. There are no ads or anything. I guess it’s just to get the 4th and Battery name out there? I don’t know. I’m not going to complain about a fun, free game, but they could have easily charged a buck for it and I certainly wouldn’t have complained.

Basically, you’re an unpleasant horse living in a world of “pritty ponies” who fly about a beautiful, cloud and bird filled sky. All this is floating over a ground of spinning sawblades, for some reason. Since you’re such a dick, your job is to leap around from cloud to cloud by tapping the screen. Ram into and kill a bird, and you get a feather, which you can use for an additional jump in the air without landing on something. You can stockpile a large number of these, I think up to eight. Jump onto a pony, and you ride the pony as it plummets down to the sawblades below, killing it in a spray of blood and bones. The longer you stand on the back of the pony, the more points you get, but if you don’t jump off fast enough, you’ll get caught in the sawblades too.

What brings it above is really the presentation. It’s sugary sweet, except the intense metal on the title screen, and the rather intense, though cartoony, gore in the game. The ponies neigh in great pain as the saws grind them up. It’s humorous to watch. Well, if you find a little black humor funny. It’s got that design polish that Popcap is all about, but it’s not Popcap-style stuff that’s being presented. Which is cool.

That’s basically it. You try for a high score until you mess up and land in the sawblades, with no feathers to let you jump away from danger. It’s a fine game for little short bursts, and has a nice risk/reward setup to it, where you can try to play it safe with how long you stay on the ponies and how brave the leaps you make are, or you can just try to play it safe and hope you don’t run out of easily accessible targets. It’s not going to last you forever, but I find many games of this sort, like your Tiny Wings and whatnot, to have similar amounts of replay time, and some people really, really, really play those all the time. I’m sure this can be the same way. And hell, this is free, as I said. Download it and give it a go.

Coin Drop! is the other game Lobst suggested people should buy when she tweeted about NBA Jam. Again, dollar, random recommendation, and I immediately purchased it. A review I saw on Slide to Play compares the game to Peggle. I feel like this is unfair to Peggle. As random as Peggle is, it still feels like it uses a lot more skill than a normal board of Coin Drop! uses.
I say that, but Coin Drop! is still a ton of fun and does require some amount of thought to complete the levels with a high score. It’s just even more “press the button and hopefully pretty lights flash” than Peggle is.

Basically, you go through a series of stages. In these stages are various things: moving pegs, breakable blocks, bumpers, and so on. You have 20 coins to drop from the top of the screen. Bouncing off of things scores points, but you have to collect all 4 “bad coins” to complete the level and be able to move onto the next one. The faster you get those four, the more focus you can put on point-getting.

You can drop your coins from anywhere on the top of the screen. Things have to be timed for all the moving parts to bounce your coins around. However, you can drop up to 5 coins at a time, and I find that on many boards, you can simply drop 5 right there at the beginning and the chaos will hit most of what you’re aiming at without trying. Some levels will mix it up enough so that that strategy doesn’t work, and many levels, as you progress through the game, start adding gimmicks that require you to take a little more care in your shots. Eventually, for example, the game starts adding little pink lady coins that you have to break out and rescue for extra points. Saving them and collecting all the “bad” coins takes a lot more skill. Of course, the rescue is optional, and just for more points, but it’s a nice goal to make the game more complex if you want it.

There’s only one thing I don’t like about the game, and that’s the shaking. You can shake the iDevice to perform a “bump” on the virtual cabinet that you’re dropping coins into in order to use some extra skill in maneuvering the coins around. This is great in theory, but any movement just causes a generic “bump” motion to happen. Holding my iPad and shaking it, it feels really weird that the direction I am shaking the device doesn’t affect the way the coin bounces to the point that it really distracts me. Maybe that’s just a minor thing that only bothers me, though.

Still, this game is the perfect phone “waiting in line” game. It’s satisfying, takes mere moments to play a board, and is cheap. It also has a better sense of progression than something like Tiny Wings, because you’re making progress through a bunch of levels. You’re also unlocking a lot of new “skins” for your coins, so if you’d rather drop slices of lime or chocolate coins, you can do that too. There’s also a promise in the game of more free level updates, as so many iPhone games do, so that’s wonderful. If you’re the sort who enjoys a good time-waster, Coin Drop! is a good time-waster, and worth a look.

Let’s bang out some iOS game review thought things I’ve been putting off, hm?
We’ll start with Neuroshima Hex.

If you feel like you would ever play a hotseat multiplayer sort of strategy game, buy Neuroshima Hex.

Neuroshima Hex is a strategy game played on a hexagonal board made of hexes. It looks like a Settlers of Catan board, if you want to picture it. Players pick one of four armies, each with unique abilities and units. Play starts with each player placing their base on the board. This base starts with 20 HP, and by the end of the game (which occurs when only one player is left alive or one player reaches the end of his “deck” of tiles) whoever has the most HP is the winner. Pretty standard in that regard.

Players draw from their “deck” of tiles each turn. They draw until they have a hand of 3 tiles, and then discard down to two. They can then play as many tiles onto the board as they can fit, and use any abilities, such as free moves, that their units might have. When they’re done, they pass the turn to the next player. Tiles can be actions, like a tile that causes Battle to happen, soldiers, who are the ones doing the fighting, or “buff tiles,” which gives bonuses to soldiers touching them on certain sides. You can hold off on playing tiles in a turn, but you always must draw up to three and discard down to two at the beginning of your turn. Finally, if the board is ever completely full of tiles, or every player has taken their last turn, a battle occurs without playing a battle tile.

Units only attack in specific directions from their hexes, which are indicated by various triangles (short triangles for melee attacks, and long triangles for ranged). Each unit also has an initiative value which indicates in what turn they attack during battle. It counts down, so a soldier with a value of “3” attacks before one with a value of “2” and so on. This is super important, because you can use these numbers to take out pesky units before they attack. There are also many other special abilities, like having “armor” on certain sides which blocks ranged fire, or having extra HP. The game using an iconography for all of this that can take a little bit to get used to, but once you learn to translate it, it’s really easy to see what any unit does.

That’s the description. The game itself is a lot of fun. It’s basically constant trying to fuck your friends over by undoing their plans while pushing yours forward. It can be slightly confusing in games more than 2 people with passing the iDevice around to keep track of who did what, for revenge purposes, but other than that, the game works perfectly on the platform. It’s deep, it’s interesting, it’s fun. Plus, they promise online multiplayer down the line. That’s not a reason to buy it now, of course, but if that would push you over the edge, keep an eye on it.

Also of note is a separate game, called Neuroshima Hex Puzzle. This is basically a single player experience set up like a puzzle game. You’re given a pre-set board and have to win in one turn. It’s almost like a tutorial of sorts, and is really useful in learning the game and the strategies each army can employ. It’s unfortunate it isn’t part of the main game itself, but I’ve really enjoyed it, and I bought both of them during a sale where I grabbed them both for less than what Neuroshima Hex normally costs, so I’m not complaining.

Basically, this game passed the “friends” test. I forced my friends to play it, and I’ve had them request playing it again. That means it’s got something there, you know? If you like strategy board games, it is worth your time.