January 23, 2011

Only Fools Play With The River, Apparently.

I bought the Carcassonne iPhone app right when it came out. I love the game, and it supposedly had asynchronous multiplayer, something that way, way more iOS games should have. Unfortunately, when I booted it up, I learned that to play online with your friends, you have to use the e-mail account set up on your iDevice. Because having my e-mail on my iPod seemed stupid, I balked at the idea, and I never really got too much use out of it, even though it had hotseat. A few half-started games while waiting for movies to start, perhaps, but that’s about it.

Then, at Jonathan’s birthday party, Spaeth was playing the game. Apparently he got his sister and her husband hooked, and was now playing online matches with them. This made me say, “okay, fine, fuck it.” I hooked up my Gmail, which was as stupid and pain in the ass as I expected. Then I started games with Spaeth, and some people on Talking Time.

I was quickly reminded how fantastic of an implementation of Carcassonne this is. I mean, asynchronous multiplayer does automagically put it above other versions in my book, but it’s not just that. The interface is fucking fantastic. It’s classy and stylized, but at the same time, completely unobtrusive. You never have any problems doing the actions in the game, and all relevant information is instantly available. It does nice little bonuses like showing you positions on the board where it is impossible to put a tile, based on the distribution left in the draw pile. It even has a special little sound for when you get a Push notification of your turn coming up, of a polite gentleman going “It is your turn now.” It’s just a classy app, and Carcassonne is a great game anyway. It really makes me wish that more board games would come out with multiplayer versions like this. Imagine, say, Ticket to Ride played this way! That would be fantastic.

Yeah, keep being awesome, Carcassonne app people. And if you haven’t bought it, do it! It’s excellent.

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