Tabletop games continue their push into the electronic space, with at least a dozen digital adaptations released in 2019—and that’s not counting the numerous games in Early Access (like Gloomhaven) or approaching beta (Charterstone). Below, I’ve ranked my eight best of the year based on app quality, play experience, and purchase price.
Other games were either too buggy or just not good enough to include. I’ll give an honorable mention to Takenoko, which was released in early December and looks fantastic... but is just too buggy to recommend right now. For example, if you switch out of the app mid-game, the app usually restarts and loses your progress, and the app requires you to tap too many times during AI opponents’ moves. (Surprisingly, it’s from Asmodee Digital, who typically does such great and bug-free work, so I expect these problems will eventually be resolved, but for now I’d say hold off on purchasing even if you love the tabletop version.)
But these eight are each worth your time. We’ll kick things off with...
8. Mystic Vale (Nomad Games)
Mystic Vale is a “card-crafting” deckbuilder, where you buy cards from the market and use them to enhance cards that are already in your deck. Each card has three slots you can upgrade, and you can only add a new card to an existing one if the right slot remains unused. As with most deckbuilders, you’re trying to acquire as many victory points as you can, mostly through card values, but here there are additional points in a shared pool that you can acquire through the right card combinations.
The digital version does a great job of letting you scroll through the two rows of the market and through your two rows of cards (cards in play and permanent cards), expanding or removing focus as needed and highlighting what cards you can legally purchase and play on each turn. My one quibble with the app is that the game ends so abruptly—there’s no warning unless you’re watching the victory point stash to see that it’s nearly exhausted.
7. Aeon’s End (Handelabra Games)
I wouldn’t have given Aeon’s End a second thought prior to trying this app—which is at the high end of the price range for board game apps at $9.99—but this implementation really sells the game itself and does a fantastic job of making it clear to the player what the available options are. A co-operative deckbuilder, Aeon’s End pits players against a single opponent that operates from its own deck and must be defeated over a course of many rounds while it counterattacks and adds harmful cards to player decks. The enemy might have 60 hit points that players must deplete, while the enemy can win by depleting the hit point value of the players’ home of Gravewell, which starts at a much lower number. The player decks comprise just two card types (beyond what the enemy adds), attack spells (which, err, attack the baddies), and currency cards (which help you buy better cards from the market).
You’ll get your tail kicked the first few rounds, but eventually you get more powerful cards, open more “breaches” so you can cast more attack spells, and start to see the tide shift in your favor. The app works beautifully, and the in-game help is incredibly useful; there were some rare cases where I didn’t grasp immediately what the app wanted me to do, but by my second play-through I had it down.
6. 7 Wonders Duel (Repos Digital)
This app release received little fanfare despite the cardboard game’s exalted status as the top-rated two-player game on BoardGameGeek. (Ars also highly recommended it in our own two-player board game guide.)
7 Wonders Duel reimagines the great 3-7 player game 7 Wonders as a more interactive two-player conflict. In each of three rounds, players deal out a tableau of cards in a specific shape to the table between them, then alternate buying cards from the visible unblocked cards in that tableau. Some of these cards grant resources, some grant points, some grant military strength, and many give you free cards in later rounds. You can win 7 Wonders Duel by gaining the most points—or you can shut the game down early by gaining a big military advantage or by collecting six unique science tokens.
The app makes the cost to build each card clear via a number in the upper left that changes color if it’s beyond your means. The game is playable on small screens as well, so long as you’re fine with frequent tap-and-press moves to get closer looks at various cards. The one flaw is that building Wonders is not intuitive—you must click on your Wonders to activate a pop-up screen, then drag a card from the tableau to the Wonder you wish to build. The AI players seem strong—or I’m just not very good—and move quickly so you can play a complete game against the app in just a few minutes.
5. Raiders of the North Sea (Dire Wolf Digital)
Raiders is Shem Phillips’ first worker-placement game in a trilogy of worker-placement games that has since been followed by two more games in another trilogy of worker-placement games (got that?), all of which have the same goofy yet wonderful artwork. Raiders of the North Sea was perfect for a port to the digital space because it’s a game of a lot of pieces, so setup and cleanup are a bit of a chore. Players gather provisions in the village, placing one worker to use an action space and picking up another worker to use a second action space, and collecting coins to hire a crew for raiding ships. Once they meet the requirements to raid a space on the top portion of the board, players can go raiding, gathering rewards and victory points—but often losing one or two crew members in the process.
The app doesn’t just look great, it moves well, and the developers let you jump from the village to the raiding section so that it’s always clear what action spaces are available and what they do or cost. There is a campaign mode that forces you to play with some variants and stretch yourself a little, but I didn’t find it challenging enough. The AI players were too weak in the initial release, but they’ve at least been ramped up a little bit in subsequent updates.
4. Yellow & Yangtze
Yellow & Yangtze is a 2018 Reiner Knizia game that updates his classic Tigris & Euphrates with some significant rule changes, although at heart it’s still an area-control game with lots of conflict and the same “who has the highest score in their lowest category” mechanism. Players compete to place five leaders on the map and then place matching color tiles to gain points, but they can also fight wars or stage revolts by connecting two clusters of tiles or by dropping their leaders into someone else’s “kingdom.” This Dire Wolf Digital port is excellent across the board, with solid AI players on the hard setting, bright graphics, and a very intuitive interface.
3. Santorini (Roxley Games)
Santorini is a chess-like two-player game where the players each get to place two of their pieces on a 5x5 grid and use them to build and climb one tower of three levels first. This is harder than it sounds, since either player can put a “dome” atop a three-level tower to seal it off for the rest of the game. There’s no luck involved, so the strategy involves anticipating what your opponent might do and trying to set a trap so that you’ll have two ways to win on your next move or so that you can build the winning tower somewhere your opponent can’t reach in a turn.
The Santorini app takes the artwork from the tabletop version and brings it to life, especially if you start to use any of the advanced rules and expansions that let players be “gods” with unique powers. There’s a sophisticated campaign mode that introduces you to some of the gods and lets you face more difficult opponents each time through, while most of the gods are available through in-app purchases. I have an issue with the imbalance of so many of those gods—some combinations just don’t work, and I think certain gods are probably too powerful—but the implementation here is sparkling.
2. The Castles of Burgundy (DIGIDICED)
This seemed like a tricky game to port to mobile because there are so many components and because the board itself is pretty involved … but the plus side of a digital adaptation is that the game’s lengthy setup and cleanup are handled for you. Stefan Feld’s best “point-salad” game works surprisingly well on mobile, with new graphics taken from the game’s latest edition (taking care of some of the color-similarity issues that bedeviled the original version), and I’ve found the app very intuitive—you tap what you want to do and a box pops up at the bottom that prompts you for the next step. Players try to fill out their boards of 36 hexagonal spaces by buying or acquiring tiles of six different colors, each of which scores differently and has a very different function. You also score points by completing board sections of a single color (and you get more points for doing so early in the game), by selling goods you gained, by placing yellow bonus tiles, etc.
The app brightened up the colors from the original, and the layout manages to fit everything on a tablet screen without feeling too crowded. Tap and hold any tile for details on its use and function, which is useful even though I’ve probably played the tabletop game and the online version at Yucata over 100 times. The game is on the complex side compared to the others in this ranking, but if crunchy worker-placement Eurogames are your thing, this app was made for you.
1. Evolution (North Star Games)
I believe in evolution, but I wouldn’t say I’m a huge fan of the board game itself. The app, however, is among the best of breed, with stunning graphics, a solid campaign mode, quality AI opponents, and digital flourishes that enhance the game-playing experience. Evolution players create multiple species, all of which begin as herbivores, and upgrade them over the course of the game with up to three Trait cards that can make feeding more productive, provide defenses against predators, or create carnivores that only feed off other species (including your own, if they can’t find anything else to eat).
The central watering hole from which all herbivores feed has plenty of food when the game starts, but players have some control over how much food goes there each round. By the second half of the game, there usually isn’t enough food to go around, so you need alternative food sources—or just need to munch on your opponents’ species instead.
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December 23, 2019 at 10:45PM
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The 8 best board game apps of 2019 - Ars Technica
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