In case you've never heard of it before, Dominion is a deck building card game created by game designer Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. Since its release, Dominion has been ripping up the charts over on BoardGameGeek, and has won all sorts of other awards including taking home game of the year at Germany's Spiel board game festival. In fact, Dominion's success and popularity have spawned an entire genre of other similar deck building games.
A few days ago, Dominion Donald X. Vaccarino [Free] hit the App Store, and since then I've been trying to verify the validity of this port. It seemed pretty shady, and the developer's web site sure didn't help things. After some additional digging, I came across a post by Rio Grande Games' Jay Tummelson over on BoardGameGeek. It turns out that over the years they've given their blessing to a number of developers to release iOS versions of Dominion, provided they agree to remove it once the official version hits the App Store.
What's more interesting though, is that the official licensed version, per this same forum post, is only "a few weeks" away. Even more curious though is that Chillingo currently has a game titled Dominion [$1.99] on the App Store as well. We'll just have to wait and see how the dust settles on all of this. If you're interested in Dominion, I'd snag the free version out now, and if you own Chillingo's Dominion it might not be a bad idea to back up the .ipa just in case there's any hijinks with take-down requests by Rio Grande Games so they can score the "Dominion" title on the App Store.
I hope Rio Grande is serious about this "few weeks" thing, as an official version of Dominion has potential to be awesome.
Attention card geeks and all god slayers: the first expansion pack for the outstanding Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [$4.99] is now available. After grabbing it via IAP, the cleverly titled pack, Ascension: Return of the Fallen, adds even more monsters, new characters, and even mechanics to the core play. Developer Playdek touched base with us on this the other day, and it seemed pretty stoked about how fans will react to it.
Not familiar with Ascension? We got your back. Earlier this summer, we reviewed the game and, obviously, explored its fundamentals. Here's an excerpt:
The actual game of Ascension is a somewhat refreshing spin on fantasy-based card games in that instead of building a specific deck that you use in battles, you're building your deck on the fly from game to game. Players start the game with identical basic decks of ten cards consisting of two militia cards which provide the "power" resource and eight apprentice cards which provide the "rune" resource. Using power and runes you're able to interact with a common pool of cards to either acquire new cards for your deck or defeat monster cards. Most actions you do in the game award different amounts of victory points, and at the end of the game, the player with the most victory points wins.
You gotta love it when a sharp game sees the injection of a bunch of new content -- and for a fair price. This expansion is $2.99, so grab it when you can.
Games that tie in to major properties are sometimes, shall we say, a little lacking. So you might be tempted to think that Assassin's Creed Recollection [99¢] is just your average cash-in, perhaps a standard collectable card game with images of franchise heroes Altaïr ibn-La'Ahad and Ezio Auditore da Firenze slapped on the cards. You can stop thinking that right about now, because this game is something far more interesting.
That's not to say it's without its problems -- Ubisoft has been chasing down some big-time bugs since the game was released -- but Assassin's Creed Recollection is more than just another coat of paint on the traditional CCG. It takes the formula real time, pitting you and your opponent against the clock as well as each other.
Hello. My name is Cassandra and I have a problem. I'm a recovering trading card game-holic. I used to play them obsessively - just ask my wallet. But I've been getting better. I've been clean for a while but I have doubts that it is going to last. There's a new game in town and it's smart, sexy and exotic. Meet Cabals: The Card Game [Free], ladies and gentlemen, and kiss your productivity good-bye.
Developed by Finnish Kyy Games, Cabals has all the necessary hallmarks of the genre: exceptional artwork, warring factions, creatures to summon, resources to manage, booster packs - you name it, they've got it.
The world of Cabals: The Card Game is a familiar one. It's our own, after all. The key players here are the Cabals, secret societies comprised of witches and steam punk magicians, of Russians and alchemists and faerie pigs. As is often the case with anything eldritch in nature, these Cabals don't get along too well. This, obviously enough, is where you come in. You're one of the vanguards and you will fight for the glory of your faction. Or something like that.
If you're not an O.G. iPhone (or maybe even a original 3G) owner, chances are Apple's own Texas Hold'em never even appeared on your radar. There wasn't much reason for it to, either. It was originally released in late August of 2008, updated a few weeks later, then totally abandoned. Even though the presentation at the time was a major step above the other offerings on the App Store, Texas Hold'em was quickly outclassed by third part developers that included things like online multiplayer, multiple game modes, and more.
Apple just pulled Texas Hold'em from the App Store, which was the only game they ever released for iOS devices. If you've got a copy of the .ipa laying around, it's probably a good idea to back it up somewhere if you at all care about keeping it. If you're into reading tea leaves with every minor move Apple makes, this could signal them withdrawing entirely from first-party iOS game development. Although, you could really argue that they've already been withdrawn anyway.
If you're curious what Texas Hold'em was all about, Apple's web site for the game is still online, although don't expect it to be there for long.
Assassin's Creed, as far as I can tell, is about stabbing dudes and pushing down NPCs while on the way to stab more dudes. The upcoming board game for the iPad, on the other hand, is about building a beastly deck of cards and pummeling dudes into submission and taking their territories in real-time. Intrigued? We still are, even though the new details out there are still pretty vague.
IGN recently got their hands on with Assassin's Creed Recollection and are reporting that it features several mechanics from other collectible card games, but fiddles with pacing by introducing a "looping timeline" as seen in, say, Lumines. Cards apparently have the power to attack players or seize a territory, so that's how the action part of the game works, at least.
Ubisoft is still tossing out phrases like "deep tactical gameplay" and "challenging political battles" in regards to what Recollection will offers, but we're not sure how it's going to execute on these promises. We'd look to the new trailer to see what's up, but Ubisoft is still in full-blast mystery mode for its November-bound game.
Regardless of the lack of intel, this continues to be something our all-seeing eye is keyed in on. Assassin's Creed fans should definitely stay with Recollections, too, as it'll deliver collectible assets from all the games, as well as reconnect you with characters and "memories" from Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed 2.
I've been searching for a new asynchronous multi-player game for a while, so when I saw Poker Pals [99c / Free / HD] released by Chillingo: a poker-based game with asynchronous multiplayer mode, my eyes went wide. What I didn't anticipate was that within a few hours I would be snatching up my iPod every couple of minutes to make my next turn, juggling several games at once, like a crazed poker addict. (Thank goodness there's no real money at stake, just bragging rights.)
Poker Pals is not a regular poker game. There's no chips in the middle of the table, no antes and no calling, raising or bluffing. This is actually poker redesigned as a board-game and it resembles a mixture of poker and Scrabble, which works really well. It's reminiscent of Sword and Poker 2 [$3.99 / Free], which also presented poker as a board-game, but included RPG elements.
Square Enix has a billion Final Fantasy XIII spin-offs and a handful of new IPs in the oven set to hit a variety of handheld devices. One of these fresh and clean IPs, a card-based battle game that apparently goes by the name Demon’s Score, is coming to iOS and Android in 2012, the mobile arm of the publisher announced at its Tokyo Game Show presentation.
The Machine gods behind Google Translate aren't helping us at the moment, but it appears as though the nitty-gritty given at the event begin and end at the genre and the fact that it’ll boast over 50 cards -- a feature that means nothing to us at the moment because the game mechanic hasn’t been shown. Interestingly, Dengeki mentions that Demon’s Score will utilize Unreal Engine 3, so there’s that.
On the off-chance that Square shows off Demon’s Score at the show, we’ll be sure to update this and throw in some footage. As for now, we only have a singular image for you to gawk at. Eyes up, sirs.
Like word games? Great! Graeme Devine’s studio, GRL Games, is launching a new front-facing camera-enabled game this coming September 1 across the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. It’s titled Word Chat, and it’ll release with a total four modes, one of which is an online mode that’ll let you chat face-to-face with your pals similarly to how GRL Games’ last title, Full Deck Hold 'Em [$2.99], allowed.
The online mode you’ll see just below is pretty simple. In 100 second timed rounds, you and your bud are tasked with spelling as many words as you can out of an endless set of tiles. As more words are forged, the tiles are removed and the highest score wins.
The other modes are basic solitaire modes designed for challenge as well as learning. In one, you’ll be given 200 titles and an infinite amount of time to come to grips with the game’s mechanic. In another, you’ll get 200 tiles and the aforementioned timer. The last mode is an infinite mode in which you can juice the game for more time after using every fourth letter.
We’re just now getting this into our hands, and will report back to you. If you have faith in Devine like we do, though, this seems like a no-brainer.
As the mega-fans of UNO recoil in horror and one-star the game’s latest update, Gameloft is preparing a patch to address two of their core issues: the ads and the crashes. In an e-mail floated to us this afternoon, we get the impression that the development team behind the game has identified what the crash problem stems from. More importantly, though, it’s fixing it.
The same goes for the ads, which were essentially links to other Gameloft titles. As of this upcoming update, they’ll be removed from the main menu and the loading screen, which were the two places they appeared in the first place.
As for the IAP cards… well, apparently there’s been a misunderstanding on the user end, as you can disable bonus cards before every match. We’ve also been told that the game doesn’t allow you to use bonus cards that other players don’t have access to, which makes a lot of sense from a competitive design standpoint, but has us scratching our heads over the reviews that game has been seeing post-multiplayer update.
As for an ETA on the fixes, we don’t have one yet. We’ve touched base about that and I’d imagine we’ll be able to get that to you at some point in the near future.
Normally, multiplayer updates are celebrated by the fans and community surrounding a title, but in the case of Uno [$.99 / HD / Free] fans are bitter over the whole ordeal. According to the 50 plus one-star reviews (and counting) that the game has raked in post-update, Uno has become a bad, crash-riddled title filled with ads, bugs, and broken gameplay. We didn’t see this one coming.
Alongside multiplayer and new leaderboards, several new issues introduced via the update are rubbing people the wrong way, and none more than the bug that keeps the game from launching after its updated, which is a pretty rational reason to throw a bad review the game’s way. Unfortunately, when it does work, paid users are now being served ads, which again, is a pretty rational reason to drag the title under the bus since ads weren’t a part of the original deal.
Users are also complaining about IAP cards leading to bad play. Apparently, you can purchase special cards in the game that can be pulled out whenever, including even in multiplayer. If this is the case, well, wow — that’s definitely not good.
On the bright side, it’s hard to believe that Gameloft won’t answer these concerns in some meaningful update down the line. When that’ll be though is anyone’s guess. We've put in a word to the publisher to see and will update if / when we hear back.
Sometimes it seems as if there’s nothing more ubiquitous than a game of electronic Solitaire. Even a quick glance at the App Store will yield pages upon pages of Solitaire titles of every kind of variation, theme, and quality. With this much competition new players to the field are going to have to distinguish themselves in order to earn the attention of gamers looking for a Solitaire fix. Solitaire by Backflip [Free / HD], one of the latest entries in the overcrowded Solitaire field, doesn’t particularly offer anything that hasn’t already been seen in this sub-genre. However, what it does offer is a solid card experience with incentive to continue playing, provided you aren’t put off by the prevalence of in-game ads.
You won’t find a multitude of different types of Solitaire in this title. Rather, Solitaire by Backflip only has 1 and 3-card draw. In addition, you can either play with ‘Normal’ or ‘Vegas’ rules (the latter only allowing you to run through the whole deck only once before the game ends). Solitaire also has four different themes, two of which must be unlocked by collecting a certain amount of in-game coins that are earned by making successful card moves and completing a whole game. While the coin amounts for unlocking the themes did seem high, by my calculation you’d have to win approximately 10 games on normal rules in order to earn enough coins for a theme unlock, which seems fair enough to me. Of course, additional coins are available as IAP should you decide you don’t want to play the game.
Texas Hold'em is one of those games that's better in person. It just isn't the same if you can't pull out your best poker face. But as we mentioned in our preview, you can now get that experience from the comfort of your couch if you've got an iPad 2, because Full Deck Hold'Em [$2.99] includes video chat integration in its multiplayer gameplay, and it works beautifully.
For those who aren't on the latest, greatest hardware, it also has nearly everything else you could ask for in a Hold'em app: sixteen AI players to compete against, up to four-player multiplayer through Game Center, eight tables with a range of buy-ins and a lot more. There are some rough spots in the interface, but the core experience is great.
For relative Poker rookies like myself and my friends, keeping track of who does what and who has what gets progressively harder as the drinks flow and more and more people join in on the action. Card manufacturer Bicycle just released a new iPad app that might help. It’s called Bicycle Poker Night [$4.99], and it’s merely a game tracking device. You use your real cards on a real table, while the app keeps track of the blinds, the chips, and everything else for you. As long as you keep the whiskey off your tablet, it should prove to be a handy tool.
Hilariously, its super elaborate in the visual department. As you’ll see, you can drop in pictures for your pals, and watch the action unfold on a virtual table. I’d imagine you’ll see a good bit of promotional content, too, if that lower right-hand corner is indicative of future plans.
We've been following the activity of gaming legend Graeme Devine's GRL Games since he left Apple and decided to start his own studio. A chat at GDC later revealed that the motivation for his departure from the company had a whole new layer of awesome to it: He just wanted to make games with his daughter. Since then they've released Full Deck Solitaire [Free] as well as Full Deck Poker Solitaire [$1.99 / Free].
Tomorrow, the Full Deck family of card games will get its third entry: Full Deck Hold'Em. We've had our hands on an early copy of the game, and aside from being an all-around awesome iPad-powered poker experience, the iPad 2 video chat functionality is just awesome. You can see a glimpse of how it works in the following video:
In case you've never heard of it before, Dominion is a deck building card game created by game designer Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. Since its release, Dominion has been ripping up the charts over on BoardGameGeek, and has won all sorts of other awards including taking home game of the year at Germany's Spiel board game festival. In fact, Dominion's success and popularity have spawned an entire genre of other similar deck building games.
Attention card geeks and all god slayers: the first expansion pack for the outstanding Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer [$
