Game Impressions Finally got in a game last night and found it good fun! Thankfully, although a bit overwhelming at first, by the end of your first epoch you'll have the rules down pat (well, you'll surely still need to look up specifics of scoring, but you'll have the gist of it down already). The game is all about collecting various tile sets in hopes of outscoring your opponents at the end of three rounds (epochs). Most of these tiles will be gained by winning a Ra auction in which case you get all of the tiles currently on the table (up to 8). When do these Ra auctions occur? They can come up three different ways: 1) If any of the players draws the Ra tile 2) If a player decides to call upon Ra (which I believe will end the current Epoch at the end of the epoch). 3) If the lot of tiles fills up. How does one bid? Each epoch you are given 4 Sun tiles of random values of 1-16. Once an auction starts each player can bid one of their Sun tiles (or pass if not interested in the lot). You only have the 4 Suns so use them wisely. You also know, right off the bat, the value of the other players' Suns and can often create fun situations where you know the only way player 2 can beat your wussy bid of 5 is to break out their shiny 16. How does an epoch end? Not entirely sure but think it is either once 3 Ra tiles have been drawn, all of the player's Suns have been played, or once a player has forced a bid by invoking Ra. How do these tile sets score? I'm not even going to try in get into this one other than Nile tiles only have value if you have some Flood tiles with them, Pharaoh tiles have no inherit value on their own, the only point is to have more than everybody else (the player with the most gets +5 and the least -2), and you can look up for your self how one scores with the people and other tiles. Some of these collections will be ongoing through the epochs while other, you soon see, you are forced to start over from scratch on each epoch. There are even a couple of extra scoring aspects you can read about that only kick in on the Final Epoch. Disaster Tiles often turn up in a lot and are like anti-tiles. If you get one of them you'll need to throw out two tiles appropriate to the type of disaster. So even if the lot you were thinking of biding on has lots of cool prizes, you might want to reconsider if it forces you to pick up too many disasters (not sure what happens if you pickup a disaster you can't fulfill the conditions of). God Tiles are a fun invention as well. You can save them for the end of the epoch for point or use them to snag single tiles out of a lot (great if you really only want one tile out of the offered lot to complete a set). By no means the complete rules but it will at least give you a clue what it is about I hope. As I've only played one game so far I don't have any useful strategies to discuss yet. I played a game vs. the weakest AI and won, so I can't really comment on the AI as of yet but it did seem to not bid on a lot of great lots (not sure if this is because this is the silliest of the AI's or that it was completely focused on only one particular tile set and if the lot didn't have any useful tiles in that category it would pass). It is good fun and probably closer to Medici than any other RK game. 5/5
Do you mean online multiplayer, so I can play with my brother in another state? And NOT through Facebook, right? I just want to be sure before I drop the $ on both these games. I will happily go ahead and buy them now to help fund development if those two things are correct. Thanks!
Online multiplayer Yes, online multiplayer. Most likely through OpenFeint. More info when we get closer to updates!
Medici on sale Medici HD is now selling for a reduced price, and Medici for iPhone is on super sale for the next week to celebrate the release of Ra! Happy gaming!
Awesome, hopefully more people pick up Medici. Then there will actually be people to play with when online is available.
Just bought Medici since Ra was such a good translation to iOS. Codito, are you guys working on El Grande???
I reeeeeeeeeally would like to see "Lord of the Rings" from Knizia into my iPhone. With online Multiplayer, that could be awesome. I made a custom board table with images from the film, and it's amazing. Here, the link to BGK: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/823/lord-of-the-rings
Thanks for your supoort! El Grande is one of our licenses, but we haven't started development yet. It will be out sometime in 2011 though, for sure (and probably sooner rather than later.) Until then, enjoy Ra and Medici!
Love the game but I'm kind of bummed that my stats screen glitched out. I think I'll wait until an update is released before playing more games since I'm one for keeping stats of the games I played. Aside from that though and a few other minor glitches the game is fantastic.
Stats bug Yes, we're tracking that one down. Apologies for the inconvenience. Looks like that's the only major bug that made it past QA though. Also, the first update will let you see even more stats, so hopefully that will help make up for this. We'll be sending the update to beta testers this week and hope to have it approved by the end of next week.
Maybe not the creepy crawly type you might be thinking of but yeah. There seems to be a glitch that screws up the stats. Not sure what triggered it but after a game I went in and all the players were gone. It then started my stats over from scratch but the other AI characters were all missing. Thanks. Not a huge deal really considering how great the game is and how well everything else seems work. I really like the game though so I don't think I'll be able to put it down anyway. Can't wait for the update and the new additions to the stats will probably be worth it.
Is it a bug or...sentient AI? Think about it. In most games you have an option to reset the stats at any point...could it be that one of the AIs you'd severely trounced found a way to hit the reset switch?
Don't Forget: Tigris & Euphrates Age of Industry (aka Brass) Le Havre and Through the Ages We'll be getting lots of Board Gaming Goodness thanks to Codito. I'm hoping for Le Havre or Tigris & Euphrates next but who knows
Lots of really great games there. Tigris & Euphrates is one of the all-time great Knizia games, in my opinion. El Grande, finally starting to get to games by other designers, is also very solid. People who haven't been playing board games in recent years have some good ones to look forward to. While I actually prefer the variety of play in Agricola, Le Havre, by the designers of that game, is a very solid game and will be lots of fun to have on the iPad. Le Havre is a good game in its own right and some people do prefer it to Agricola. Agricola is the current highest rated game on boardgamegeek.com (out of 49,000+ games). Le Havre is a respectable number 7, to it is considered excellent by many people. Also, I'm a huge Martin Wallace fan. His Age of Steam is one of my favorite games. Age of Industry is a great game from him as well. It takes what he did in Brass and removes a couple of the more cumbersome mechanisms and adds for the possibility of additional maps/scenarios over time. I'm hoping expansions will be forthcoming. It is currently rated #217. Not top 10 like Brass, but out of over 49,000 games, that is still pretty good. Some people prefer Brass to Age of Industry, but Age of Industry is much newer and not as many people have tried it where it eventually settles in the list remains to be seen.This will be a very nice one. Out of all of these, though, I'm probably most excited about Through the Ages. Currently rated #4 on boardgamegeek. This is probably the first truly great civilization building board game since the original Civilization/Advanced Civilization from Avalon Hill. There have been some other ones, but this one really gets the feel right and manages to distill what made the original great in 4 hours or less of play (as opposed to the 7-12 hours for Civilization). The publisher, Czech Board Games, has several other really good games. Hopefully this will just be the first of many brought to the iPad. All in all, Codito has a very solid lineup here. Other than Age of Industry, all of the listed games are in the top 20 highest rated. If they manage to include Brass along with Age of Industry, then even it moves into the top 10 ratings. Even if they don't, Age of Industry is still a good game on its own. Given the quality of what Codito has produced so far, I'm really looking forward to what they put out in the future.
are there any plans to implement wi-fi multiplayer in your BOARD GAMES? Cause you know, board games are usually best played with people, not a mediocre AI. I love medici, i love ra i love kingsburg but i refuse to buy any boardgame without online/asynchronous multiplayer. Not implementing it into a boardgame is just being a lazy developer. Seriously, a lot of people agree with me and good multiplayer would boost your sales.
Codito confirmed multiplayer on the last page. Most likely through openfeint but they said they would announce more when they get closer to an update
