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[Ghills]

Having a lot of fun with Reigns lately, although I can't seem to rule past 23 years.  I've managed to turn the country pagan so many times.

[Aoi]

Some of their card design decisions seem strange. You start with a 2 mana 2/1, and a 2 mana 1/1 with a conditional +1/0 text. The former outclasses the latter due to not being conditional, yet there they both are in your starter deck, showing off some odd design choices right from the word go. Maybe there's a warcry trigger card somewhere that can make the second card better, but I haven't gotten it yet.

The conditional is actually persisting. Meaning as long as you can place it early and defend it, it can actually hurt a decent amount. The other 2/1 is kinda trash, a vanilla 3 in stats for 2 mana when the ballpark seems to be at least +2 over the mana cost made me ditch it as soon as possible.

 The fears of cards getting 'Just Plain Better' seems to be confirmed early on too. There's also a $2 store item that advertizes +15 vitality. I have not checked pvp to see if this vitality relates to in game player health like I suspect, but that is my current biggest pay to win warning light right now.

Vitality is 'energy', as in that mechanic that prevents people from playing endlessly. Though I didn't manage to run out after multiple multi-hour sessions.

That 1/1 +1/0 is monstrous if you play a slow-burn game against a healing opponent; I had one buffed up to around 15/8 by the time my opponent finally crumbled.

[Aoi]

Having a lot of fun with Reigns lately, although I can't seem to rule past 23 years.  I've managed to turn the country pagan so many times.

I found Reigns to be downright indecipherable until I noticed the little status bars. Managing this will help out a LOT. Blue mushrooms will let you see numberical values for the, and be aware there are some effects that will change your status over time, not per-action. Which means you can just sit with a card out until it reached a number you like.

[AzyWng]

The Walking Dead: March To War is a pretty fun multiplayer base-building game.

While it depends on a lot of waiting, it's still pretty fun to play. There's a lot less pay-to-win than in other similar mobile games - speed boosting items can be found pretty easily, and most of the premium currency items don't really provide a huge advantage.

Worth giving it a go if you're any bit interested in empire-esque building games. If you do, look up the community "[GUN] The Gunmen" - it's mine.

I didn't say a whole lot about the game itself since I'm posting on a phone.

[Aoi]

I'm getting a non-English error message when trying to start of Fist of Truth today, actually. Has anybody else had a problem?

[SHAD0Wdump]

 I notice that it can take a few moments to log into your account. If you attempt to start without letting it do that first, it'll throw what I presume is Chinese at you and will not start.

[sambojin]

Yes. You were completely right about that card. It's awesome. Silly me.

Actually, aside from occasional server and app lock-up issues, I'm liking Fist of Truth more and more. I'm not all that far through the basic campaign, but this looks like it'll be a winner in PvP. Every deck is internally synergistic, with placement mattering HEAPS on the 3x3 grid, mana curve of deck still being massive but not entirely restrictive, and with multiple forms of battle-cries and effects of it seems like it has great potential. There's "screw you's" control, life gain, buff decks (every deck is a buff deck), reward/cost on self-enrage, but you can "hard lane" as well (rather than HS's "face-or-board-place" or MtG's "defender wins combat unless you cast stuff or are winning"). Another rock-paper-scissors perhaps, but there doesn't seem to be too many easy one turn kills or anything, so you always have a chance to regain board control, even Vs hard laning.

Anyway, rather than the 20mins I said, give it a couple of hours. You get just enough freebies through the campaign and occasional server issues that you'll have plenty of stuff to play with shortly, and the grid placement makes it a novel CCG to play considering everything is meant to "work" together, even with random draws. Probably worth the 10'ish dollars of card buy the first two p2w things give you, just to pop some packs, but works well f2p too (haven't bought anything yet. Wouldn't mind exchanging card lists to see if early card draws are "just progression" or are actually random).

[sambojin]

Yay, top 10 in the world in Robots.io again. Admittedly out of only 100k'ish downloads, and probably only a few thousand regularly active players, but that's not much different from most "second tier" multi-player games on Steam. And at least this one's free and fair, even on the mobile platform (*gasp*).

Seems like 10v10's are the standard now, or as many players as jump into them. So usually 6v6+. Been a few ping issues server wise from it, but being a bastard with mines still works lovely. Better than it did before, if anything. Multi-kills ahoy!


(edit: 8v8s are the new standard. It seems to work fine) 

[sambojin]

#8 now, and closing in on #7.

Anyway.....  I keep telling people through my very "helpful" Tips for Beginners guide for Robots.io to play a bit of Virexian if you don't know what twin-stick shooters are about.  It's slightly quicker and doesn't have auto-aim.....

So taking my own advice I thought I'd give it another spin. Just the Free Rogue mode (that's in the free version, I own the full version though. Fell in love with it at first sight <3). Cleared it easily in 9:49. Just wondering if this is a good time or not? It felt slow as, I was playing really cautiously. But, even as a "roguelite" with heaps of random elements, maybe we could get an unofficial timekeeping scoreboard going? It looks like a fun game to speedrun, because it's quick, but the smaller mode doesn't have THAT much randomness to it.

Got incredibly lucky with a Yellow Laser first drop (boss killer and generally useful), and a Shrapnel later on to mop up harder kill-all or survive stages. Still, I reckon 1-1 1/2 minutes could be chopped off that time quite easily.

[Wiles]

Through the Ages came out recently and I have to say it is the best digital boardgame I have played so far. It's rare for me to choose to play a mobile game over gaming on my PC when I have the choice, but I've had it for 3 days and have played several matches and I'm still going back for more.

The user interface is fantastic and incredibly user friendly. As someone who has never played this boardgame in meatspace I found myself making mistakes often, but the UI helped me learn from them. I have often been reminded by the game that there were still specific actions I could take on my turn if I wanted to. For example there's a wonder card that gives you 1 free worker every turn if you activate it, but I would often forget to take it so the game would remind me I could still take that action if I wanted to when I tried to end my turn.

The tutorial is very well done, by the end of it I had a good understanding of how the game worked. Considering the physical game has a 4.17/5 complexity rating on boardgamegeek I think they did a great job teaching me the game.

If you have never heard of the game it is a euro game where you build your civilization and try to accrue the most culture points throughout the game to win. If you have played any of Sid Meier's Civilization games then you will be familiar with a lot of the concepts in the game. You can research techs to give you new units or buildings, or bonuses, build building that give you resources, victory points, or happiness, build wonders that do various things, build military units, declare war,  or colonize new lands, among other things. All of this is done through cards that you purchase with your civil action points in the case of civil cards, or by having left over military actions at the end of your turn in the case of military event cards.

I feel like the game has a good amount of replayability. There are 3 levels to the AI and so far I haven't bested the mid-tier AI. There are also many challenges to complete that often involve special rules. The game also has multiplayer (including asynchronous multiplayer) as well as pass and play. I haven't tried the multiplayer yet so I can't comment on it.

Through the Ages costs 10$, so it is fairly expensive compared to most mobile games, but well worth the money in my opinion. I feel like this game will become one of my favourite mobile games of all time. I am glad that there are mobile devs out there that are making quality games without any of the f2p trappings that are invading paid games. Take for example a new game called Iron Marines, the game is 6$ to buy, but it has an in game currency that you can buy with money or watch adds to gain. You can also get the currency through playing, I imagine it is a safe bet to guess the game is balanced in a way to make you want to spend money or watch adds to take away from the grind. I can't really fault mobile devs too much for adding that kind of garbage to their game since many consumers are unwilling to pay a fair price for a quality mobile game. I hope TTA and games like it do well so that we will see more like it in the future.

[Rose]

Been playing a lot of plants vs zombies 2 lately. Good fun. Hard sometimes.

[itisnotlogical]

So Toram Online is an interesting thing. If you've played an Asian MMO on PC (Mabinogi, Flyff, etc) it's nothing special, except the translation actually makes sense. Also it's on Android. It has pretty decent graphics, I only did the tutorial and it just looks like standard MMO fare. I'll keep playing for a little bit, who knows if it's a good game or just a curiosity.

[Folly]

Terra Battle 2 launched last night.

It's an Online Tactical RPG from one of the makers of Final Fantasy, though it's not under the Squeenix umbrella. Somewhat original combat and exploration aspects grant novelty to this title. Art and music are both solid, and storytelling is decent. Much like the first game, it seems like it can't figure out if it wants to be an online mobile game or offline experience, with things like login bonuses that don't really offer much added incentive to log in each day, and missions that cost energy which would be almost impossible to run out of in a single sitting.
Still, despite these shortcomings, I'm enjoying the game for the moment and will continue to play for a while at least.

[Frumple]

I think I'd like it, but it's a little unstable on my tablet...

... and the movement system makes me want to hurt people. The timed drag thing may actually be the most miserable means of movement I've encountered in a video game in my life, or at least a contender for top 3 or so. Straight up kills the game for me. Grid based game which heavily incentivizes precise movement using a limited pool of it, chooses a movement system about as inimical to that as you can get without coding the game to randomly misinterpret or ignore your commands. Even has a degree of the former since the magnet feature (basically full party movement) freaks the hell out when you run into obstacles or petrified enemies.

Give it a 7-8/10 so far as mobile games go, based on everything except that one aspect, and about a -1/10 including it

[sambojin]

Demise of Nations is a well made little Civ-like (with simple city management) or Total-War-Rome-like (but only on the campaign map)  that I've just started playing a bit of.  Hex based, and synchronous turn based,  but with a nice mix of units and rock-scissor-paper-catapult to play around with (various units have many different match-up bonuses), a quasi-historical setting in the base game for free (most of ancient Europe/North Africa/Western Asia is the base map with plenty of civs to try out, but modern/future Europe is available as a freebie d/l as well), it has online multi-player, and even a mod-making and map design kit available for the paid version. Seems to have modern, future, WWII, and full earth scenarios available at least, so the system is versatile enough to do a bit.

Kind of a simple yet complex war game, that I'm really liking the vibe of. OK'ish diplomacy system, plenty of win conditions available for victory (conquest, domination, regicide, etc), strategic resources and map control, and even a weather system for those horrible Russian-esque "don't go there in winter, you'll lose" things happening. Seems really well rounded, and I recommend anyone that wants a bit more wargame than most civ-lites can offer, or that always wanted to roll on through as the barbaric Gaulish Brutes in TW:R (but that mostly liked the turn-based-strategy side of TW), to give it a go. Even has a basic tutorial, so you can learn what the thingies do, but it's all pretty simple. Available on Android, iOS and PC, with multiplatform online play in the free version, so it might be fun to get a group game going some day. Even teams Vs AI is available, until we know what we're doing properly.

Total War: Rome: "the turn based version", on your mobile for free, is worth checking out.


(digging the fact that each civ has its own separate unit list, with proper ('ish) names and everything. Separate Roman troop types, although it's odd that you have an "army" of skirmishers or legionnaires. Still better than anything Civ has done for that era, and way more like TW in that regard. Heaps of generic stuff still (Brutes everywhere!) , but at least they slightly themed some civs. Which is a good thing )

(wow.  "Germanic" civs,  ie: everyone properly north of the Mediterranean Sea, gets a "Pagan Priest" unit. That can make it rain or snow within three tiles to give you those horrible Russian winters. Nice. Strategic magic is in, even in a semi-historical setting )

(#3? I guess. This looks fairly moddable. For nukes and stuff. I think it might not be too hard to whip some stuff up. GoT or Ultima IV minus 1/2 (the Rise of Britannia) is what I'm thinking though. Just for a laugh.)