Ticket to Ride Pocket

The patch notes also mention a lot of bug fixes, including memory leaks. Hit those up if you are really, really into the nitty-gritty of a splendidly comprehensive patch that adds functionality that we've all been waiting for. Here's to hoping Pocket gets all of the maps in the iPad version down the line, too.

Caylus

It's becoming a bit of a running joke that Big Daddy's Creations puts out great board game ports with shoddy (or no) multiplayer, and Caylus is no exception. You can't play over Game Center, you can't invite friends, and trying to play asynchronously will extend the game length to near-infinite. But if you're down with fighting AI or playing locally against friends, this is a must-buy for any board game fan.

Here's how a typical game of Caylus goes: there is a castle, there are buildings, there is a road. Each players has six workers, and takes turns each round placing them in the various buildings. The provost and bailiff (essentially progress markers) make their way down the road at the end of each round and each worker gets his due. Some buildings provide resources, others provide gold or change the turn order, and some let you trade your resources around.

The ultimate goal is to build up more favor from France's King Philip the Fair than any of your competition. The king is generous with favor in a 'you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours' sort of way. If you use your resources to help build up his castle, he'll bestow favor upon you - especially if you're the most productive builder of the round. If you collect resources, you can turn them in at the end of the game for more favor. Building monuments, shops and landmarks like churches will make you very popular, and sometimes you can ship off extra money or resources to earn a little extra mid-game. Though I wouldn't say Caylus is incredibly strategically deep, these methods of building up points give players a few different tactics to use to defeat their foes.

Going deeper, there are a number of rules and strategies that can affect your success in a big way. For example, each worker you place costs you money. Generally, the further along the road you place a worker, the better the reward. If the provost hasn't passed the building he's in, though, it won't be counted in the round's final tally. You can pay the provost to move him back toward the castle or further along the road - but so can everyone else. So sending a worker to a far out shop can be a massive risk, especially if you've already earmarked unearned resources to help build the castle at the round's end.

There are five different resources to manage and a huge list of buildings to erect. There are also a slew of conditional rules to keep track of. So here's where I applaud Big Daddy's Creations the most: Caylus's tutorial is outstanding. With the tutorial messages on through my first playthrough, I figured out maybe three quarters of the game. After one more match to polish up on the details I understood nearly everything. I'm still working on strategy, but such a thorough and straightforward introduction is pretty impressive for a game with Caylus's complexity.

I've run into one or two cases that weren't explained by anything in the rules, and it's possible they were bugs. A couple crash bugs have been found, as has a miscommunication with Apple about translations (the game is only available in English but lists several other languages in its App Store listing). Big Daddy's Creations has covered their plans to solve these problems in a blog post already, so I'm confident any other issues that crop up should be handled in a timely fashion.

Otherwise, the big sticking point is multiplayer. Caylus is universal, so you can play with friends on an iPad or pass-and-play on smaller devices. But online play should be a big part of the game, and playing with random unranked strangers that you can't chat with takes a lot of the fun out of it. Also, you really have to poke around the interface to quit a game once it's done, or to leave one for another part way. The interface is mostly extremely usable, but that's an unintuitive task. And there's a serious lack of stat tracking.

But for pure entertainment dollar by dollar, I'll take Caylus over most board games in the App Store. It's an obscenely good game, which makes its flaws all the more frustrating. If you also want to gripe about that, there's support to be found in our discussion thread. Me? I've said my piece, so now I can go back to playing. It will take more than awkward multiplayer to keep me from having this much fun.

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.

Rivals of Catan is a card game adaptation of Catan proper built for two players. In brief, it's all about expanding principalities and scoring points for various things in a fairly rapid-fire fashion -- players roll dice for bonuses and draw cards each round, some of which activate a special event or allow general improvements. You can read more about it here, if this is tickling you in any special way.

And by the way, that Cities & Knights expansion is still coming to Catan. A beta test is planned to start at the beginning of the year, and DSM hopes to release at some point around February or even March. Cross-platform multiplayer is also still scheduled to hit at some point after this update, FYI.

Fans of the title should be forewarned, however. The iOS version is significantly watered down compared to the original. There is no Axis of Evil. There are no off-board negotiations or dealings. Defeated players do not become terrorist nations. You don't even get situational cards. Nonetheless, that doesn't change the fact that War on Terror is surprisingly fun and, once you've realized the genius behind it, devilishly clever.

But we're moving a little too fast. Let's take a few steps back and take a look at how the game actually plays. When you first start the game, you'll be asked to select your avatar (this is purely cosmetic, by the way) and the number of players you wish to play against. After that, you'll be dropped into a world map with a few nations under your control. To win, you must accumulate a certain amount of liberty points. How do you do that? By taking over continents (each continent rewards you with a certain amount of points). I'm totally serious about this.

If you cringed at that, you should probably stop reading now because it gets a lot worse. Did you know that the total annihilation of a player in War on Terror is usually accompanied with fanfare and a declaration that the aforementioned individual has been liberated. Ahem. Moving on.

The actual gameplay itself is relatively straightforward. During each turn, a set of dice is rolled and countries with the corresponding number will reward its owner with a certain amount of money. You'll also be able to do things like establish alliances (these seldom seem to help), declare war on others, develop the countries under your ownership (the better developed the country, the greater the revenue you receive from them), indulge in a spot of terrorism (they're surprisingly effective), build defenses (protect a country against radioactive assaults or common-place rabble; it's your choice) and even initiate nuclear attacks (exactly what you think it is).

Complex as all that might sound, it's not. War happens when you click on an adjacent nation and select the appropriate option. Victory is even less hands-on; a win is determined by whether or not your dice rolls are above a five.

Such is the case for everything else as well; it's all a matter of pointing and clicking. However, what makes War on Terror shine is the way the game enforces the need for proper accountancy. For example, you can wage war as much as you like - just make sure you have a minimum of forty million in your bank. Want to call a nuclear strike? Sure. Have five hundred million in reserve. No one ever said it was easy to be a world leader. If anything, it's bloody expensive. Guerrilla warfare, on the other hand, is not.

In fact, compared to everything else, terrorism is almost mind-bogglingly cheap. You'll only need to spend ten million in order to send your incendiaries anywhere in the world. As an added bonus, you won't have to worry about weathering retaliation either - radicals in this game are rather close-mouthed about their affiliations.

For the sake of decorum, I'm going to forgo discussing the political aspects of the game. You can come to your own conclusions yourself. However, I will have to say that War on Terror is rather compelling. Once you've gotten into the swing of things, it's easy to get caught up in the act of expansion, in worrying about the next oil turn and whether you will be a prince or a pauper. Do you play nice with your neighbors or do you move for the kill? Do you spread like a venereal disease or do you focus on building up the nations under your control?

Like any good iOS game, it's simple but prone towards provoking 'one more turn' instincts. Graphics-wise, War on Terror will likely be a hit or a miss. If you enjoy the political cartoons in the newspaper, you'll probably like it. If not, well, it's not intolerable. It's just not something to shout about.

As I've mentioned before, War on Terror is a game that you need to experience at least once. But only once. Re playability is a big issue here for me. After beating it once, I feel little imperative to do so again, an odd turn of circumstances given that War on Terror was derived from a board game. I imagine that this opinion might change once online multiplayer (hot seating could have worked brilliant too, guys) is introduced but for now, it is a problem. Still, if you're willing to overlook that, War on Terror remains a rather brilliant if possibly misguided piece of political satire and a rather entertaining game to boot.

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.

One thing I really liked about Kyy Games' new title is the exceedingly robust cross-platform online gameplay that it provides. I know, I know. This isn't anything new, per se. We've had cross-platform games for ages. But bear with me. Most games have limitations. With Cabals, things are a little different. Not only will you be able to take on players on the iOS platform, you'll also be able to challenge everyone from Mac Users to Android-wielding associates. In short, if it runs Unity, it will run Cabals and it will run it beautifully. (Facebook and Windows 7 versions are apparently in the works too.)

So, we've got kick-ass online services and a delightful urban-fantasy setting checked. What else has Kyy Games brought to the table? A lot, I would say. Cabals: The Card Game is a somewhat nontraditional take on the idea. More a TCG/board game hybrid than anything else, Cabals will not have you safely seated on your side of the metaphorical table as you work on whittling your opponent's health down to zero. No, sir. Things are much different here.

In Cabals, you're going to have to either storm the Stronghold (it's usually the tile furthest away from your own and marked with a little castle-like symbol) or acquire 60 Domination points (this usually entails conquering approximately sixty tiles) in order to win. Your choice. Just be forewarned - it's not as easy as it sounds. Units can only be brought into play through your Stronghold or a 'deployment location' that you control. Does that mean you should rush towards those hot spots? Not really. It depends on your playstyle. Can you afford risking the possibility of being flanked? Can you control your opponent's wanton expansion in the mean time? What about your Stronghold? Do you worry about it or do you charge for the other guy's Stronghold first?

But before you get into all of that, you had better damn well make sure you have enough resources at your disposal first. Do you finance spells or units? Do you go for quality or quantity? And if that wasn't enough to worry about, you're also going to have to take positioning into account as it is far too easy to maneuver yourself into a corner should you be careless.

As for the rest of it, it's all pretty straightforward. Movement is accomplished by dragging and dropping a unit onto an adjacent square. Combat is performed when two units are within range (and by dragging and dropping one onto another). Damage is determined by the power that a unit has and occasionally by certain special attributes. Spells work pretty much the same way as units - their individual effects can be found on the cards themselves.

Sometimes, a laborious dance worthy of the grandmasters of chess and sometimes, a mad rush for control, Cabals is easy to grasp and surprisingly deep for something that can, at times, feel like a distilled version of the genre. It currently operates on a freemium model so you're going to have to spend some real world cash to purchase more cards. Fortunately, you won't get assaulted by constant demands to spend money so that's always a plus. As an added bonus, the amount of influence points (which is their name for in-game currency) that you receive when you register yourself is actually fairly hefty so chances are, if you're going to make this a casual experience, you'll probably never find yourself reaching for your wallet.

Yesterday, Days of Wonder has gone and released an iPhone version of Ticket to Ride, dubbed Ticket to Ride Pocket [99¢]. Many iPad gamers, and of course non-iPad owning gamers, have been clamoring for a portable version of Ticket to Ride, so this release certainly should make quite a few people happy. However, Ticket to Ride Pocket has almost the exact opposite problems that its iPad counterpart had on release. It does contain a pass-n-play mode along with its single player, but does not contain an online multiplayer mode. Days of Wonder has stated this was a conscious decision, as they didn't want to compromise the online experience with interruptions that are inherent to phones like incoming calls and spotty network coverage.

Besides lacking online play, Ticket to Ride Pocket also nixes the extra Europe and Switzerland maps from the iPad version, instead focusing on just the American map. This was another conscious decision by the developer, as they felt that the additional maps contained too much detail to be sufficiently playable on the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod touch.

While Ticket to Ride Pocket is a more limited experience than the iPad version, it doesn't make it a bad game at all. In fact, quite the opposite. The single player AI is quite good, and pass-n-play is adequate for when you have a friend close by. There's also multiplayer over local WiFi or Bluetooth if you're close by friend(s) happens to have their own device and copy of the game. Perhaps best of all is that the pocket edition is just 99¢ as of this writing.

I still think it would be nice to see online multiplayer and the additional maps added into the game, despite the developer's concerns, and that may happens sometime down the line. But for the cheap price of entry, Ticket to Ride Pocket is a great mobile take on the board game that's worth having a look at.

Assassin's Creed

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.

[Via IGN]

Fantasy Flight Games

I love these games, but there's really no such thing as a quick game of, well, any of them. Between set up, tear down and the inevitable time taken to teach new players and reference forgotten rules, you're looking at a full evening's entertainment. So imagine my delight playing Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD], the first of Fantasy Flight's more mature games to arrive on the App Store. It's quick to play, can be learned (mostly) as you go, and can be played solo or hotseat with friends. What's not to like?

Elder Sign: Omens is harder to explain than it is to learn, but let's give it a shot. Azathoth, one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, is showing signs of awakening. This would basically be the end of the world, filled with eldritch abominations and mindless gibbering, so you must assemble a team to stop this from occurring.

You can choose from a list of 16 investigators to create a team of 1 to 4 members. The investigators all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some have more sanity, others more stamina, some get more items than others and all have unique abilities to help you on your mission.

Once you enter the museum in which Elder Sign takes place, you're faced with a selection of missions. Each one is horrifying in its own way, and your investigators risk losing their lives or their sanity by facing them down. In each mission, you roll the dice (proverbially in this game, and literally in the tabletop version) to see if you can match the symbols that come up, things like Terror, Peril and Lore, to the symbols needed to defeat the nameless horror you face.

If you do, you're well rewarded, earning items for your investigators that help you improve your odds and occasionally Elder Signs. If you don't, you fail the mission and suffer, losing sanity, stamina and sometimes gaining Doom. If the Doom Track moves up by twelve spaces before you collect the fourteen Elder Signs needed to seal away the Great Old One, Azathoth awakens and all is lost.

There are a few other details that can effect the outcome of your game. As you succeed at missions you earn trophies that can be exchanged for healing, items or expensive Elder Signs. Time passes on as you take your turns, and at midnight terrible things happen depending on how many monsters or Midnight signs you've left on the board. And occasionally portals open to Other Worlds, where the stakes are higher but so are the rewards.

As a result, success in Elder Sign is part luck, part strategy, but it's certainly weighted toward luck. If you fail at rolling the signs you need, there's little you can do. But making sure you pick the right investigator for the job, keep them alive and choose the missions you can defeat -- therein lies strategy.

For the most part, the transition to digital has been very kind to Elder Sign. Azathoth is the only Ancient One that features -- the others and their varied win conditions aren't present in Omens. But otherwise the game is intact and elegantly presented. The interface is superb, aside from a few small oversights. I would prefer to be able to see what items can do at a glance even when they're not usable, and I didn't discover that tapping the title of a mission would bring up more information about it even while you were in the midst of it until I was quite deep in the game. But on the whole, Fantasy Flight has done a fantastic job of making a complicated game simple and easy to play.

They've done such a good job, in fact, that you don't need to worry about learning much at all before you play. I'd recommend watching the tutorials so you don't get lost, but this is a game you can muddle through and understand within a single playthrough. That's outstandingly intuitive for this sort of thing. Playthroughs are much quicker than in the tabletop game, too, though not as speedy as they could be -- a bit too much focus is placed on fancy but slow scene transitions.

You can play Elder Sign: Omens alone, using up to four investigators to explore the museum. You're given a local high score when you finish the game, win or lose, and it's endlessly satisfying to try to defeat that score with different teams and strategies. Alternately, you can play hotseat with friends -- assign each person to a single investigator and pass your device around. The game doesn't change, but it works brilliantly both ways.

Best of all? Win or lose, no one has to clean up the table when you're done. There's no overstating how much I'd like to see more of Fantasy Flight's catalog brought to iOS. If you agree, voice your support in our discussion thread. And do try to keep your sanity intact while you wait.

The story behind this is pretty cool, too. In a developer blog post, Peak said it wanted to figure out a way to get That One Guy in their real-life shuffleboard group off his phone and into the game. The easiest way to do that, apparently, was to make a game that required and included his or her phone.

Utlimate Shuffleboard requires at least two phones and it seems pretty easy to set up. A host makes the match, others join, and then you put the phones together end-to-end.

We've seen a developers dabbling in using multiple devices in their games, but sticks out to us as a really implementation of the technology. Plus, it practically requires its users to be social while using it, which is something we don't see a lot in this space in general. Neat!

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.

The idea is to lay down poker hands, like a three-of-a-kind, straight, flush, etc. But as in Scrabble, you can only play your cards if they interconnect with one or more existing card(s) on the board. In Scrabble, if your tiles form two new words, you score points for them both, and Poker Pals works in the same way. So when you slam down a full-house, you might also intersect with existing cards, forming a pair and a straight at the same time, scoring combo-points for all three, which is super satisfying.

The points range from a lowly pair (10 points) to a royal flush (90 points), plus a 10-point bonus for each card you placed. Although a pair of threes scores the same as a pair of kings, as it's based on the hand type, not the face value. Anything less than a pair doesn't score. It would be even better if the face value of cards was taken into account when scoring, as occurs in real poker.

In the four corners of the board, there are wildcard jokers. If you place your cards against these, the joker defaults to the most valuable card for your current hand. For example, if you have two aces it might become an ace, giving you a three of a kind. The game continues until the 7x7 play-field is fully populated with cards, at which point the highest scoring player wins. And the games are often close and exciting.

The game modes include single player (against the computer AI, with 3 difficulty levels), online multiplayer, which includes an option to play a random online opponent. There's also a "pass and play" option for sharing the device with your family at home, although you should probably let them complete the in-game tutorial first.

The free lite version contains all of the game modes, but you're limited to three simultaneous games in progress. If a fourth person invites you to play, they must wait for one of your three active games to end. However, once upgraded, you can play unlimited simultaneous games as well as freeing yourself of in-game ads and unlocking a higher single-player difficulty level.

Leaderboards and achievements are handled by Crystal, with Game Center also storing the achievements, except a bug is currently stopping the Game Center achievements from appearing correctly. Overall I've been having a fantastic time with Poker Pals, I just wish it were a little less cumbersome to switch between existing games and it really needs in-game chat functionality.

Poker Pals delivers a fun interpretation of poker, with desirable asynchronous play and random match-ups for people without many online friends. It has a high replay value and should come with a warning about time-consumtion, due to the constant, but pleasurable interruptions when it's your turn. After trying the free version initially, upgrading to remove the ads was an absolute no-brainer.

It's a turn-based strategy game that encourages players to engage in something one step shy of mutually assured destruction. You destroy the lands you harvest, and firing on your enemies crumbles away the ground beneath them.You win as long as you have at least a single unit on a single hex and your enemies don't. This brutally aggressive game first made its debut on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network in the early months of 2010, but it's hardly aged in the time it's taken to arrive on iPad. It's also extremely well done for the most part, offering a natural touch interface and both single and multiplayer content.

Greed Corp is initially overwhelming, so it's for the best that the single player content starts off slowly. The first few maps are slow and the beginner AI is pretty incompetent. This gives you the chance to practice the concepts you picked up in the tutorial, which you better have played before launching into the campaign. There are only a handful of units in the game, but without a basic understanding of how to use them, you won't survive for long.

Harvesters trigger at the start of your turn, dropping themselves and every hex of land around them by one level and giving you gold for the land they destroy. Eventually that land will collapse. Walkers can claim hexes and attack other units, defeating them on a one to one basis. Armories let you build new walkers, cannons fire at enemy hexes, and carriers can lift your isolated units out to the enemy.

Everything is costly, and resources are scarce, so you'll need to make trade-offs. Do you harvest your land, collapsing it as you go in order to afford to fight? Or do you preserve your land, but in doing so fail to defend your troops? If three corporations set out to claim every bit of land and damn the cost, one pacifist on the board won't last long. No matter your politics, you'll have to buy into greed eventually.

Greed Corp's battles are lovely to look at. Though the environments are often bleak, it's a visual feast to watch them crumble away to dust. As they do, the battlefield becomes more and more isolating until each team stands alone on tiny islands in the sky. Or maybe not -- depending on your choices, battles can go many different ways. Directly charging your enemies may be the best call at times, but waiting and letting them destroy each other can be just as effective.

This is the sort of game best played with time and attention. It's long and challenging, with 24 single-player levels divided between the four corporations. The battles themselves are quite time consuming. You have to watch as each of the CPU teams take their turns -- they're not especially slow about it, but any time spent out of control can drag on. Greed Corp is worth the time, though, with a thoughtful storyline and clever gameplay.

I can't comment on the online multiplayer, unfortunately. During my time with the game I wasn't able to connect to a single other player. Hopefully this will improve as the player base grows. Greed Corp allows you to set up a multiplayer game and wait for matchmaking while you play single-player, so if you want to find a game your best bet is to start matchmaking at the beginning of your play session.

But if you have someone local to play with, you don't need to wait for strangers to join you. Multiplayer games can be set up with any combination of single-device local, online and CPU players. The one thing you can't do is play online with friends with any reliability -- the game uses its own matchmaking service rather than Game Center, and there's no friends list.

The exclusion of Game Center is mystifying, actually. Greed Corp includes 12 achievements and 4 leaderboards, but all of them are local. Even more worrying are the bugs I encountered while playing. There weren't many, but one resulted in a couple losses that shouldn't have happened, and one had the game crashing every time I rotated my device (the system-wide rotation lock will let you avoid that if it happens to you). These flaws stand out in a port that's otherwise very well done.

Still, I'd recommend Greed Corp -- flaws and all. It's a strategy board game that feels right at home on iPad, and it outdoes much of its competition on the platform. I wouldn't get it solely for online multiplayer, but with a vast single-player campaign and support for up to four local players, it's a gem of a game for any other purpose. If you're on the fence, swing by our discussion thread for more opinions, but they're mostly glowing. Rightfully so. For a game that drags you into despicably greedy behavior, Greed Corp HD is gorgeous, well designed and fun.

You definitely aren't alone if you're confused by this move or wondering what exactly this thing is. All we have to go on at the moment aside from the vague press release boilerplate are images of the game's cards. My gut tells me that this will be a simple line-up and battle kind of game, like the one featured INSIDE of id's FPS Rage. Could be totally wrong, though.

What a weird announcement and idea, right? Also, wouldn't it be weird if Ubisoft just stopped here with these board game tie-ins? Then again, I don't make the big money decisions at these publishers who want iOS tie-ins or cross-overs.

[Via Kotaku]

BlueMarble doesn't have the cleanest translation, but if you've ever played either of the board games you won't have trouble falling into its rhythms. The first square gives you a nice chunk of cash, you visit places around the world and buy them, and build houses or hotels on them. Some squares cause you to lose money, and others win you more. There's even a jail, er, desert island.

Instead of fighting over who gets to play the hat and who will be the race car, BlueMarble lets you pick between adorable animated animals, blobs, robots and more. And you don't necessarily need to play until all the other players are bankrupt -- in single-player, the game usually goes for a certain number of rounds, at which point the player with the highest worth wins. You can also play until someone reaches a certain amount of money or total net worth.

But what really sets BlueMarble apart is the addition of collectable cards. In single-player, each match has a second condition to meet -- hitting it wins you a new card. You can also earn stickers, achievement-like meta game rewards that unlock new cards and avatars.

The cards replace "Chance," "Community Chest" or "Key" cards, depending on which game you're used to. You can build a deck of up to twelve cards (out of a possible 80 cards), and you'll always have three randomly-chosen cards available to you while you're playing. They cost marbles to use, and you earn marbles as you move around the board. But there's a catch -- it costs marbles to upgrade your lands too.

The cards let you do all sorts of things. Some are familiar -- one lets you leave the desert island instantly. Some are aggressive, letting you steal lands, marbles and cash from your opponents. Others are stranger, or reliant on luck. Deciding which to bring, when to use them and whether to save or spend your marbles adds a nice layer of strategy to a game that otherwise rides entirely on a roll of the dice.

The single-player levels are abundant, spanning six worlds, each with ten scenarios to master. The multiplayer, on the other hand, is sadly lacking. BlueMarble offers single-device multiplayer only, which isn't the best call for a non-iPad game. I'd love to see an iPad version -- the extra screen real estate would show off the candy-colored visuals beautifully, and I could see playing with friends on the big screen. Even more, I want online multiplayer. I'm not holding my breath, but an update that brought Game Center and its associated multiplayer is exactly what this game needs.

BlueMarble is currently on sale, so if you're considering buying it, do so while it's cheap. It's great fun, but without proper multiplayer integration it's probably not worth the higher asking price. If you share my fond memories of childhood games of Monopoly, though, and are looking for something that scratches that itch while actually entertaining, you won't do much better. Charming, cheerful and fun, BlueMarble does a great job of breaking the mold while not straying too far from its roots -- and you won't ever have to be the banker.

Settlers of Catan

So, what is this upcoming expansion? Cities and Knights, which is easily one of the most aggressive expansions of the bunch. In it, you’ll develop cities while using knights to attack other players as well as help opponents defend the world from barbarians from across the ocean. The expansion also ushers in new cards that bolster the overall vibe of the experience.

Overall, there are a lot of fine details in this package, so if you're really interested in Cities And Knights, the Wikipedia article on it should sate your hot desire to learn more.

It’s unknown at the moment whether this will be an IAP or simply a free update, but our dime is on the fact that it’ll cost some dough. And, really, why wouldn’t it considering the amount of stuff it adds to an aging game?

[Via Pocket Gamer]