4th
Carcassonne is a classic board-tile game, and it’s now on the iPhone thanks to the excellent work of The Coding Monkeys. Great design, great new features, and best of all, within seconds I forgot I was playing an “iPhone port of a board game”.
Don’t worry - this isn’t a time-sucking social RPG. It’s a fairly simple game (with infinite possibilities, of course) so a very casual gamer such as myself can get into it in one play.
I have to agree. This is by far the best board game implementation I’ve ever played on the iPhone, and the game it’s based on is very, very good. When you consider that the iPad version is going to be a free update, this is well worth your five bucks.
Experienced players will notice a few significant gameplay differences from the tabletop edition: there’s a button that shows you exactly which types of tiles are left in the “bag,” and how many of each. Before you place each tile, the game highlights all the places it could go, and whenever an open space can’t be occupied by any remaining tile, the game draws an × there. These features remove any advantage you might gain by memorizing the tile distribution and save you the trouble of counting up what’s already been played, which is enormously helpful in a situation where, say, only that one tile with the bent road and the diagonal city wall will save you.
Some people will probably object to that data being shown — the official Scrabble app doesn’t tell you when all the U’s have been played, for example — but I think it improves the game. It’s information that’s available to all players anyway, so why not just put it right there on the table? At the cost of changing the experience slightly, you get a game where the strategy is tightly focused on finding the best move rather than counting tiles.
That’s what a good adaptation should do: be faithful to the original, but only when the medium doesn’t afford an opportunity to improve on it.
