What IOS games have you been playing?

The new Galaxy Trucker iPad app just came out yesterday. It's $5 for the first two weeks, then the price jumps up to ... $10, I think.

The app is very slick. I had some problems with the tutorial crashing, but I eventually gave up and jumped into a regular game (I already know how to play the game, so I didn't really need the tutorial anyway). Games have been rock-solid so far. The animations are neat, and the humor from the boardgame is all there.

And it's definitely Galaxy Trucker in all its capricious, whimsical chaos. In my first game, the second-to-last card knocked out my sole remaining engine. No problem, only one card left, right? And man, I had a shitload of cargo to sell! Last card ... Open Space. I have no engines, so I'm out of the race.

My only complaint about the app so far is that it moves almost a little TOO quickly. I know that's a weird complaint, but the app just whizzes through the Meteor Swarm cards so fast it's almost hard to follow what happened.

(Thaks, Joebot, for dragging this back to the front page. I'm too lazy to dig for it.)

I've been playing Star Realms on the iPad Mini. The Star Realms page says that one of its designers designed Ascension as well, and it shows. It's got money cards and combat cards, which are either permanents or use-and-discard cards. It looks like Ascension with the serial numbers filed off. But the faction cards bonus makes the game just different enough from Ascension to be worth it. I really need to switch iPads with my daughter, though. The Mini's screen is a little too small for the game (and others). I'm getting old, and can't read Flyspeck 3 anymore.

Hey, I have a dumb question.

Is Year Walk a game where you're going to want to take notes on paper? I ask because I tried it a while back and it seemed like it, so I stopped for them. I tend to play iPad games in bed just before going to sleep and taking notes would be cumbersome there.

No

Papers, Please is on iPad: itunes.apple.com/us/app/papers-please/id935216956?mt=8

Hard to describe this in a way that sounds entertaining, but it definitely is. You are the guard at a border station in a fictional Eastern European country, and you have to examine the papers of everyone coming through. The game gets progressively harder in a way that you can keep up with, and also gets more interesting. Not sure it'll have too much longevity for me, but for now it is very engaging and hard to put down. I thought something felt familiar about it and then finally recognized the art style as that of the great Helsing's Fire , which I also loved. So that's two big hits from the same developer, and each very unique.

Legomancer wrote: Hey, I have a dumb question.

Is Year Walk a game where you're going to want to take notes on paper? I ask because I tried it a while back and it seemed like it, so I stopped for them. I tend to play iPad games in bed just before going to sleep and taking notes would be cumbersome there.

itunes.apple.com/app/year-walk-companion/id597879895?mt=8

theres a companion app which I think is supposed to help


Papers Please is great but I think I'm done with it now

I love HELSING'S FIRE! Those hand slaps at the end of each round are a crack up. I had no idea PAPERS PLEASE was from the same troupe.

Gary Sax mentioned 80 DAYS on the video game thread, but I haven't had a chance at that one yet either.

I finished DEVICE 6, which was a cool exercise in ergodic gaming. Mostly I have been back to puttering with ASCENSION.

Yes, the Helsing's Fire hand slaps! They always cracked me up. Man, now I think I'll have to play that game through again...

Papers doesn't have the kind of humor that Helsing's Fire had throughout, but there's a little, and it's more that it carries a similar style or feel to it. And like Helsing's Fire, which was a totally unique type of game, Papers is also very one-of-a-kind compared to every other type of game out there. It's a pretty basic memory and observational thing, but put together in a very fun way. I do find myself cursing with aggravation whenever that printout comes up telling me I missed something, though. Arrrghh.

Device 6 was pretty interesting. I'm just trying a voice-control game called Mayday Deep Space. Will report back later...

yes! the fucking printer, and that perfect second delay between them leaving the booth and you're like did I rush that, nah, it was perfect, FUCK wrong gender or some shit. Sometimes wonder if those touches are just happy accidents or did someone experiment with that delay because its absolutely fucking spot on.

80 Days is so good. Having played it several time (I fucking DIED the last time!!!) there is a lot of stuff in it. Lots of little corner cases that only happen once in a blue moon. So even though there's a little sense of deja vu if you hit the same place you've been before, there is a point. If you choose different dialog choices, totally different things CAN happen, unlike most games that have a dialog tree but the choices don't really matter except for flavor. It took looking online at some examples of the bizarre shit that can happen to realize all of that.