There are many board games in the App Store. Scrabble, Risk, Clue, you name it. As these are all very popular games, owning a digital version while most likely owning a physical version doesn’t really make that much sense. What you need is a board game you don’t already have. What you need is Carcassonne.
Carcassonne is a board game that focuses solely on the creation of the world in which you play in. Starting with a single tile, players will lay tiles down one by one to expand the world. Tiles include pieces of roads, cities, individual buildings, and patches of grass, all of which have a great importance to where they’re played as your goal is to complete and claim the roads and cities you begin to construct.
The game is really simple to learn, and has limitless strategy as the world changes greatly with every round you play. While I would normally recommend actually purchasing the game at a store, dropping $30 on a game you might not enjoy seems like a real risk.
What does make sense is purchasing the app for $10, much less frightening than wasting the $30. However, with the app comes benefits that the physical version does not have. Saving high scores, playing online when no one else wishes to play with you, and tallying up the points automatically make the $10 purchase less of a duplicate of the real game, and more of a feature filled extension.
Now don’t think you’re paying $10 for a half-baked digital revision of the game. Its developers The Coding Monkeys spent a lot of work on making the game look not only beautiful, but efficient. The game mechanics work well, the AI is challenging and fun to play with, and the entire application has a medieval wood and tapestry look to it. They definitely pulled it off well.
I personally enjoy Carcassonne now that I have both the iOS version that I play on my iPad and iPhone, and the real version that I play when my family joins in. I don’t regret the purchase of the app as there would be no other way to beat my friends while they’re not even here.
Click here to download Carcassonne
Do you play any board games on your iOS device? Which ones?
