CR
Craig
2017-12-13 18:22 UTC
#1
BoardGameGeek.com has launched their community vote for the top ten digital board game implementations. This is your cue to go let them know how much you love Sentinels and Bottom of the 9th!
BoardGameGeek.com has launched their community vote for the top ten digital board game implementations. This is your cue to go let them know how much you love Sentinels and Bottom of the 9th!
That link doesn’t seem to work for me.
Ah yes. I'm a dumb. It's been fixed!
Dear entropy, that is a bad way to host that poll.
Edit: So, I wasn't logged in, filled it all out, and then it lost my entries and told me to log back in.
Yeah, I don't think I have the energy to go through that again...
Interesting to see what's doing well. Sentinels has a 20% share after my vote, that's pretty good!
Thank you for saving us.
Just voted now. Sentinels has dropped to 17.10% (18th place with about 800 votes in). The top 20 games are currently:
Weird, Elder Sign is the only other board game app I've played that I'd put on par with Sentinels in having the perfect blend of presentation and usability, but apparently it's not even on anybody's map.
Pandemic has great presentation but there's areas where the presentation gets in the way of usability. Ditto for Star Realms, Ticket to Ride, and Galaxy Trucker. (Meanwhile Onirim is technically good at both but suffers from the gameplay itself being IMHO kinda shallow and boring.) Other games have good usability but are pretty generic on presentation.
Onirim's expansions are pretty good, but the base game itself can be kind of bland.
I've heard good things (from multiple parties), but I have never played the app and so couldn't justify voting for it. And that's speaking as a long-standing HPL fan. The original physical game had some problems, which probably put a lot of people off trying the app.
The app actually fixes a LOT of the problems people have with the base game. I believe the more recent expansions for the physical games are based on the app.
@Blackfang108: I had wondered if Onirim's expansions made it a bit less bland but had been reluctant to drop money on a game I wasn't feeling. Now you're making me think I should reconsider, though.
As for Elder Sign, I admit I've never played the actual ink & cardboard game. But the app was one of (if not the, my memory's a little fuzzy on that call) first board game apps I tried, and it used to be my favorite to play up until I discovered Sentinels. It's an utterly beautiful app with flavor in every nook and cranny and yet the UI is still clean and easy to use, and I find the gameplay to be interesting, sometimes frustrating but never to the point where I feel tempted to throw my tablet.
If I had to pick a third I'd probably go for Pandemic as the usability issues are more annoying than outright gamebreakers and it's otherwise a charm. (Like I wish there was a way to mute the disaster siren without having to turn off the SFX completely. Being jump scared is kinda fun the first couple times but gets wearying after that.)
I picked up Elder Sign at Gen Con when it was first released. There were some serious balance issues - much like Arkham Horror it specified that it could play 1-8 players, but we quickly found out that if you had more than, say, 4 people playing it simultaneously had way too much downtime between the turns of any one player and, due to each character having their own static set of starting gear, it became a cakewalk to actually win. Additionally, several of the event cards were just poorly designed (I understand the first expansion came with replacements for several of them - it just never got enough play for me to bother picking up anything after the base game even when available, though).
I'm super happy Patchwork is in the top 20, I love it to bits and used to play it a lot before I had a kiddo.
I soured on Onirim quickly - when I realized it was "shuffle luck, the game", it got less appealing.
I like Splendor but it has fallen into disrepair since Asmodee took it over. Some of the challenges are outright broken and the multiplayer needs work.
Two of the games I play the most often aren't even listed because they've been delisted from the App Store due to the pseudo-death of Playdek. To get to 10, I had to tack on Pandemic and Forbidden Island and Desert, all of which are nice adaptations but aren't as fun to replay as other stuff.
Why is Banner Saga on this list?
Yeah, that was pretty much my meh-ness with Onirim. It had a lot of promised strategic possibilities but was so governed by luck that most of them never came into play.
I admit I'm a little sour grapes on Splendor on that while it's a nicely-crafted app, I have yet to figure out how to be even mediocre at the game itself. [sheepish look]
And yeah, I am confused about that too. I know the list stretched to "apps that are board-game-like but aren't adaptations of cardboard board games", but Banner Saga is just straight up an RPG. FTL also leaves me scratching my head. (Guild of Dungeoneering I think is close enough to board game mechanics to count, though.)
Yeah, I got the complete Onirim for a song a couple of years ago for my Valentine's gift to my now-fiancee. It's a little more fun with 2 people, too.
I got Elder Sign and Unseen Forces all at once, and the first expansion really does add to the game (though, unlike Arkham Horror, Curse isn't terribly bad and Bless is not quite OP). The Winter expansion is BRUTAL.
Both of those get a fair bit of play at our place, along with Pixel Tactics (Nabbed during the Kickstarter), the Dresden Files game, and the Tiny Epic series. I play Sentinels mostly digitally now.
Munchkin would get more play if it wasn't just the two of us. (My fiancee LOVES Munchkin.)
I'll be honest, I never realized digital board game conversions were such a big thing. I kind of voted for a half-dozen or so games I've actually played (like Elder Sign), but only the Handelabra apps have I actually seen the apps of.
@TakeWalker: If you want board game app suggestions, I'm happy to oblige.
Seconded, I've got two dozen board/card games on my iPad.
Alas, Sentinels did not win. Or even place.
On the plus side, one of the other apps I voted for "won"!
It’s on Dave’s list
Yes, yes it did. But this is not the thread about Dave's backhanded compliment. It's the community vote.
Star Realms won, really? I played through its campaign, barely (got it in a Humble Bundle), but didn't find it to be all that great. It's too easy to optimize mathematically, so games come down to not much more than Candyland once you've played enough games to figure it out.
What do you mean “backhanded compliment?” I didn’t see any comments from him, just the list.
@MindWanderer: Going by what people picked in the end, it seems to be basically really a "what games are most popular" list rather than necessarily a "what games are best implemented" list. Which I admit doesn't surprise me terribly and isn't even necessarily inherently bad ("These are the games everybody plays" is still useful information), but I wish sites would be more explicit in pointing that sort of difference.
Props, though, to the Dave person for being the only one to list both Sentinels and Elder Sign.
Jeez. Do you have a link to his full review?
Dave's opening line in his review of it in the gift guide is
"When Handelabra released Sentinels of the Multiverse back in 2014 they did the unthinkable: they made Sentinels playable."
As I said at the time (I thought here, but it turns out it was on the discord server)
"Ow. Just Ow"
EDIT: Made it clear that the quoted line was not the whole review
I find it funny that he admits he's never won a game.
Yeah, that seems a little... weird for anyone with any sort of minimal experience with card/board games. (I mean, I won the digital tutorial itself as the first Sentinels game I ever played, having had experience with MTG beforehand.)
Then again, the Steam Achievements for the game show that apparently only 43% of players have gotten the "Win a battle" achievement, so... yeah I dunno. Even accounting for the inevitability of many players who acquire the game and stick it in their backlog and take forever to get around to it, maybe the game really is just that hard for the average player?
I wouldn't say it's hard at all, but I suppose we should take into account that not everyone can focus on playing more than one hero at a time. Also, if someone's just dropping into the game then they aren't going to be as familiar with the decks as someone who went from the tabletop to the digital varsion.
But still, don't most achievements revolve around winning at least one game?
Yeah, but those have even lower compliance as it turns out.
The highest percentage achievement that requires winning a battle is the one you get for defeating all four core villains, with 12.2% of everyone having achieved it. (Win a game in each core environment is close behind with 11.9%.)
The highest variant that requires winning a game is Mad Bomber Blade with 5.6% achievement.
Achievements were added to the game after launch, so there would be a set of players who have the game (and won games) but stopped playing before that.
To vote for your favorite digital board games like Sentinels and Bottom of the 9th, you’ll need to follow these steps:
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Good luck supporting your favorite digital board games!