Let's Play! Oink Games

I wish there were more pictures to choose from.

My family loves OINK travel games: they are so clever, well-designed, beautifully rendered and compact for travel. 5 stars for the real physical thing. This app seems to take the original board games and move them online beautifully, which is perfect for our needs at this stage in life — we can carry our favorite games, without carrying 3-4 boxes with us. The app itself seems beautifully designed and the games so far appear faithful to their physical variants. Each board game is purchased as an additional module within the core app, and the prices appear OK (I wish it was $2 per game, rather than $3, but fair enough). I am excited to test this out further, and I suspect my kids will love it. Well done *again,* OINK!

For starters, I should say that on this app I have only played the free Deep Sea Adventure game and the one game I purchased, Scout. I own and like the IRL versions of both of these, but got the app for practice and for when I felt like a game but had no live players around. I win both games in the app a little more frequently than average, which suggests that I’m either a very good player (doubtful) or that the AI is an average-at-best player (more likely). That’s fine; I lose enough that playing doesn’t feel trivial — in my opinion the AI is good enough. I attempted to play other live human players in the app, but that hasn’t worked. I suspect it’s not a problem with the app itself, but rather just a lack of people using it. Thus an Incomplete grade for network play. The one downside is that when I leave the app midgame and open enough other apps on my phone that the app has to be pulled from memory, the state of my game is not saved. Just about every other board game app I’ve played saves the game state as app data, so that you don’t lose a game you’re in the middle of. It seems like it should be a relatively minor update to fix this, and save users like me some frustration. All that said, a solid 3 stars; and at some point I’ll likely make more game purchases in the app (especially if the saved-game suggestion gets implemented.