Terra Mystica

While not perfect, the game does run as it is supposed to. There are glitches yet they are mostly visual and do not impact gameplay mechanics. And as mentioned in other reviews, the tutorial isn’t quite as helpful as it could be. It helped to give a basic understanding of the game’s mechanics but I still had to read the online pdf version of the rules to feel like I understood what all the symbols meant in the various panels. I haven’t tried the online multiplayer and can’t speak for that. Overall, it is a good adaptation that has room for improvement. For the price it is a decent way to “test” the game and see if you might like it or Gaia Project (the arguably better follow up to Terra Mystica with similar mechanics) as an addition to your physical collection.

Minus one star because of two things; errors and ease of use. The errors, I get sometimes after completing my turn. You have to start the app over again for it to work. Then you have to take the action again. It’s always worked after two tries. The second thing is that there are a lot of menus to check through. If I start to take an action I don’t have certain information available to me quickly. For example if I want to build or upgrade and I forgot how many workers I had I would have to close the screen, check my workers and potentially my income for future actions, etc. I wish it was all right there. On the positive side, the game looks and feels just like it’s analog counterpart. Great job with the look and feel. Works pretty well on my iPhone 7 and doesn’t require a massive screen to play.

EDIT: this review has been bumped up because the developers have pointed out that when a player "times out," they can still rejoin the game until another player boots them. However, I've been the player to boot someone for timing out, and the dialog for doing so indicates that I am just acknowledging that another player timed out. This UX should require a confirmation of "are you sure you want to replace USER with an AI?" I still stand by my review that we should be able to select the timeout clock duration when creating a game, but the app is not useless, given what I've learned. Just unsatisfactory. ------ Original review: This app is useless for asynchronous play. I've yet to have a game where nobody times out and gets replaced by the AI. Gonna stick will the browser implementation by Snellman until the devs give users an option to undo an opponent's timeout or disable or extend the game clock when creating a game.