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Everdell is a competitive board game about trying to build the best fantasy forest city teeming with animal citizens and valuable structures. Conceptually and structurally it borrows from some of the most beloved and long-standing board and tabletop games out there, but I'm not sure Everdell makes its component parts fit together as well as they should, nor does this digitized version of it really help its case.

Green cities

As a worker placement game, Everdell is one of the least complicated board games in terms of knowing how to make moves. In each game, players take turns sending their little minions out to do a task as represented by a space on the board. Occupying that space grants specific rewards, like a certain amount of a resource, the ability to draw cards, or a way to complete special actions that reward victory points.

Victory points are the ultimate currency of Everdell, as the player at the end of the game with the most wins. Of course, to rack up points you'll need to think about what kinds of buildings and villagers you want to add to your city, both of which can also grant rewards and other resources that can empower you to earn points. You have to plan all of this carefully, though, as you have a limited amount of city space and only four seasons (rounds) to try and complete your city.

Drafting duels

Between the city-building concept and the worker placement mechanics, Everdell reminds me of a hybrid of two of my absolute favorite board/tabletop games: Dominion and Lords of Waterdeep. These games also have relatively simple rules in terms of how to play them, but their interchangeable parts and competitive design make decision-making and figuring out why to make certain moves at certain times against certain opponents a deep and satisfying exercise every time you play.

That said, I find Everdell's spin on these popular and celebrated ideas to be a little too abstract. There's an internal logic at work assigning point values to cards and actions, but it isn't intuitive beyond understanding that the game designers needed to balance the game. As a result, each turn feels like an agonizing exercise in trying to tease out what my best course of action might be, all while Everdell's woodland fantasy backdrop does very little to help me figure things out.

Scroll through the woods

To its credit, this digital version of Everdell is quite eye-catching, with polygonal critter game pieces moving around a colorfully rendered forest that acts as the game board. There are also a ton of options for playing, including online multiplayer (though not much action is there), pass-and-play, and even some challenge modes that create special rules that traditional matches of Everdell don't follow.

All of this seems purposely designed for someone who is already very familiar with Everdell, though. The tutorial doesn't feel like it goes into strategy considerations enough to help newcomers succeed, and the pleasing visuals of the game board shoves some other UI elements that might be helpful aside or out of the game completely. Having to scroll around the screen to see what other players are doing, objectives you're working toward, or even having to tap and hold on cards to get a full view of them just feels unnecessarily difficult, especially when playing on an iPad that could accommodate a little more visual information more comfortably.

The bottom line

The iOS version of Everdell definitely feels like a tool for folks who already enjoy the board game to do so on-the-go. Even in this capacity, though, the game does feel a little overly clunky and the online multiplayer is hardly existent, which limits its appeal.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/everdell-review/

Hindsight is the latest game from the creative mind behind Prune, though you wouldn't necessarily be able to figure that out without someone telling you. In fairness, over the better part of a decade since Prune released (2015) a lot has changed. Funnily enough, Hindsight is all about reacting to changes and processing the past once things aren't what they used to be anymore. It's an ambitious subject matter to tackle and I appreciate Hindsight's willingness to explore the space, even though I don't think it entirely works well.

Cleaning house

The story of Hindsight follows a woman who is revisiting her childhood home under tragic circumstances. Her mother has recently passed away, and now she is packing up all of the things left behind, which obviously stirs up a lot of memories and emotions for her.

The game presents this introspection by storing memories in objects, which you as the player activate and flow between by rotating your view around a scene and catching a reflection or shadow that you can tap on to move into. For example, you may see a teapot in kitchen that—at the right angle—reflects a view of the dining room with the woman’s full family family eating dinner years ago. Tapping on that sucks you into that memory where there are other objects that you can manipulate your view of to take you through to even more new memories.

Puzzling perspective

As you bounce between time periods and vignettes through various objects, the woman narrates an internal monologue about her life and her relationships with her parents and how they shifted over the years. You see everything from casual hangouts in the yard to piano recitals and vacations. The story told across all of these scenes is deeply personal and rife with nuance that extends beyond the surface-level tragedy of losing a caregiver.

Similarly, the ways you find paths forward into new memories get increasingly complicated and–at times–fractured between different objects you can explore in any order you want. Between chapters in the game, you also get to choose a single object to pack into your personal bag to take with you, which doubles as a moment of reflection for the player to think back to which aspects of the experience resonate the most with them.

Grief is messy

I appreciate for the kind of storytelling Hindsight aims for. More games should go out and attempt quieter, introspective experiences. That said, there were times where Hindsight's components didn't really click into place.

Most of this happened when a particular puzzle was a bit too obtuse to figure out, killing the momentum and sense of flow between these memories. Some puzzles even resulted in me putting down the game. To my surprise, when resuming the game, Hindsight went ahead and skipped whatever puzzle I was on for me, which was nice, but jarring. There are also some moments where the delivery of the narrator is so flat or overly philosophical that the dramatic aspects of them got muddled or lost.

The bottom line

Hindsight is at its best when you're cascading between memories and objects and following a steady stream of consciousness. When it stops due to trying to spot the right glowing object or because you're trying to parse what the narrator means, it loses some of its magic and feels a lot more like a standard perspective-based puzzle game. Luckily, this doesn't happen too often, and the game has some ability to put you back on track if you find yourself getting derailed by its rougher edges.

Source link:https://www.148apps.com/reviews/hindsight-review/