Best iPhone iPad Games

These are the board games coming out for iPad and iPhone.  They better all have an iPad version or I’ll be ticked.

Wits and Wagers bgg coming out for iPhone October 2010 by North Star Games.

Neuroshima Hex bgg tactical 4 player war game programmed by Portal Publishing and Big Daddy’s Creations

Tichu bgg one of the best 4 player partnership card games. Programmed by Steve Blanding who brought us Mu card game on iphone / iPad.

Settlers of Catan bgg ipad version coming soon

Five below all programmed by Condito’s company.
Tikal bgg and El Grande bgg by Wolfgang Kramer
Brief History of the World bgg by Ragnar Brothers
Le Havre bgg by Uwe Rosenberg’s
Age of Industry bgg by Martin Wallace

Reiner Knizia has following coming out:
Medici bgg , Ra bgg and Tigris & Euphrates bgg programmed by Condito’s company

Samurai bgg programmed by Conlan Rios brought us Wriggle, Knizia’s Robot Master, Knights of Charlemagne, and Monumental.
High Society bgg and Kingdoms bgg programmed by Shannon Appelcline who did Knizia’s Money for iphone / iPad.
Through the Desert bgg programmed by TribeFlame who did Keltis Oracle for iphone/ iPad.

Board Game apps  I currently enjoy on iPad are:
Carcassone, Zooloretto, Keltis Oracle, Mu, Small World, Honey That’s Mine, Gipsy King, Knizia Money, Dead Man’s Dice, Kachina, Roll Through the Ages, Blokus HD, Pathology HD, Rush Hour, Quoridor.

(bolded games mean they are iPad version or are universal iphone / iPad games)

Only took about a month till a hack solution was found to this ridiculous problem Apple created in their update of Snow Leopard 10.6.3.  Still could use webcam for iChat or Photobooth or Quicktime but not for Skype video, Yahoo chat video or Google chat video (third party apps trying to access USB 2.0 webcams).  Solution is download this QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer.component.zip 246KB and unzip it and copy it to your Macintosh HD/System/Library/Quicktime overwriting your current one.  Problem solved no need to reboot or anything.

Well back in the day I bought my 400GB for $200 each.  I’ve probably had four or five die on me last few years both Seagate and Western Digital.  Even though data was safe in my ReadyNAS through the years I attritube failure to heat.  Those puppies would get 65 C/ 149 F that is as hot as hell is I’m sure.

Seagate used to be fine but evidently last year or so many reports they suck too.  So who is the new king? Samsung check out 1.5TB drive at 23 C / 73 F or even 27 C / 80 F which is lower than Western Digital 33C / 91 F. So 23 C or 33C? Yea I’ll take the 10 C cooler one.  Next step is get five more Samsumg 1.5TB hds top populate both my ReadyNAS devices.  So grats to those Koreans as Samsung seems to be putting out the coolest 1.5TB harddrives which is critical for longterm life.

Update Feb 2010 now got all 1.5TB drives and Samsung still running cooler than Western Digital.

Recently cable provider decided to bump all from 6Mbps to 10Mbps $55/month. I decided to bump from 10Mbps to 18Mbps for $67/month.  Still though not fair since San Diego gets 25Mbps for $57/month.  However, still 25Mbps is still behind Japan.  In 2006 used fiber there from a neighbor let me share his fiber connection ($60/month he said he paid for fiber) for 2 months and got 100Mbps (12.5MB/s).  America is still at twice as slow (50Mbps compared to 100Mbps) Japan and Korea.

NAS I can transfer via gigabit 1000Mbps (theoritical 125MB/s) huge files at 21MB/sec.

Now if I was on 10/100 Ethernet max is 12.5MB/s. Not getting 10 times more as harddrives are the bottleneck but twice the speed I believe it’s worth it.  Although my hard drive is so busy downloading stuff and unraring it I think I like just unrarring it directly to my NAS which done at 7MB/sec.

I know technically this is approximations but for all intensive purposes the following is correct.

1000KB = 1MB (3.5 inch floppy 1.44MB, CD 700MB, email attachment 10MB limit)
1000MB = 1GB (DVD 4.4GB, DVD-9 dual-layer 8.5GB, 4GB Memory, BluRay disc 25GB)
1000GB = 1TB (1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB hard drives)

CD/DVD/Bluray read/write speeds.
36X CD speed = 5.3MB/s
4X DVD speed = 5.4MB/s
1X BluRay speed = 4.5MB/s

Internet connection speeds
56Kbps = 7KB/s (remember dial up days from 1995, got DSL in 1997)
64Kbps = 8KB/s (ISDN ring a bell anyone, maybe was 128Kbps)
512Kbps = 64KB/s
1024Kbps = 128KB/s
3G (1,000Kbps) = 125KB/s (yea iphone is slow)
1.5Mbps = 192KB/s (some DSL still at this speed and T1s)
6Mbps = 800KB/s (cable and maybe DSL)
10Mbps = 1.3MB/s (cable)
18Mbps = 2.3MB/s (cable)
25Mbps = 3.1MB/s (cable)
50Mbps = 6.3MB/s (cable)
100Mbps = 12.5MB/s (fiber, 10/100Mbps ethernet)
1000Mbps = 125MB/s (if all switches, routers are gigabit ethernet)

Time to download 10GB bluray.
1.5Mbps = 15 hrs
6Mbps = 3 hrs 45 mins
10Mbps = 2 hrs 30 mins
18Mbps = 1 hr 15 mins
25Mbps = 1 hr
50Mbps = 30 mins
100Mbps = 15mins

Time to copy 10GB bluray to NAS
unrar on the fly 7MB/s = 24 mins
10/100 ethernet 12MB/s = 14 mins
7200rpm 21MB/s = 8 mins

In the Year of the Dragon game I just decided I wanted to learn since I play Samurai on mabiweb and read how cutthroat and competitive it is.  Well hot dang this game seems pretty hard to teach let alone learn but hopefully I can point you in the right direction. First print out these one page PDFs except perhaps official rules wish you can read over quickly. Credit for PDFs you can find at bgg entry for Year of the Dragon.  12 rounds and each round consists of four phases (all players do each phase before next phase):

1. Action – Taxes, Build, Harvest, Fireworks Display, Military Parade, Research, Privilege
2. Persons – Monk, Builder, Farmer, Healer, Warrior, Scholar, Tax Collector, Pyrotechnist, Courty Lady
3. Event – Peace, Drought, Contagion, Mongol Invasion, Imperial Tribute, Dragon Festival. Decay occurs end of phase.
4. Scoring – 1 VP for each palace, each courty lady, and each privilege. Also there is end game scoring.

yotd_reference.pdf 957KB one page – shows actions and events and quick phase description.
yotd_player_aid.pdf 166KB one page – shows 9 persons with related 7 Actions and and 6 events
yotd_quickref.pdf 63KB one page – quick summary of rules
yotd_gamerules.pdf 4.35MB 8 pages – official rules from Rio Grande Games.

Showing screenshot of In Year of the Dragon game in progress on mabiweb.

Now before you play on mabiweb.com you may wish to learn In the Year of the Dragon playing a flash version (my mirror) versus AI opponents.

Hoity Toity by same guy who did Settlers of Catan is one of my favorite bluffing games.  It’s really a love or hate game for sure. Definitely doesn’t win in the graphic department at least the online implementation.  Actual board game has decent graphics though. Object of game is to advance the furthest along the game board. On your turn you can either go to the Castle or Auction House. All players decide together and actions are revealed simultaneously.

In the Auction House you can choose to play a check or a thief.  If you play the highest check amount you get to choose between the two exhibition cards.  If a player choses a thief they steal the check played this round unless of course there are two are more thieves then no thieves steal anything.

In the Castle you can Exhibit your cards which must be at least 3 consecutive for instance AAB or BCD or BCCD or CDEEF.  If you have the best exhibit or 2nd best exhibit you advance based on the two numbers on the board where the lead player is currently. However, when you exhibit you could have someone who played a thief steal from an exhibition card from you.  Thieves can be caught and thrown in jail if you play a detective.  Detectives advance using a catch up mechanism.  If your in 4th place you advance 4 spaces forward for instance.  Game ends when one player reaches the dinner table (pink section) and all players reveal their collections. Player with most valuable collection advances 8 spaces and 2nd most valuable collection advances 4 spaces.

Hacienda also on spielbyweb is a game where you use land cards and animals cards to claim your land.  You score points by connecting three or more land tiles.  Connecting animals to markets gives you point bonuses too.  Water tiles and haciendas you can purchase for $12 each and give you additional points.

Santigo is probably one of the nastiest and pure screw your neighbor boardgames I own.  For that reason alone I love it.  Usually I’ll only play it with 5 players as I believe that’s the best to play with.  In real life money is hidden but the online version it’s not hidden. Five plantation tiles are laid out like bananas, peas, potatoes, etc. which players bid on or pass.  Can never bid the same amount as another player.  Whoever wins the bid gets first dibs on plantation tile of their choice and places one or two workers on the plantation and places it where they think water will run lest it dry up.  Canal overseer is one player who passes first and all others can if they wish bribe that person.

Scoring is done at the end of the game which is your money in your hand plus the income earned from harvest.  All plantations that have water produce their respective fruit / vegetables. Income is your number of workers times base of your plantation.  As you can see green color (mrbass) has four workers on peas and there are 7 pea plantations all connected there I get 4 x 7 = 28 as seen below in the scoring screenshot.

Reiner Knizia Amun-Re online is quite a complicated game to explain with lots of rules.  So I suggest you get a few other games under your belt before even attempting this one.  Let’s just say you bid on provinces for each of the six rounds.  You score in the third round and sixth round.  Pyramids score you points, depending where your provinces are could score you points (upper or lower Egypt, west or east of the Nile River).  Farmers give you income.  Sacrifice money to the gods to determine where the temple will go or steal 3 gold from farmers.  Each round has six phases. There are power cards.  Quite the game but it’s extremely interesting the mathematical computations one must make.  Love it.