This is the second in a four part series on Terra Mystica. In today’s entry I’ll talk about using the Terra Mystica App. It is available forr Android or iOS, but my review will be based on using Android.
Professor discovered the Terra Mystica app and played a game against an AI, then we played a local game together.
Right now the app only has easy AI opponents, but they’re working on adding medium and hard. The game also has tutorials, but since we’ve played the board game, we skipped those.
The app has the option to select the Basic map or Loon Lakes. There are other options as well like playing with the expansion’s passing rules. In the original game the first player to pass becomes the first player for the next round, then game play passes to the left as usual. In the expansion (Fire & Ice), the first to pass still becomes first player, but the next person to pass becomes second, and so on. Since it was just the two of us playing, we couldn’t test out this new passing rule. We did, however, decide to try out Loon Lakes, which is a bit of a crazy map, and definitely seems like it would be good for a race like the Mermaids (or the Riverwalkers from the expansion).
Obviously because it’s an app, a lot of stuff is taken care of for you. You don’t have to remember to put coins on the bonus tiles, and it prompts you to take a favor token after building a temple. It automatically gives you your income and manages your resources.
Because there’s only so much room on the screen, you mainly see the map area of the board, and a mini version of the player boards. There are other icons around the edges to show you things like the special actions available, the Cult board, the goals for the rounds, etc. You tap your player board to see your available actions. If you have power that can be sacrificed to perform an action, the game tells you it’s an option and let’s you know how much power will be sacrificed to carry out that action.
For the most part game play is just like the board game.
Probably because Professor and I have played so much, turns went pretty quickly. Instead of taking my turn and coming back to it in a while, I usually ended up playing for several turns, and we decided to finish the game sitting side by side on our couch.
There are a few bugs they’re still working out. Professor had trouble with the adjacency rule. He built a bridge so that he would have adjacency to my buildings, but the game wasn’t recognizing it at first. After a few rounds he was able to do what he wanted, but he was frustrated with it for a while. He sent in a bug report, so hopefully they can fix that. They’ve already done one update for the game, so it seems like they’re on top of things.
In the next entry, I’ll discuss playing Terra Mystica on Tabletopia.