Destrin

I'll probably go install this just to see what has changed since release. I haven't touched the game since the first release of the original Elemental, I always felt there was SOMETHING good lurking under the covers but the terrible interface obscured a lot of what might have been fun.

Quite late to the party on this thread, but here are some suggestions for you, these are in a vague 'difficulty curve' order to aid in progression but are all 2 player recommended (some of them 2p only!), welcome to the hobby : Battleship Galaxies - Don't be put off by the name, this is a great, fun reimagining of the original Battleship game that has some strategic depth. My only complaint is that the core game is a little unbalanced and it's in dire need of expansions. As new gamers you should easily get a lot of plays out of it before either of those things becomes an issue, though Khet - A bit of a 'boardgame nerds chess', I found this enjoyable for a few games, my GF refuses to play me now because she made a really embarrassing move once and she has now decided the game hates her! Ticket to Ride: The Card Game - A set collection game that can be brutal on your powers of recall. When playing this with my GF, we both get quieter and quieter as the game goes on as you have to 'card count' the piles you have scored that you aren't allowed to look at any more! Fun Agricola: All creatures great and small - the 2 player version of a great boardgame, I'd probably put this a bit further down the list, it's not very complicated but uses some mechanisms that might be tricky to get used to if you haven't played other, similar Euro style boardgames. One that might be best taught to you rather than reading from the rulebook maybe? A few acres of snow - Excellent 2 player, slightly abstract card driven wargame. Play this online at Yucata.de first and see what you think Washington's War - Very simple 'large scale' game representing the American War of Independence, I can't play this with my GF as the war theme doesn't interest her at all, but it's very well done. Twilight Struggle - One of the best two player strategy games there is, thoroughly enjoyable.

I've been as rubbish as others at trying to get around to my matches so in the interests of trying to keep things running, here are the outstanding matches still to play for Day 3: Div 1: Sacred Chilli v TJVS Div2: Riadsala v JammyJoker Archiel v CobraOB Div 4: Scamander v Majinmagics Sorbicol v Rollmeister Div 5: Orvidos v Destrin (:$) Orv, give me a shout here or on Steam with your user ID so we can fix up a game time!

Woo!

I would caution a buyer beware on this one. If you want to play San Juan against the AI, this is a very good port, nice clean graphics, nice interface, the only weirdness is they hide your hand away and you have to tap to bring it to the fore which is an odd UI choice but whatever. If you want to play multiplayer, don't bother. Pass and play is okay but suffers from the inherent issue that the game is hidden information, so works better on iphone pass and play than ipad where you want the view shared. Online multiplayer is realtime ONLY and requires gamecentre. If you lose connection mid game, tough, you will get dropped and replaced with an AI. I have yet to complete a game of this multiplayer, very disappointed

I know it's off at a slight tangent but I think the best unit customisation I've ever had the joy to partake in is that used in the board game Eclipse which uses a very simple system to control the customisation. You don't have much in the way of options but you are limited in how far you can customise as it takes an action to play with the ship components. I've seen some very varied ship designs crop up in that game despite the simplicity of the implementation.

Yes, it's a very odd approach, they could easily have made the ipad app universal and shared it across the whole platform, and I certainly don't understand why they need two apps for TTR: Pocket, but hey ho.

The iPhone application is separate. TTR: Europe has been available on the iPad TTR as an in app purchase since it released

I like the idea of reasonably small hexes that are grouped into continents (possibly centred on the pentagons?). I think you'd want something between those two images, depends on how many units are expecting to see on the board, personally I get fed up managing lots of units so I'd prefer a structure that didn't allow that many to exist on the world.

I'm definitely in for when that happens

I think I have much the same attitude as you to coding projects (I'm currently halfarsedly trying to get a Google App Engine version of Baltimore and Ohio written) I'm happy to contribute my apathy to this noble cause!

They REALLY need to fix some of the interface issues as well. If someone plays a 'units can only be hit on a 6' card on their turn, there is noway of knowing that unless you were paying very careful attention as the card went flying past your face. It's a fun game, I like it but I agree it's a tricky one to recommend at the moment.

And yet Civ 5 multiplayer was largely unplayable at launch, I'm a multiplayer only guy, I don't view Civ as a single player game at all, haven't done so since Civ 3 Play the World was released. Civ 5 had so many issues with synch errors in multi crashing game, you also couldn't save a game that was in progress. I'm amazed anyone made it through a game in this state pre-patches. I've enjoyed it thoroughly for good games since then.

I never manage any of my ships abilities in combat in Sins, just have them all set to auto use and I can fairly regularly steamroller the AI. I accept this is a different state of affairs playing against real people!

It sounds to me that you would definitely enjoy Alpha Centauri, and there is no excuse not to get it given how cheap it is on gog.com. Sins is realtime but it's 'slow' realtime, you will rarely gain much, if anything, in that game form being a fast micromanager, especially playing AI. I would recommend trying it, although sadly I'm not sure there is a demo available, which is a shame One other Realtime game which DOES have a demo is AI Wars, which I can thoroughly recommend, it's pausable and you can also control the time pace. If you set the combat to 'slow' and slow the time right down you have enough time to consider your actions. Consider those recommendations on how you might find a realtime game that you enjoy