Not Stopping Believing

It’s really hard to play a solid game of Dungeon & Dragons on the commuter rail. The polyhedral dice bouncing everywhere, fitfully sleeping commuters knocking your limited edition dwarf figurines around, you know what I’m talking about. Thank the sweet Lords for the nerdish privacy of my iPhone. I could be checking my resurgent blue chips and terminating subordinates with this thing for all you know.

Sword and Poker [app store] claims to be the #1 downloaded app in Japan, and I love the Japanese. Add a good review from Jay Is Games, and that’s enough for me to drop a dollar. The gameplay is perfect for commuting. It’s basically playing poker: they give you nine cards in the center for you to tic-tac-toe off of with two cards from your hand. Instead of the usual monetary reward, every time you score a decent hand, your little guy bludgeons a troll. The better the hand, the more deadly your attack. Vegas with fantasy violence.

Here's me on Level 4, fighting a walking rutabega or something. I've placed one of my cards, and am about to place my second.

It’s a remarkably solid game. The artwork is good and the AI is decent. Turns out monsters are pretty good poker players. If you quit out, it resumes your game where left off; a simple feature, but often frustratingly absent in more expensive apps (Dragon’s Lair, Hootsuite). Progressive tweaks in gameplay keep things interesting; there are “spells” to switch card order, ways to steal cards from your opponent, treasure chests to discover, and so on.

A few adjustments would really make this game sing. A turn timer would be be great; as it is, you can spend all day staring at the board to find the perfect move. Adding a little panic would be great. And the opponents all seem to behave at the same level of difficulty. But for a buck download, Sword and Poker is a cheap way to let your freak flag quietly fly.