When our family board game night got cancelled, I sampled digital spins on the classics instead. I’m not sure I should have bothered – with one exception…
I
don’t play video game versions of board games. Why would you? The whole point of video games is to be faster, more visually arresting, and less reliant on other humans than old games played with dice and cards. But a recent family board game night was derailed by clashing schedules and family civil war, so I spent a Saturday night trying them out on the iPhone instead.
I started with Uno because that is the old family staple. We still use the Simpsons Uno set we got decades ago. It is simple and comforting, the chicken soup of card games. The iOS version is a different consommé altogether. A three-minute time limit for each round means it is as much about avoiding mistakes as it is about tactics. I like this development, but I miss the family banter (and ruthless switching allegiances) of our real-life family version. It’s not the same spamming a silly face at MoshOnion933. Trust me. I tried.
I boot up Yahtzee With Buddies with relish, because Yahtzee is a rare game that I love but the rest of the family don’t. I liked the spins on the original, with multipliers appearing in certain scoring categories. I even liked the extra bells and whistles of different dice and chests to open, until I realised that these are just gateways to the inevitable micro-transactions, which include graphics jumping into your face with an offer to buy an extra roll if you are one six away from a Yahtzee. The final straw was when it started offering me scratch cards, the vilest form of gambling enticement outside the old Fifa packs.
