Sweating the Details for iPhone Card Games: Visuals, AIs, and Player Numbers

This week Apple released my fourth eurogame iPhone release, Michael Schacht’s Gold!. It was a particularly exciting release for me not just because it was my first chance to work with Michael Schacht, but also because it was the first-ever (as far as I know) simultaneous release of a professional print game and an iPhone adaptation. Michael revealed abacusspiele’s edition of Gold! to fans at the Nuremberg Toy Fair on the same day that the iPhone edition became available in Apple’s iTunes stores.

To commemorate that release, and talk some more about the lessons learned in iPhone game designed, I’ve put together this article, discussing some of the more careful details that I had to consider when creating my newest game. If you’d like to see some of my other discussions of iPhone game design, I’ll point you toward Turning Reiner Knizia’s Money into an iPhone GameMaking Computers Think Like Auction Players (which I wrote for the release of Reiner Knizia’s High Society), and What Makes a Great Mobile EuroGame (which I wrote for the release of Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms).
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What Makes a Great MobileEuroGame?

This Sunday my game company, Skotos Tech, released its third mobile game for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad: Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms. It follows on the heels of our previous releases, Reiner Knizia’s High Society and Reiner Knizia’s Money. All told, I’ve spent some goodly portion of my last year’s work on these three games (and the MobileEuroGame toolkit I’ve been creating, which is making it easier and easier to create new games as I go along). Along the way I’ve learned some useful lessons about choosing which games to adapt to mobile devices, and I’ve decided to talk about that this week.

For me, it’s a contrast between Reiner Knizia’s Kingdoms and Reiner Knizia’s Money — both of which I play obsessively myself — and Reiner Knizia’s High Society — which I think has as good of Artificial Intelligence and User Interface as any of our games and which I think plays well, but which doesn’t quite generate the same spark for continuous play for myself.

Five Points for Great Mobile Games

Why? Here are my best guesses at five elements that make for great mobile gaming:
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