Hero Park

I tried a few new app games this week.  It's really hard to find the exact mix I'm looking for.  I am open to new twists or game mechanics, but they are rare.  Most apps run the same specials, the same boosters for the same 5 or 6 stats, the same contests and guilds and clickbait stores.

One that I found was Hero Park.  It starts off saying, "This is the story of an old man and his unicorn," which I thought was cute and spunky.  In this game, you are building a town full of shops that craft items for adventurers, and you stock the dungeons where they can get loot and then spend the loot of beer and turkey legs in your tavern.


When the unicorn zooms off to find new adventurers, it's hilarious.  Well, it was hilarious the first time, and now I just click that top-right button and the unicorn is usually off the bottom of the screen at the time.  The unicorn brings in new adventurers.  Four cards are shown at first, so choose the two with the most money who need the most of items you have on hand, then two more adventurers, pick one of those.


I have tried a few of these "make the adventurers happy" game apps, and they all get the same quickly.  You can only build a new building if it has unlocked, and you spend most of the game just looking for buildings with exclamation points -- you click those and click whatever needs clicking.  Why can't they show all the available shops and just let high prices decide what to build.  Why do I have to have a graveyard before I get a swordsmith?

You get to level up your shops and workers, and make more stuff, better stuff.  

Anyway, the art is friendly, and the game has a good vibe.  It's just something I've been through before.  I don't know that I will put hours into it, waiting to find something new.

Funny side note: Trying to google '"story of an old man and his unicorn" +app' just confuses the system and gets no results at all.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Idle Planet Miner: Selling Your Galaxy

Image
Back in Idle Planet Miner, production was starting to bog down, with crafts taking an hour apiece, and sometimes needing hundreds of items to unlock new research.  So, I figured it would be a good time to test out their "Sell Your Planet" feature, which has so many people online asking questions. These idle games can't level up through an infinite many items, so they all have this same kind of game reset mechanism.  In Idle Planet Miner, the Sell Galaxy button shows you the value of your galaxy and how many credits you will get for it.  These credits are a kind of meta currency, letting you buy new rooms for your ships, with each new room offering a different game boost.  Clicking the Sell button will show you exactly what you will lose: all planets, cash, ores, alloys, items, research.  Which sounds terrible.  But you get to keep your dark matter, your managers, your beacon buffs (though you will have to research the Beacon again to get it back on screen),...
Read more

Ancient Games Book

Image
I had a former coworker contact me to say her mom had a weird book of old games, so we met up, and it turned out to be the classic Irving Finkel "Ancient Board Games" produced by the British Museum.  Dr. Finkel is a leading expert on ancient board games, and the book covers four classics: Senet, Mehen, Hounds an Jackals and the Royal Game of Ur.  The Royal Game of Ur is one of our favorites from this era, and was one of the first games I covered in this blog series.  I was familiar with the others, but never had a decent board to play on. The book comes with a little plastic tray with four throwing sticks and 8 playing pieces for each of two colors.  In each set, one piece is larger than the others, being the "lion" in the Mehen game. After dabbling with these games for about 45 minutes, we kept having problems picking up the perfectly smooth throwing sticks, and there was no clear distinction between the flat side and rounded side, aside from the subtle shape. ...
Read more

Hounds and Jackals

Image
Continuing with the book of ancient board games, the Hounds and Jackal board is gorgeous.  Every painted crack or chip in the supposedly wooden surface added character.  The original artifacts had holes in the board, and the pieces were little carvings of hounds and jackals on pegs.  Moving chips around the board was good enough to get the feel of it.  It's a simple race game, trying to get your pieces to the top of tree and off the board first.  There were no tricky rules for the throwing sticks.  You roll, you move. Since there were a few spaces with "slides", it's hard to not feel like you're playing a scaled down Snakes & Ladders game.  Some of these game ideas really do span most of human history.  There are also a few spaces with a little cross on them, where you roll again if you land there. The game was simple, and only took about 10 minutes.  This one had the most interesting set of variations discussed on the back page, since di...
Read more