Card Golf Part 2: Batch of Android Apps

After reviving many variations of Six-Card Golf (and Four and Nine card games) in my previous post, we went looking for Android apps to play them together.

1. We tried "The Golf Card Game" by Glowing Eye Games



This ran a Four Card Game against two computer players and you could kill ads permanently for $2.99.  It was fairly solid but limited.  There were no real settings or options to play with.  

2. Next came "Play Nine: Golf Card Game" by Bonfit



This was also a solid play, and it had the best range of options, from single player to a Play With Friends mode where you create a room with 2-4 players over 3-9 holes, also Tournament and Multiplayer and an endless Journey from course to course.  It only did Eight Card Golf.

But the ads were relentless after almost every hand, at could only be removed by a $12.99/year "club membership".  No.  $3-5 is fair for these.  I'm not going to be charged 11 months from now for something I forgot I ever downloaded.  It looks like they also have a Windows version, but if it's also full of ads, I am not interested.

On the unexpected side, it looks like this "Play Nine" is a version of an actual physical game with a custom deck, found here.

3. Next up was "9 Card Golf: Golf Card Game" from TxLabs.


The one had the most options, but it looks like a utility app on most pages: packed with tiny options mostly too small to read.  It has options to Play Against the Computer (of course), Play Online (sign in needed) and the uncommon Pass and Play option where you pass the tablet from one player to the next.  It can play 4, 6 and 9 card Golf games.  The Computer players have Easy, Medium and Hard difficulty to choose from.  As very good.

But the actual interface of the game?  The draw pile and discard piles are little tiny things in the bottom right of a mostly empty window, but the action button is pretty clear about what you can and can't do at the moment, and the value of each card is clearly shown (if a bit small).  Interestingly, the score for game two adds onto the score for game one, headed toward the first player to hit 100 points losing.  I won that first game against the Easy bot.  It all went smoothly.  I still don't know why the all-important deck and discard piles are so freaking small, but this is the most solid of the four games in this batch, and we saw no ads at all.  ;-)


Update: after trying out 7 different Card Golf apps, we came back to this one as the best of them.  No ads, lots of options, fair card draws, well done.


4. The last one we found tonight was "Golf Card Game" by Garia Games Ltd.



This has all the completely standard app annoyances.  Login bonuses, daily spinners, begging to send notifications, bouncing coins and casino sounds.  The standard okay features: unlocking new deck art with heaps of those coins, I guess.

The ads are insane again and ads keep getting harder to close.  Here, you get a microscopic Close button, or the only option is to go to the Google Play page, after which the ad still sits there trying to get you to click ... and getting rid of ads requires the "Diamond Club" for $2.99/week.  It comes with other bonuses but I don't like payment plans of any kind.  That model just wants you to forget so they can suck money from you forever.

This one can play 4 or 6 cards games, and has a few options, but I find the sideways layouts of the opponents to be unpleasant, and the only indicator of the point value of cards comes from watching the totals of other players change when they use the cards.

I have to agree with the Google Play reviewers for a few of these: that the "AI" seems to get all the low cards while dealing us the 10s, 11s and 12s pretty harshly.  If that's true then boo -- just let the cards fall as they may.  God, I'm sick of everything being AI anyway.  I don't want to win all the time, but I also don't want to be played.

We will look for more next weekend.  Somewhere there must be one with the balance we're looking for, one that's not just an ad factory.


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

WarZone Idle

Image
Playing with WarZone a bit this week, I discovered that there is an "Idle" campaign at the bottom of the main page.  Either that's new, or I just didn't see a year ago when I first wrote about this great app. The Idle campaign is set up in a very interesting way.  The maps appear to be the same sequence as in the main game: you start with the standard Risk world map.  But now, you have a certain amount of money and armies shown at the top right as W and A values.  You gain some amount of each per second, and each space has an army value shown on it.  So maybe Brazil starts at 96.  Click it when you have 96 armies and it's your without a fight. Some spaces have "resources", which include Army Bases (where you can buy armies for W's), Caches (some amount of Ws and As), Mines, Forges and Crafters.  Some of these can be upgraded by spending Ws to get more per second.  You can forge ores into ingots like so many other games and sell all the resources f...
Read more

Escape from the Aquarium

Image
We found Escape from the Aquarium on the way home from our Sedona trip.   It looked cute and we didn't notice at the time that it was an escape room game for kids.   Or main issue with escape room games is that the pieces get marked up or ruined during the course of the game,  so it's hard to play them a second time.   And knowing the outcome spoils the replayability.  Escape room games are not really games, they are sets of puzzles. The art is bright and friendly.  The story is a bit silly: you get turned into a fish while visiting the aquarium and have to swim around looking for clues to get magical ingredients to get back to human form.   Okay. There is an answer book and hint book, both of them with scratch off spaces, so there's the main component that can't be restored to its unplayed state.  There are four folders full of clues but you have to dump all four folders together, since the stuff you need to solve puzzles in o...
Read more