Castles of Mad King Ludwig 4+

I casually played the board game 2x a year visiting relatives and loved it. Bought the app on the flight home last time and have been so impressed!! Not only does it bring all the elements of the puzzle/strategy that make this game so fun, but the campaign mode functions as a tutorial. Working through the different challenges forces you to think the way that you need to think to be a master.

Well done. So worth the money.

One note... when playing, you can't tell how many bonus cards are left in the pile. Also, sometimes it gets a little glitchy and if you replay a level, when you start again it will say there's no bonus cards yet, and you haven't even started the game.

I love "Castles..." the board game, and this app is a good proxy for it. The AI is pretty predictable, though, once you've played enough games. The AI players also make some very unusual choices at times, such as placing rooms illogically or passing on every turn simply because they have the 5-coin bonus card.

There are some rule bugs such as AI players on rare occasions closing off or blocking all of their open doorways, or being able to collect the corridor room completion bonus twice in one turn. The AI players also have a very annoying quirk of pricing very valuable rooms (i.e. king's favor bonuses) very low so the other AI players can buy them cheap, and somehow knowing which rooms are valuable for me (based on my secret bonus cards) and pricing them very high- almost seems like cheating at times. Don't get me wrong though, I do enjoy playing the app a lot, despite some annoying quirks.

Some things I'd like to see in a future update: a cleaner, tidier interface (it's hard to see the scores as they pop up, and avoid having parts of the interface cover large portions of the board); smarter, adjustable AI; INTERNET MULTIPLAYER; a digital rule book for new players (the tutorial isn't very helpful).

This app is great except for one huge issue, it does not have online multiplayer. When I got the app I immediately told my board game group to buy it, we already had a couple other board game apps and I was kinda surprised we didn’t know about this one sooner. I bought this without checking if it had online multiplayer cause it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t, after I found out fortunately my friends hand not bought it yet. If this does get online multiplayer I know at least 4 people that will definitely buy it. The pass and play is a nice feature but in most situations if we are together in person we will just play the physical board game. The main point for my group of getting the board game apps is that we can play online. It’s really unfortunate because we love this game and functionality wise this app is better than some of the other board game apps I have but it’s essentially useless without online multiplayer.