Recent reviews by Narkulus

Simple city builder with a bit of Banished and a dash of Stronghold in a Stonehearth style, minus the depth of those games. Building your city is a somewhat formulaic affair, house-quarry-forester-farm-etc. based on needs and not so much creativity. If you like these kind of games though, it's a bargain.

Pros:
Price
Cute blocky graphics
Potato friendly

Cons:
Formulaic building order
Not a large variety of buildings
Not many production chains

Edit, 3/7/19: Still lots of bugs, no hard AI, and almost a year into release. Disappointing, but I still hold out hope.

TLDR: 7/10. A great board game port somewhat hampered by its mobile roots.

Let me get the bad out of the way first, this is a mobile port with very little enhancement for PC and it shows. The game's use of screen real estate is very unoptimized for large screen monitors. Large Icons and game elements could have been shrunk down and more elements of the board game allowed to occupy the main screen. Two side menus on each side of the game could be left open by default, but everytime you restart the game and even when your turn comes back around, the menus are tucked away again, they should stay open by default as they don't obstruct anything.

Some newer players have complained about constantly having to access information hidden away in menus. This is only partially true as most of the info an experienced player needs is on the main screen. For the benefit of those experienced with the game I'll list the menus that people think have info hidden away and what is actually visible on the main screen without opening those menus. Satellite menus include: resource exchange screen with power bowl, town tile screen, players score status screen, player bonus tile selection screen, favor tile screen, cult track, power tiles, round score tiles. The main screen does present you with a lot of that info without opening those menus including, with the side menus open: home terrain with terraforming costs for other terrains (left side menu open), current round score tile and power tiles available to use (right side menu open). Player info cards at the bottom include: current workers, coins and priests available and income levels for next round, power bowl summary, cult track positions. So that's quite a bit of info available reducing the need to open those menus.

So the real star here is the board game itself. Terra Mystica is deep, complex, and presents you with many choices each turn. The game consists of 6 rounds of expanding your fantasy empire using different factions all with their own unique powers. A round consist of 8 possible actions with each player taking one action then the next player taking their action, this continues until all players have passed and then the next round begins with each player recieving their income and performing their actions again. Every round has a different way to gain points so many of your action choices will revolve around what will score points during that round. The game has some interesting synergy, when you build certain structures next to a neighbor, you get a discount, in turn, they get the option of gaining power at the cost of some victory points based on the value of their adjacent buildings involved. Power is very important for some actions, but so are victory points, so it's an interesting trade-off to consider. There are many ways to earn points throughout the game and of course the winner is the faction with the most points at the end of round 6.

A future expansion "Fire and Ice" are included in the price and will add more factions and game elements.

Single player has 4 easy AIs based on time starting with a 1 second thinking AI up to a pretty tough 15 second thinker. A Medium and Hard "learning" AI are promised in a future update.
Multiplayer has chat and is cross-platform so you can play with Android and iOS players and games seem readily available.

A lot of reviews and players have bashed the tutorial pretty hard. I'll just say that this is a complex game and writing a long complex tutorial to cover all elements of the game would have been an expensive time sink for a small team, so I personally had no problems reading up and watching some cardboard playthroughs. I didn't bother with the tutorial.

Overall, I find Terra Mystica a gem of a board game and can easily forgive the shortcomings this digital implementation has. A must buy for true board game fans.

Pros:
Uses original board game art with only a few digital embellishments.
Easy AI is pretty good with harder "learning" AI to come.
Fire and Ice expansion will be included in a future update.
Deep, thought provoking gameplay with little left for chance.
Cross Platform play for multiplayer.
Ability to play a deep boardgame on something other than a phone/tablet.

Cons:
Mobile roots are obvious.
Oversized elements meant to be visible on mobile are oversized on large monitors.
Screen real estate not optimized for PC monitors, needs more game elements on-screen.
No tooltips make it a little tough for newcomers.
Game is too complex for the tutorial, newcomers should probably watch a cardboard playthru.

I ultimately refunded. Tutorial was brutal, I just got killed over and over, that's no fun. Finally got away from the dropship without being killed and was then chased by aliens that I just could not kill or even avoid. I ran, tried to hide, tried going under water, but there was no shaking them. Dead again. I prefer games that ramp up the difficulty as you learn, so this was just frustrating and not fun.

A good adaptation of the board game with pretty good AI. Multiplayer features are very much lacking though and the game needs achievements especially for multiplayer to get more people playing.
Just haven't been able to get a multiplayer game started as of writing this, but the strong AI makes single player worth it.

Edit: I still leave it as thumbs up because it's a fun game to play, BUT, the AI is not very strong once you learn the game's nuances.

A very good port of the 2-player Agricola board game focusing on animal management. This is a worker placement game in which you only have 3 workers and during a round each player takes turns choosing a market space to place one of their workers. Each market space can only be selected once during a round, so you need to weigh out what you need vs. what your opponent might need and sometimes it's a better strategy to deny your opponent a critical resource space rather than advance your own needs. At the end of a round there is a breeding phase and if you have enough farm space, you increase your livestock count. Any excess livestock that can't be accomodated, are lost.

Building your farm involves placing workers on market spaces that give you building abilities such as fencing in pastures and placing various building upgrades to hold more livestock. Scoring is based on the number and variety of animals and building types and pastures you have at the end of 8 rounds.

The game features multiple levels of AI, a tutorial, and online multiplayer. I started an online game and had an opponent in just a few minutes. The multiplayer utilizes steam turn notifications which makes running multiple online games a breeze.

The game comes with a free game dlc. Highly recommended for any Euro-style board game lover.

I haven't been this involved in a Civ game since Civ 2: Test of Time.
Civ 3, 4 and 5, weren't that engaging to me for some reason.
This one strikes the right progressive balance that really gives me that "one more turn" feeling.
Highly recommend.

Quilt Tetris.

Some nice board game mechanics. Build a quilt out of different shaped patches you buy, and place them on a 9x9 space, Tetris style, to sew a quilt together. You get a choice out of 3 different patches to buy when it's your turn. Make the best quality (most buttons), and most complete quilt (fewer holes) to win.

Each patch piece you buy, and place, determines future income, based on the number of buttons on it, and also how far along the scoring track you move that turn, by way of a movement number on that piece. Your turn continues until you pass your opponent on the track and then the turn switches to your opponent. Scattered on the track are small single patchwork pieces to fill in small holes in your quilt, the first person to reach them, gets them, so you want to sometimes race ahead if you need one badly or want to deny your opponent the piece.

Income spaces are scattered along the track to replenish your money based on the quilt pieces you have played, so you need to try and play increasingly better quality pieces as the game progresses so you'll get some good income when you reach one of these spaces. If you have no money (buttons) to buy a piece, then you can skip your turn and your piece moves up to one space past your opponents space giving you a button for each space you traverse to get there.

When you reach the end of the scoring track, the game is over and scoring begins. You lose points for unfilled holes in your quilt and gain points for your button count.

Games are typically fast with the AI.

Highly recommended.

Fun theme park builder.
Lots of customization options for your park.
Management is a little shallow at launch, hope they make it a little deeper in future patches.
Rides are all very similar, swinging, spinning chair rides mostly.
Still recommended though.

A great 4x board game, but this digital implementation is a little barebones. If you're familiar with the board game you'll probably have less of an issue with it, but it's just not new player friendly. The tutorial is okay, but the game has no tooltips once you leave the tutorial. Not having tooltips is bad enough, but then when you're not sure about an action and need some help, you have to actually leave your current game to get to the help menu. I hadn't played in quite a while so I downloaded the rulebook in pdf and alt-tabbed to it for reference. I don't understand why a simple f1 press couldn't have been implemented to have the rules pop-up in game.

Multiplayer lacks turn timers and notifications which is something that definitly needs fixing; devs should take a look at Ticket to Ride to see how Multiplayer is done.

I give it a recommendation based on the solid mechanics of the board game and am kind of hoping the game gets some much needed updates added in the near future. If it doesn't, I'll probably come back and switch the review to negative at a later date.

Sadly, its got the iOS port blues. I curse you! Apple.

Whether you like it or not depends on what your expectations are and how much you paid attention to the hype. It's relaxing and great to play with some good background music. Just explore and chill, that's it.

The future of the game is in the devs hands to patch it up and keep it all fresh.

Overall 8/10

Edit: The devs have kept updating and it's looking pretty good. I don't think it will ever live up to pre-release hype though. I still revisit the game from time to time and that's saying a lot.

Edit again: The "Next" update is awsome, enough for me to significantly raise the score.