It’s funny how my gaming has flipped. Back when I started this blog, my main games were always MMOs, and I’d play other games to fill the gaps. At some point a big gap filler became mobile games, but initially those were random titles I’d grab for free or pay a few bucks, and generally play for a few hours. Day to day I was still playing MMOs, following MMO news, and blogging about MMOs.
Time and life goes on, and today the most consistent games I have are all mobile. I’ve been playing Clash of Clans and Clash Royale now longer than any MMO not called EVE, and of late Mighty Party sees more actual gaming time than anything else on PC week to week. I barely follow MMO news anymore, and the few blogs I still read I do so because I like the author more so than because I need to ‘keep up’ with what is happening in the MMO scene. Obviously here this blog is way down on posts, especially those focused on MMO gameplay and design.
Not that any of that is bad of course. I’m still very happily gaming, just with different titles on different platforms. Of late I have been playing two boardgame adaptations on PC, Carcassonne and Lords of Waterdeep. Both are 100% accurate recreations of their physical counterparts, and both work very well for multiplayer. Waterdeep in particular is just a fantastic game to play over and over, as it changes so much game to game.
Besides those titles, I’m looking forward to the upcoming Battle Brothers expansions in mid August, which will give me a single player game to consume myself with for a while. After that, Necromunda should be close to release, which I’m hoping will be a great solo and multiplayer game to enjoy. The only other title on my radar right now is Mount and Blade: Bannerlord coming out of Early Access, which will be the trigger for me to play another round of that.
Hardcore Casual 
I have been favoring board game adaptations on the tablet for a couple of reasons. First, the touch and swipe interface seems well suited to board games. Second, the adaptations for tablets, or at least for the iPad, seem better done than those on the PC. I don’t have a lot of comparisons, but Ticket to Ride and Carcassonne both felt better implemented over all on the tablet. There are probably a few reasons for that, but has biased me in that direction.
Carcassonne on Steam is fine except for the bugged achievements that spam you every game. You can see the board really well, and placing pieces is mostly intuitive (with expansions the extra clicks can lead to mistakes).
Waterdeep is too zoomed in, which is weird because it lets you further zoom in… That aside its great, and has a really decent online matchmaking setup.
I’ve been playing the latest beta branch build of Bannerlord and I really like it, lots of nice improvements but I still think it is going to suffer from a rather repetitive end game. All they have really done to address it so far is slow down the rate at which you reach that point, it needs fleshing out quite a bit.
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