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[BEATBOXING MUSIC]
WIL WHEATON: Hey, everybody.
Welcome to my show, "Not the Flog." We were going to call
this show "*** in a Box," but I couldn't find any boxes.
So today, on "Not the Flog," I wanted to talk about mobile
versions of some of the games that we've played on tabletop.
All of these are available in the iPod/iPad store.
And a lot of them are also available in the Google store
for Android.
So do your own research.
And don't yell at me if the game that you want to play is
not available on your mobile platform of choice.
Because all I'm doing is delivering news to you, not
actually programming games and putting them in
stores, my god, man.
One of the really great things about playing games on
tabletop is that we all get together with our friends.
We spend an evening together.
And we enjoy the company, while we play at games.
But sometimes you want to play a game, and there isn't
anybody to play with.
And when that happens, what is better than
playing with yourself.
These games work really well against the computer.
They all have good AIs.
They also work really well against your friends and
neighbors or soon-to-be-vanquished enemies.
I don't judge.
We actually used a lot of these games to help people who
are unfamiliar with their tabletop counterparts train up
before they came to play on the show.
So let's get started.
Game number 1 is Small World.
Small World is from the first season of TableTop.
It's the game that Sean Plott won.
We all thought Grant Imahara was going to win.
And it let Jenna Busch say the phrase "my crazy ***" over
and over again.
JENNA BUSCH: Crazy ***.
I like the crazy ***.
We've got crazy ***.
WIL WHEATON: It is a delightful [CHOKING]--
dying.
Not really.
It's just very hot in my house right now.
The Small World iPad app is really fantastic.
The AI in it is quite good.
And you can play it as Pass and Play with your friends.
Or you can play it against the computer.
There are in-app purchases available to get a couple of
expanded races and powers that are super fun.
It's the Cursed Expansion and I forget what the
other one is called.
The only limitation to it is that it is only
a two-player game.
I'm really hoping that the developers will expand the map
and let us have three, four, and five player games.
But at the moment it's only a two-player game.
When I bought it, it was like $7.
Next step is Settlers of Catan.
We played Settlers in the first season of TableTop.
We also played Star Trek Catan in the
second season of TableTop.
Spoiler alert--
I did not win either game.
The iPad app is really super fun.
It has a campaign mode that allows you to go out with the
expansions, like Seafarers of Catan.
And it also has just regular straight up
basic four-player Catan.
You can play against three players.
You can play against two players.
It doesn't matter.
It's got lovely music and delightful, little character
animations.
And works very well for Pass and Play as well.
There's nothing more fun, I think, than playing with
yourself and shouting, "I've got wood for sheep!"
[SHEEP BAAING]
WIL WHEATON: Next up is Ticket to Ride.
Ticket to Ride, of course, made delightfully famous by my
wife Anne Wheaton, who hit the table and knocked all of the
trains everywhere.
How about if we go to a slow motion shot of that right now.
ANNE WHEATON: (SLOW MOTION MUFFLED SPEECH) And whoever
wins gets a Rolex!
Oh, [BEEP]
WIL WHEATON: [SOBBING]
Right?
So Ticket to Ride is a really incredibly wonderful game from
Days of Wonder, one of my absolute favorites.
It really is kind of my go to infection vector game for
people who are sort of interested in tabletop games,
but are a little intimidated by the array of choices that
are available to them.
The Ticket to Ride app is fantastic.
It comes with the basic American map, and allows
in-app purchasers to buy every single expansion.
And they're all really, really good.
I think a lot in-app purchases are typically bull [BEEP].
And they're just sucking money away from
you for no good reason.
But the Ticket to Ride in app purchases are great.
You can buy the 1906 expansion.
You can buy Ticket to Ride Europe expansion.
You can buy the Switzerland map, which is specifically
designed for two people to play.
It's very well put together.
It's got great music.
The graphics are really nice.
It's really, really easy to play.
The AI level is great too.
It goes from like very easy to beat to-- oh if you play
against this AI, you're going to feel like
Will Wheaton on TableTop.
Of all the tabletop games I have played on my iPad while
pooping, nothing has as much time invested in it as
Carcasonne.
I love Carcasonne.
It's such a brilliant, beautiful,
simple, elegant game.
But one of the most difficult things in it is knowing
exactly where your legal moves are, making sure you don't
inadvertently put a farmer in a field that already has a
farmer in it, and the scoring can be a little complicated.
The app takes care of all of that for you.
And you can play against opponents of
every different level.
You can play against opponents that are really simple, that
kind of don't do really smart things.
And you can play against really evil opponents, where
pretty much all they do is try to put a road straight into
your city, so you have no hope of completing it.
Or they're constantly putting up city tiles next to your
cities and claiming them, to make you invest five meatballs
into one city.
It's really fun and it uses the Elo ranking system, so you
can keep track of exactly how you are doing relative to the
players you're playing against .
The computer is great, but you can also play against anyone
you want on the internet.
It supports GameCenter, so you can play it against anyone
that you can connect to.
I play against Felicia all the time, although sometimes it's
three [BEEP]
months before she takes her turn.
What the [BEEP], Felicia.
One of the games on this list that I know is available for
Android and Apple products--
I don't know why I have such a hard time saying iOS.
Doesn't it just sound weird?
It sounds like you're putting something in your butt.
One of the games that I know is available for Apple and
Android is Elder Sign from Fantasy Flight Games.
We played this last season with Bill Prady
and Felicia and me.
And even though I was useless, we still
managed to win the game.
This game is a perfect single player game because you're
basically controlling all of the
investigators in the museum.
They've developed it a whole lot since it first came out.
There are tons of new characters that
you can play with.
And there are some campaigns.
So now you can play against additional, more, dangerous,
elder gods.
And what's really fun is there's a campaign mode where
you have to gather up elder signs through the museum just
like you do in the basic game, but then you have to go to a
second phase where you have to travel to, like, the Arctic to
go and try to send Cthulu back.
Or there's another one where you have to go someplace else.
I don't know.
I think it's like the Del Taco drive-thru.
And you have to work your way around all the stoners on a
Sunday afternoon, so that you can just get a big beefy
burrito and some fries.
A game that we haven't played on tabletop and probably won't
ever pay on tabletop, just because of
limitations, is Ascension.
Ascension is probably my favorite deck-building game
this side of Smash Up.
And the iPad version of it is so phenomenal and so fantastic
and makes that game fly by.
And it's really, really fun.
If you don't want to invest in a whole part Carcasonne game
while you're taking a dump, this is perfect for while
you're taking a dump.
It's probably the best dump taking game.
But don't get me wrong.
Bejeweled's great for taking a dump.
But if you really get on a run-- which is a word you
don't want to think of when you're taking a dump-- and you
just can't stop playing, you're going to give yourself
some hemorrhoids.
You don't want that.
Trust me.
I know what I'm talking about.
And now it's time for this week's Not Question of Note.
It comes from CheffBryan who asks, why don't you play
Descent: Journeys into Dark?
Well, CheffBryan, let me tell you.
Dear CheffBryan, one of the main reasons we can't play
Descent: Journeys into the Dark on tabletop is that an
average game lasts about five hours.
And that's just too long.
Now we could make it into a two-part episode, but if I'm
going to spend that much time playing a game, I want it to
be a game that I really love.
I'm not particularly crazy about Descent.
There's so much dice rolling, and it's so random, that you
could spend an entire game developing a strategy only to
just roll so poorly that the other team wins.
I speak from painful personal experience.
Thanks for your question.
And play more games.
Heart, heart, heart, Wil Wheaton.
OK, CheffBryan, nothing is coming to you in the mail
because all I did was draw a ***.
That's a bunch of games that you can have on your Apple or
on your Android or--
I don't know, does anybody use an N-Gage?
I know.
That's ridiculous.
That's like asking if anybody's recently had a limb
amputated by a field surgeon during the Civil War.
I know.
I get it.
Anyway, they're a lot of fun to play.
I hope that you enjoyed them.
If I've missed a tabletop game that is in either the Play
Store or the App Store that you love, please tell me in
comments because I'm always looking for other games that I
can add to my collection.
And if there's really great ones that I love, maybe I'll
do another "Not the Flog."
So thanks for watching.
Have a great week.
And until next time, play more games.