![]() I don’t think I’m terrible about it, but I admit that I save the disposable spoons from the frozen yogurt place down the street. My favorite example, I think, is the bizarre button economy the game has going on. The way inactive forces are displayed was confusing to me for quite some time, and the game often waits for your confirmation without explaining why or what your options are. Others are usable, but awkward and unexplained in the dramatically underspecified “tutorial”. Some choices are just daft–if you have three units in a lane, you have no way to see the third unit’s strength on the iPad, because the lane extends beyond the bounds of the screen (the phone’s aspect ratio doesn’t suffer this problem). I normally appreciate developers treating tabletop adaptations with a degree of respect, but I could have done without replicating this pattern in the app. So the card game is pretty simple, but presented with confusing interface choices which are never explained. That wouldn’t be awful if all of this were explained in the rules, perhaps with some examples, but I wouldn’t have started this sentence that way if they were. That’s confusing if you first encounter cards like “Stragglers”, which also have a number and explanatory text, but they aren’t additive. It’s tempting to see this as explanatory text which simply explains what the card does, but what this actually means is that you can play the card for +1 on defense or for +2 on attack. Consider the pictured “Covering Fire” card, which has a “1” in a blue circle and a “+1 Attack” in the text box. ![]() Unfortunately, rather than addressing the problems with the physical version, it exacerbates them into a carnival of usability blunders. I’m hearing this in Chris Parnell’s voice in my head. The game is scored according to the number of beaches which still have Axis forces present at the end of the fifth round–you don’t simply win or lose, you can win decisively, marginally, or historically. Each round has different rules, which start off slowing down the Allies before escalating to a powerful final assault. Within each round, you have a substantial element of hand management in which your ideal will often be to find an inessential fight in which to lure your opponent into overcommitting to a Pyrrhic victory, thus stripping their hand of useful cards. ![]() Over five rounds, you’ll activate units deployed to each lane (that is, beach) and fight with active forces bolstered by cards from your hand. Lightning: D-Day has fairly simple rules, comparable to The Battle for Hill 218, but it puts a bit more complexity onto its cards. Then again, we all know how this joke ends. I had hoped that the combination of a lower degree of difficulty than their ambitious past games mixed with an easily addressed problem in the cardboard version made this a superb candidate for an unqualified HexWar success. ![]() With Lightning: D-Day, HexWar did it by translating to app from a well-regarded, unusually simple WWII card game famous for its poorly-written rules. I assume that, once the running gag had been established, the challenge for Charles Schultz was to find a way to create interest in a joke with a predictable ending. Dave has given me the impression that HexWar are the Lucy van Pelt to our Charlie Brown, repeatedly advertising wonderful games and delivering troubled ones once we get our hopes up.
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