Michael Schacht's Web of Power Card Game: The Duel Released

[Shannon Appelcline]

Folks,

Today our newest eurogame, Michael Schacht's _Web of Power Card Game:
The Duel_ went live in iTunes. This game has formerly been released for
the tabletop as _Richelieu_ and is a nicely strategic card game that
allows for some look-ahead, as you reserve tiles that you'll be later
taking. Here's a URL if you want to see the full iTunes info:

http://tinyurl.com/mswebpowerduel

I've also included our press release.

Shannon
--
BERKELEY, CA, March 20, 2012 -- Skotos Tech today released its sixth
iPhone game,
Michael Schacht's Web of Power Card Game: The Duel. Previously published
as Richelieu, The Duel has now returned to its intended Medieval theming.

In Schacht's Web of Power games you battle opponents across a landscape
of 12th century Europe, trying to influence the great powers that rule
the Dark Ages. The Duel depicts that conflict using a set of tiles that
players will claim over the course of a game. By tactically placing
ownership markers and taking tiles, you will achieve the majority
control required to influence the countries and powers of Europe.

With its two-part turns interweaving the taking of tiles and planning
for the future, The Duel may be Skotos' most strategic game to date.
Hand-in-hand with that goes one of Skotos' most complex artificial
intelligence (AI) designs. Four different AI with four different
personalities challenge players at a variety of difficulty levels.

Designer Michael Schacht is a major German game designer who has been
creating tabletop games for almost two decades. His set-collection game,
Coloretto, is one of the best-known "euro" card games while its sequel,
Zooloretto, won the prestigious Game of the Year Award in Germany. Both
games are available in the United States through Rio Grande Games.

Skotos has adapted The Duel to the iPhone using its well-tested
MobileEuroCard platform for the iPhone and the iPad. Standardized
gestures, animations, and audio are all built into the platform, making
it easy for players of one of Skotos' card games to pick up and play
another. Previous games have included Michael Schacht's Gold! and four
different games by Reiner Knizia, including the best-selling Money.

Each new game has offered expansions and improvements to the
MobileEuroCard library, and as a result The Duel is built atop two years
worth of development, making it Skotos' most attractive and mature game
to date. Like all of Skotos' MobileEuroCard games, The Duel has been
released as a universal app, so that players can purchase it once and
play it on any of their iPad, iPod, or iPhone devices.

[Doug Richardson]

Purchased! Day 1 must buy for me. Nearly as good as playing Michael himself at michaelschacht. net.

Doug Richardson
Richtoosoon on BGG

Sent from my iPhone

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[John Flood]

If they are using the same platform as they did for  Gold! and MONEY; then why won't it work on IPODs that those game run on? They are leaving a lot of customers behind.

John

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From: Shannon Appelcline <shan...@skotos.net>
To: mobile-e...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 4:21 PM
Subject: [rpgnet-mobile-euro-game] Michael Schacht's Web of Power Card Game: The Duel Released

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[Shannon Appelcline]

On 3/20/12 3:00 PM, John Flood wrote:

If they are using the same platform as they did for  Gold! and MONEY; then why won't it work on IPODs that those game run on? They are leaving a lot of customers behind.

With The Duel, we updated our minimum required iOS to 4.3, because that's the oldest version of iOS that's well-supported by Apple, as thus the oldest iOS that we could feel comfortable with for the stability of the game. Unfortunately, Apple has opted not to support higher than iOS 4.2.1 for the second generation iOS Touch, which was released from 2008-2009, so we were forced to leave that  platform behind.

The game will run on third generation or better iPod Touches, all iPads, and the three newest iPhones (3GS, 4, 4S). Basically, anything 2.5 years old or less. Based on the amount of computation we had to put into the AI, I don't think it would have worked *well* for anything older in any case.

Shannon

[Shannon Appelcline]

On 3/20/12 3:05 PM, Doug Richardson wrote:
> Purchased! Day 1 must buy for me. Nearly as good as playing Michael himself at michaelschacht. net.
>

Michael was kind enough to continuously play against me on his web site
while I was developing the game. I think my record against him was 0-6,
which shows the high strategic element of the game. Though I kept
getting trounced, I constantly learned how to play the game well, and
that knowledge went straight back into the AIs.

Shannon

[Jeff Eberlin]

Is there ever a plan to do the 3 row variant, or pass and play?

Shannon

--

[Shannon Appelcline]

On 3/23/12 2:48 PM, Jeff Eberlin wrote:
> Is there ever a plan to do the 3 row variant, or pass and play?
>

I'm leaning toward "no" on the 3-row variant, at least for now. (For
those not in the know, with this variant, the game ends when three rows
are emptied rather than when the whole board is.) It'd be trivial to
turn it on, but very difficult to make the AIs react intelligently.
However, I'm thinking about some simple heuristics which could give the
AIs at least some chance in a 3-row game.

Better news on pass-and-play: I'm starting work on Monday to figure out
how to incorporate it into all of our games. I'm going to be
simultaneously building infrastructure that we'll be using with Game
Center, but pass-and-play will be the first step.

Shannon

[John Flood]

TY Shannon

---

From: Shannon Appelcline <shan...@skotos.net>
To: mobile-e...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: [rpgnet-mobile-euro-game] Michael Schacht's Web of Power Card Game: The Duel Released

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