New Money is Out!

[Shannon Appelcline]

As many of you have already noticed (2,660 downloads yesterday!), a new 2.0 version of Money was released by Apple yesterday. This is a big revision. Though the original intent was just to add Elo, Game Center leaderboards, and Game Center achievements, other features snuck in through numerous plays and replays of the game. Here's the list of new features that we reported to Apple:

✓ New elo system lets you compare ranking with opponents.
✓ Randomized bidding order lets some opponents bid before you; just choose "randomize bidding order" on the options page.
✓ Particularly valuable lots now have their value shown with a gold background.
✓ New games menu (marked with a "+") makes it easy to navigate among RPGnet games on your iPhone.
✓ Rewritten rules, with lots more examples and illustrations, make it easier than ever to learn the game.

✓ Game Center support for leaderboards now lets you compare your maximum elo ranking and your top scores with players across the world.
✓ Game Center support for achievements notes not only special accomplishments, but also 'quests', where you try to win Money in more difficult ways.

For those of you unfamiliar with Elo, it's basically a game rating system that awards players points when they compete, based on their relative skills, and then ranks them. In Money you'll thus get ranked based on your play with the AIs, and you can compare your AI-based Elo ranking with that of other players from across the world.

Unfortunately, releasing a new version of a game always negatively impacts us by wiping out our existing reviews (to a cursory view, at least). You can help by reviewing us (or just copying over your old review):

    http://www.tinyurl.com/raterkmoney

I also invite you to Like Money on Facebook, where I expect I'll be jotting more casual notes about the game from time to time:

    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Reiner-Knizias-Money-for-iOS/317139055037069

Shannon

PS: Here's what's on my current TODO list: submit Kingdoms with Elo and GC (today); submit Modern Art: The Card Game with Elo and GC (next week); submit Masters Gallery variant of Modern Art: The Card Game (July); release an add-on for Kingdoms with 4 new tiles (August?); release Armorica (September); release King Arthur Card Game (December).

I'm sure Elo and GC for the rest of the games will go out sometime in that time frame too, they're just not on my immediate TODO list yet. We are still considering pass-and-play as the next major system for the games, but I'm not sure where that'll fit in with everything else.