by Tony Boydell
It’s a busy time - it’s a crowded house - though the skies may be grey, the wind damp and chilly. Cousins have (just now) descended avec beaucoup des enfants and I’m about to venture forth to the fish and chip shop for a wheelie-bin full of fried un-goodness and battered ill-health. Talking of maladies: since the day before yesterday, I’ve developed an irritating ache in my back like a pulled muscle over the kidney and, following a bijou homeward diversion for tea-and-coffee in the Cotswolds yesterday, I’m feeling quite tired and not a little nauseous as well.Pulled muscle vs Kidney stones?
I seek little islands of calm within this noisy hubbub by playing Le Havre on the iPad – with real people elsewhere and the A.Is – and delving into the Solo/Puzzle goodness of the Take it Easy! app. I paid about three English quids for the former and 69p for the latter and they’ve been worth every brown, sweat-smelling acrid penny!
The Le Havre implementation is clear (given the eye-vomiting cacophony of components) and clean; it does all the fart-arsing about with chits and totals and admin and – most importantly – it FINALLY gives me the chance to get to grips with the game itself…and it is superb! It’s a puzzle, it’s opportunistic, it’s multi-stranded and it’s utterly addictive – I wouldn’t have got this many games in with my gorgeous physical copy as I must be approaching 100+ games in the three weeks since I bought it (only a handful of those are with humanoids).
Take It Easy is just a fantastic five minute occupier with a million (or so it seems) achievements that give you a warm, sparkle-y glow when they pop-up on the display – they just keep urging you forward, encouraging you, spurring you to play just the one more.
With such a captive audience for the whole of the Bank Holiday weekend, I’m hoping that the evenings will afford some real cardboard interactivity: Divinare, Santa Cruz, Santiago Da Cuba, Coloretto and the like. I just hope my failing, ailing old man’s clay perks up a little.
