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Board games are incredibly fun, but they can also be quite expensive. Most importantly, you never have them on you when you need them. You’ll want to play Risk or Monopoly at your friend’s house but realize the box is back at your place.
Fortunately, in the age of smartphones, you can easily find an alternative tabletop game app and download it.
Remember that these games aren’t always a replica of real-world board games. Sometimes, they’re just an app of a game that’s so similar in nature to the original. In other words, this genre is more than a digitalization of an actual board game.
Although, early on, many critics prophesied that Android would fail miserably, today, this is the world’s leading mobile OS. With that in mind and without further ado, here are the top five tabletop game apps for Android that you should check out.
Isle of Skye
Perhaps the best tabletop game for Android is the Isle of Skye. This is a transfer of an award-winning game in physical form into a digital/mobile era. The game relies on tile-laying and auction board mechanics, which transfer perfectly onto a mobile game.
The way the game works is fairly simple: you start on the titular Isle of Skye and own a starting tile as a clan. In each round, you acquire more tiles, each with different features (terrain types). The tiles are obtained through an auction mechanism.
Like all board games, the game is split into rounds, each of which players draw three tiles from the bag and place them in front of the board. Each player secretly bids for the tile, and they reveal it simultaneously.
Ultimately, the player with the highest score is crowned the king of the Isle and wins the game.
Wild Casino Mob
Casino apps are among the most popular tabletop game apps, perhaps most importantly because they offer a great selection of games, including card games, roulette, and more.
In the case of Wild Casino, players can “experience the thrill of Las Vegas right at their fingertips.” To give players this sensation, the app is packed with themed slots featuring realistic sound effects and graphics, just like in a real casino.
While there’s a stereotype about players betting on their own, there’s no reason why you can’t turn this into a social activity. This way, you can have a casino night with your friends at home without the hassle of going out to a bricks-and-mortar casino.
Raiders of the North Sea
This is a strategy game where you gather resources, use these resources to hire a Viking crew, and outfit your longboat to send this raiding party into battle and plunder.
Unlike many other board games where you have just one way to win, here, many different strategies can work. You can strengthen your economy via conventional matters or raid settlements for gold and fame.
One of the aspects of the game that people praise the most is the tutorial. It makes it easy for people who never played the original board game to get into it.
Takenoko: the board Game
Takenoko is a board game where you care for a panda and cultivate a bamboo garden. The goal is to accumulate the most victory points by making adequate decisions in the game’s two phases:
- Weather phase
- Actions phase
The weather phase is luck-based, involving you drawing the card to determine the weather. The actions phase, on the other hand, makes you choose between:
- Placing a plot
- Growing bamboo
- Moving the gardener
- Moving the panda
- Drawing an objective card
Ultimately, the game is scored based on the number of completed objectives. Like other entries on this list, the app is faithful to the original game.
Root
As one of the newer games on this list, the makers of Root had a plan to turn it into a digital version at one point if the game turned out to be a success. This is a great example of a crossover between board games and mobile gaming that might become even more prominent.
This is an epic adventure involving cats, foxes, and wolves as characters. Needless to say, it’s a game packed with strategy, warfare, and adventure. The story has tabletop board game mechanics but has the story progression and characters worthy of an RPG or a tabletop DnD game. In other words, it’s an incredible pastime for a group of friends.
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