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Gameplay
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Graphics / Interface
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Replayability
Try to dominate 16th century Europe with your army and inventions from the great Da Vinci.
Today I am reviewing a neat game from Slitherine: Da Vinci’s Art of War. If you enjoy turn based strategy games, I definitely can recommend this game. Now this game is not like your standard war games, where you need to conquer lands and destroy all of your enemy. I will tell you that I lost the first game I ever played without ever being attack and that was on easy too!
There is so much more than just building up an army and attacking in this game. Victory is achieved by getting the appropriate number of victory points. Now players can earn victory points in a variety of ways:
- win auctions
- have perfect house
- have more castles
- has most territories
I will not go into the details for each one-when you get into the game you will quickly learn what each of these are. Slitherine has put together a nice tutorial to guide you and I would recommend using it for a few games until you get a handle on things. There is also a very good rules section. As with most games, the best way to learn is to play!
So for this game, strategy comes in deciding how and where you can get these victory points. If you win the most battles, you get none but if by doing that and you have the most territories, you can slow down your opponents progress, which is a good thing.
Some of the key features:
- 3-4 players (local only)
- Can set difficulty via the different IA you can go up against
- Can set victory points
- Can set starting location manual or automatic
- Turn based game play
Turns are broken up into a number of different actions:
- Earn income ( based on territories owned, and special cards
- Recruitment (get more troops based on territories owned)
- Auction- here you bid for one of Da Vinci’s projects which can help you win the game, whoever wins an auction gets to go first that round, get victory points and is named Magnifico
- Action phase- where you construction, attack, invade, upgrade
Overall this is not a fast paced game, you can pause and come back at any point. This is a fun, leisurely war/strategy game. There is no blood or gore, no cut scenes- battles are done via dice. I really like the game and this will be one that I keep on the iPad. It takes a very different approach, which is very refreshing. If you enjoy strategy games, I recommend you give Da Vinci’s Art of War for the iPad a look.
