Ramses II

One might think that Ramses II seems like an odd choice for Ravensburger to bring to iOS devices. The game has been around for a while, plays fine for families but lacks eurogamer appeal and doesn’t really have some mechanic-hook that would make it a shoo-in for handheld play. But from a quick reading of Ravensburger Digital’s plans on their website, they are bringing lots of their classic family games to iOS in hopes that it’ll open the door to them playing the physical games, too. Admittedly, the physical version of Ramses II, which I owned when my kids were younger, is pretty but some of that appeal is lost in digital format since you don’t get to handle all those chunky pyramids and see a nice board laid out with them. Ramses II is essentially a hide-and-seek memory game with the current player trying to find the icon that comes up on a card each turn. Those icons are in generally fixed locations under a sheet of pyramids that you can slide around to view one space at a time. The current player slides pyramids until he/she either finds the icon sought or another icon, either of which will end the current turn. But the player only claims the card if the right icon is found. Although the items are fixed, the game has a few tricks up its sleeve to move things around (like a sandstorm, which will shift the board to another position). While the icons stay put, the perspective shifts and so players need to remember where the icons are now when the next card with it comes up. Play continues with the cards running out and then points are tallied. Ramses II is a reasonable implementation. The Ravensburger commitment to get players right into the game is served - you can start playing with virtually no time needed to read the rules. The rules are shown briefly (including a short back-story) but they are a boring scrolling bit of text. So many games on iOS do such a nice job of explaining rules through a series of pages with images that it’s kind of a shame this one doesn’t. It’s not that the game really requires one of those walkthrough tutorials but a few short pages of text with images would have been more likely to get reviewed that a smattering of text in a box that is likely ignored over just clicking the Start Game option. The music, animation and sound are all well-done, as we’ve seen in Ravensburger other games. There are some gameplay options that are simply not explained and the game crashed on me thrice in just over ten plays, which is a higher percentage than I would expect. But my tween children have enjoyed the game, remembering playing the original board game when they were younger. The game has AI players but why you’d want to play with them (especially all four!) is beyond me. It’s best as a head-to-head game on an iPad where you can see things a bit better. Ramses II is not a universal app, however, meaning you’ll pay $3.99 for the iPhone version and $5.99 for the iPad app (with HD graphics). Gameplay is probably not compelling enough for gamers but for those with younger children, it’s a fair and pleasantly portable purchase.

Really like this game, but it's got a sense of difficulty too. You'll start to memorize the board, and then a sandstorm will come around and turn everything around on you! Great game

This game is as fun as playing memory was when I was a kid, but it keeps reminding me how much better my memory used to be growing up!

This game is great, and not only fun but actually challenging. It's hard to put it down.