In May, Arizona-based tabletop game publisher Crash Games completed a successful Kickstarter Campaign for their award-winning train-themed card game Yardmaster, designed by Steve Aramini.
In Yardmaster 2-5 players are racing to be the first player to load their train with the required amount of cargo. Using a simple and intuitive “domino” mechanic Yardmaster boasts extremely easy play for new players while offering up a strategic challenge for experienced gamers.
Unfortunately the $39,992 pledged by the campaign’s 1,997 backers fell a little short of the $44,000 iOS app stretch goal, but Crash Games’ founder Patrick Nickell decided to move ahead with the project anyways. He’s enlisted the help of UK development studio Greenfly Studios who brought us the incredibly fun Ski Solitaire, so we know that they can make a good digital card game.
The game is currently in Alpha, but will be moving into Beta by August 11th. Nickell expects to premier the App about one month from now at PAX Prime in Seattle on Friday, August 29th. The physical release of the game isn’t slated to arrive until October of this year so the app will actually be available before the original game that inspired it!
The iOS version will feature:
- Solo Play with up to 4 AI players
- Pass and Play
- Gamecenter Support for asynchronous play
- Achievements & Leaderboards
There haven’t been any actual screenshots of the game released yet (since the game is still in Alpha state), but if you want a good idea of how the game plays the Kickstarter page has a nice overview, or you can check out this gameplay video.
UPDATE (Aug 23)…We’ve Got A Screenshot and Pricing Info….
Crash Games has submitted Yardmaster for iOS to Apple for review and released the first screenshot of the game. So now we finally get a peek at all of the work that Greenfly Studios has been doing…and it looks brilliant!
In this tweet last Friday, we also found out that the game will cost $3.99 with two optional 99¢ IAPs to unlock the Caboose Expansion and Bonus Card Packs which were completed stretch goals for the physical version of the game during the Kickstarter campaign.
The Caboose Expansion adds five new cards into the game. These cards are shuffled and distributed, one per player. The Caboose are all valued “2” and in order to win a player must not only meet the required point total but they must be able to “attach” the Caboose still following the value or cargo type restriction.
The Bonus Card Pack adds five new types of Bonus Cards into Yardmaster (a total of ten cards, two of each type). In the physical version players can customize their Yardmaster experience and choose which Bonus Cards to play with, so I would guess that the iOS release will offer a similar option as well.
It’ll be interesting to see how Crash Games handles the online matches where one player owns either the caboose cards or bonus pack and one or more do not. However, as a backer of the physical game (Which ships in October) I plan to pick this up in its entirety to get some practice in.
