News Collider: Lords of Waterdeep iOS, Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Combat Monsters and Star Admiral

Gen Con quite rightly centred everyone’s focus on the wonderful world of tabletop gaming. This means that some of our digital distractions, the video game counterparts to our tabletop games got forgotten and there’s been some big news over the last few weeks. We’ve got yet more Games Workshop video games a couple of new style collectible card games and a digital version of one of the biggest games of 2012.

Lords of Waterdeep iOS

The biggest digital news to come out of Gen Con was the announcement of a Lords of Waterdeep conversion for iOS. Those masters of board game conversions Playdek are behind the helm so you know this is going to be a fantastic translation.

Lords of Waterdeep is a game of cunning and management as you vie to control the city made famous by the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms setting. Players use their agents to gather gold and recruit adventurers to go on quests. It’s a very euro style game with your fighters, wizards and cleric all being represented by little wooden cubes, hopefully the iOS version will have something a bit more visually appealing.

Everyone knows wizards are purple.

All the usual iOS trimmings will be there such as asynchronous play, multiple games and achievements and the game is due for release later in the year.

Space Wolf

The bolter, don't leave home without it.

The great Games Workshop Intellectual property fire sale continues with the announcement of Space Wolf a tactical card game played on a 2D grid. Yes you read that correctly, they are taking one of the Warhammer 40,000’s most unique and richly flavoured Space Marine chapters and turning them into a free to play smart phone game that sounds terrifyingly similar to Magic the Gathering: Tactics, which, lets be fair to it, was pants.

The game involves choosing one of the distinctive warrior types of the Space Wolf chapter and building a deck of cards that controls the actions of your marine. You’ll build your deck as you progress and fight off against Chaos Space Marines and Necrons.

There’s always hope that this could be a good game but so far Herocraft doesn’t really have anything to show they understand the grim darkness that 40k universe.

There's a grid, so hopefully this means plenty of tactical options.

Space Hulk: Deathwing

It has only been a few weeks since the Space Hulk video game was release (which has been a bit meh) then a completely different game Space Hulk: Deathwing has been announced.

Streum games have announced they are making a first person shooter based on the iconic Terminators of the Dark Angels chapter. Unlike Herocraft it looks like Streum are more familiar with grim darkness but there’s very little known about the game other than a simple teaser trailer.

Combat Monsters & Star Admiral

I’m beginning to develop a theory, that all the teenagers who grew up playing magic, pokemon and yu-gi-oh are new game developers, because every other game that gets announced these days is based on the collectible card game formula. Over the last couple of weeks not one but two CCG inspired video games have been announced, Star Admiral and Combat Monsters

The colours, they're making my eye hurt!

Combat Monsters takes the collectible car game concept into a 3D arena full of little men that look like Play Mobil figures when they hit puberty.

Aren't they cute, as they kick the snot out of each other.

“In Combat Monsters, the player’s Hero spawns three-dimensional creatures to a large board that serves as the battlefield. Once spawned, each warrior or monster can attack with thrusting and slicing weapons, move about, heal itself or others, or cast devastating spells like the ever-popular fireball – which takes a full health point every turn. When the enemy’s Hero is fatally wounded, the battle is won.”

Combat Monsters is coming to PC, iOS, Android and Blackberry but most interesting it will allow cross platform play across all four devices.

pew pew pew!

Star Admiral takes card games into outer space by making the game about vast interstellar battles. If you squint and look at the screen shot at a funny angle, you can see how the traditional card fighting mechanics have been translated into spaceships blasting the crap out of each other. There’s not really much to see at the moment and until we get a handle on the game play then we can’t really make any judgement.