App Review: Castle Tiles on the iPad makes Set collecting a frantic battle

Have you always thought that what the Set card game needed was some magic fireballs and little colorful knights? Well, then say hello to Castle Tiles [$1.99], a new iPad-only app from Machwerx that blends the line between board and video games.

Castle Tiles uses the set collecting element from, obviously, Set and lots of other games to drive a random battle engine. When things are really moving and all four players are collecting sets, the screen becomes a hot mess of warriors and flying attacks, and this visual excitement makes the game feel a bit more exciting than it really is. This doesn't mean that Castle Tiles is a bad game, just that this feels like a beta version, and we'd be much happier with the finished product.

Castle Tile's graphic design was done by someone with an obvious love for early computer games when 16 colors was as much as you could expect from a PC. Does this minimalist ethos work in the iPad era? Should a card game like Set get the video game treatment in Castle Tiles? Read on to find out.

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The Game/App

To win at Castle Tiles, you collect tiles from a central, ever-changing pile of 37 tiles, looking for "three-of-a-kind" in the traditional Set fashion. This means, for those of you who haven't played that great game (with cards or on the iPhone), that the features on the three tiles need to be either all the same or all different. So, three single circles, each a different color, would be a set. So would a single green triangle, two red circles and three blue rectangles. Unlike Set, where there are three categories (shape, color, number) there are four in Castle Tiles. Honestly, adding the fourth category – backgrounds – was just too much for us. We can handle looking for the three-part "Sets" as defined by the original card game, but not the fourth feature when there are flying fireballs and little guys battling to save our castle walls.

Once you drag the set tiles over to your castle, things start to happen. If the colors are different, then knights and a wizard or two set out to attack a neighboring castle. It your set is made up of all one color, then you launch an airborne attack against someone. By the look of things, red is fire, blue is ice, and green is earth. We can't tell if any one type of attack is better or different than any other, but at least they look cool. It is clear, though, that the more complicated your sets are, the more damage your attack will do. Here's how the attacks are described on the Machwerx website (this is not in the app itself, which is a weird choice):

Collecting more complicated matches of three tiles gives you bonuses:

• Using all three different colors will launch an army attack
• Three red tiles that are all different shapes will give you another mage
  
• Three green tiles that are all different shapes will give you another knight
  
• Three blue tiles that are all different shapes will give you another cleric
  
• Tiles that are all different colors and shapes will give you half a mage, knight, and cleric (and launch an army attack)
  
• Using all three numbers will launch attacks faster
  
• Using all three backgrounds increases damage
  

At the beginning, try to make matches with different shapes to build up your army. Then, start launching attacks with all three colors to send out your huge army!

So, the challenge is to be able to find the trickier sets in order to crush your opponents' castles before they come and get yours. It's clever and a good use of the Set idea but, as stated, there's so much more that could be done here.

For example, there's a lot of downtime between when you can complete sets. You need to wait and watch while your automatic attack goes off, and you can't drag new tiles to your castle in the meantime. What if there were an "on deck" space where you could set up your next attack, make the most of your limited time? You can adjust the level of skill the AI bots display, but we'd like to see a way to handicap human players if needed. Let one of them look for just colors while the other needs to find sets of both color and number, for example, while still giving the beginning some sort of bonuses to their attack (speed, maybe?). Sometimes, people just don't get Set, and this option would allow us to play Castle Tiles against people like this and have it be a somewhat fair battlefield. I suppose you could give the beginning some AI partners instead.

We'd also like to see a way to collect certain sets to rebuild our defenses, especially in team play where maybe our partner can continue to focus on the attack, and a way to target a specific opponent. Right now, you just collect tiles and watch the battle happen. If, instead, say, blue circles meant protection, then any set that included one of them would be used to rebuild your wall a little bit. A green triangle could maybe mean you get to pick from an armory of special weapons to really lay the hurt down on a tough opponent. You know, things like that, ways to make the game a little more engaging. Right now, it's good, wholesome, chaotic fun for a minute, but then you want something more.

One last question: Why did all these kings build their castles so darn close to each other?

Watch a demo video of the game in the video below. It's got baby humor in it.