The game is playable in its current state, and functions mostly as expected. It does occasionally crash, but progress has been saved 95% of the time. The AI is not very good, but can put up enough of a fight to make it entertaining. The app does have strange dice rolling anomalies, like rolling snake eyes in 3 consecutive battles, which I guess is technically possible with true RNG. Definitely needs some work to live up to the price tag.

The good: Animated Battles 😎Challenging AI. Fully automates the more tedious aspects of the board game.The bad:Can on rare occasions crash at a point where your current game cannot be recovered. Not good for online gameplay. This App forces some steps to happen sequentially, and sometimes irreversibly, which would otherwise be flexible in real gameplay. I recently bought the board game with some friends. I got this app for practice between games or local tournaments. It’s great because it automates all the setup and calcs. Also all the little steps that could be forgotten during typical gameplay are prompted for. I don’t see any true rule variations from the board game. Playing as a single player vs 1 to 4 ai players is challenging and satisfying. The practice I got in the app gave me a significant edge when playing the real board game with my friends. I tried to play online with a friend but the game didn’t even show up in the Queue until 24 hrs later. One other caveat: Currently if you’re bankrupt at the cleanup phase; the game forces you to decide to sell resources, but darkens all the other visible information you need to make that decision. Also this action can’t be undone if you find you have to remove too many disks after the fact. So you need to be careful. Finally it is too easy, and even seems encouraged, to accept ambassador tokens from other players that replace high value and hard earned reputation tokens on your hidden diplomacy track.

This is a barely updated version of the first version of the game. It still uses some of the rules from v1 that are not actually in 2nd Dawn. Same graphics, same interface, same lack of configuration options available for multiplayer, just as before. Notifications don’t work so inevitably players in a mp game will be replaced by bots. They slapped a new splash screen on the old version, added the new tech and left everything else in the same broken state it was in before. It might be fine for solo mode, but if you want to play online MP, steer clear.

If you already know how to play, and have the itch this will do it, it's very streamlined and does not have the expansions. I'll still play it every now and then.. I have yet to play online, just bots