Mystic Vale 4+

An excellent Dominion replacement

Full disclosure: we own every set of Dominion expansions ever produced and most of the promo cards as well. That being said, it’s nice to have an on-the-go competitive CCG, and now that we’ve discovered Mystic Vale, this one might be it. I confess, it’s hard to imagine how this “card modification” mechanic translates out into cardboard, but I’m thinking we might have to also buy it just to see.

Impressive that the AI can easily beat me at medium difficulty without cheating (at least not visibly) and based on the excellent game mechanics, I’m about to buy all the expansions after getting done writing this review. I like how they’ve exchanged the (critical) card trashing mechanic in Dominion with the card modification one, and I like the “push your luck” Blackjack mechanic to risk drawing extra cards. Until the current owners of the Dominion CCG intellectual property figure out how to re-introduce it into the mobile space, anyone looking for that kind of fix can look here.

Poor UX

First online play with friends is simply impossible. You need to leave the lobby open, attempt to spell it wrote worth a keyboard that doesn't overlay properly and then when you do get connected the server errors out and disastrous the game. Simply unfathomable this passed game center testing.

In game layout is poor a much better approach could be taken epithelial the screen realestate. Very unhappy I can't play with my friends, very disappointed.

Version 4.0.0 ruin of the game

My wife and I have long loved the original physical version of the Mystic Vale game, and have been enjoying this iPad version for the last year, including earlier today. We’ve shared our positive reviews of the digital version of this game widely, and have encouraged many to purchase it as well. However, when we settled in this evening to play a game before bed, we had to deal with the latest updates for version 4.0.0, and found the new UI so unplayable that we abandoned the game. We’re unlikely to go back to it until these unbearable problems are fixed.

The primary issue is the forced zoom of the row whenever you click on the vale or enhancement cards(e.g. to slide the row back-and-forth and see what’s available). Neither of us ever use the row zoom feature, and being forced to row zoom makes it impossible to see the whole row, let alone the whole field, making it very difficult to easily take in the current state of the game and strategize for your next move.

Secondarily, the shading added to the “active“ card is both pointless and distracting. Knowing which card you touched last has no effect in the game and doesn’t serve any purpose other than to make the card harder to read. Why this “feature“ was added as a mystery to us, but it really needs to go away.

If these problems are fixed either by reverting them or by providing an option to turn these “features” off, I’ll happily bump my review back up to the five star rating that this game otherwise deserves. In the meantime, we‘ll just use the physical game, or play something else. If these problems remain unfixed, I cannot see us trusting Nomad Games in the future not to arbitrarily mess up a good thing.

Developer Response ,

Hi. Sorry to hear this. We are working on an update to correct this issue now. Thanks for your patience.