First of all, I want to complement the developers. I had never played this game before, and my first couple plays I doubted whether the many icons and windows were necessary. But after playing a few more times, I began to see what a complex and deep board game they had managed to develop. At first it had some bugs, but they have been quick to respond and fix things. They even fixed one bug I notified them of within a few days. Looking at the update history, I count about 25 updates in the last 8 months. I can’t think of another developer of iOS games who has been so quick to turn around updates to make the app better. Kudos to them. As to the game, I love it. I use iOS board game apps to decide if they are worth purchasing for real life table games, and I bought the actual game based on this app. One caveat is that this is a pretty deep and complex game, so may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Expect to spend an up to an hour or more even playing with bots. Looking forward to the Fire & Ice expansion. My only other issue is not really a fault with the app, but with the game designers. They did not play test the different factions enough, and have come up with different starting scores for the factions. Not a bad idea, but these points were not play tested well either, and the factions are still not properly balanced. Most new players won’t really notice it, but more experienced players will. I’m hoping Digidiced can gather more updated statistics to make the starting points better balanced for the factions.

Terra Mystica is my favorite board game and love that there's a app, but as of this version, it suffers from some pretty significant bugs that sometimes make it impossible to finish games. In the last game I tried to play just now, I suddenly could no longer upgrade my buildings despite having plenty of resources. In the same game I was prompted to pick a favor tile (the first for the game) and the one I chose would not work. My player icon appeared and the confirmation checkmark vanished, disallowing me to select it. All other favor tiles seemed to work fine. Also in the same game I won a free shovel at the end of a round but had nowhere I could use it because I was out of resources. The game would not let me cancel and I was forced to exit and restart the game to continue. Hopefully after I submit these bugs in the app they'll get fixed because it's frustrating to not be able to properly play every game :(

Minus one star because of two things; errors and ease of use. The errors, I get sometimes after completing my turn. You have to start the app over again for it to work. Then you have to take the action again. It’s always worked after two tries. The second thing is that there are a lot of menus to check through. If I start to take an action I don’t have certain information available to me quickly. For example if I want to build or upgrade and I forgot how many workers I had I would have to close the screen, check my workers and potentially my income for future actions, etc. I wish it was all right there. On the positive side, the game looks and feels just like it’s analog counterpart. Great job with the look and feel. Works pretty well on my iPhone 7 and doesn’t require a massive screen to play.

The app does a really solid job of converting the board game to an iPhone app. The icons are a little small on the iPhone, but that is to be expected since there are so many components in the game to fit onto one screen. The online multiplayer is kinda buggy (it will tell me it's my turn, when in reality it is not my turn at all. Ends up forcing me to forfeit and lose the game). Most of my games aren't getting past choosing the first dwellings without glitching. And the network itself is fidgety - one second, it will be online, the next it will be off. Ive had to restart the app a few times to fix this, making me lose my place in the seemingly long queues for "short" games (games with 10 minute turn limits instead of 72 hours). But gameplay is intuitive once you get the hang of the interface/icons, and the local AI's are actually really smart! It is really fun to play over and over again (multiple games at once!) to get better at different factions and strategies.My main suggestions are to:1) Possibly make the interface more phone-friendly (make the icons larger, maybe have a scrolling menu instead of a fixed one at the top for turn actions)2) Fix bugs in the online multiplayer system3) Possibly make a few more options for online multiplayer game timing systems (5 min, 10 min, 30 min, 1 hr, etc.) to allow more flexible and fast paced gameplay.4) Tutorial issues (like others mentioned) make it hard for beginners to learn (if you're more experienced, it won't be as bad)Overall, I feel like this game was money well spent (considering how expensive the real board game is). I highly recommend it! Hopefully some updates will come along soon to make it even better than it is right now.

Agree with the still buggy complaint. There have been a lot of updates and happy to see improvements, but our group has yet to successfully complete an online game without at least one player getting converted to AI. I think there are a couple of problems. First, it appears that sometimes the status gets stuck until you swipe to hard close the app and come back in. Maybe this is a game center bug, but slows down the game. Second, a 24 hour window until you get converted to AI permanently is too short and pretty harsh. Especially when the status appears to be stuck at times. How about just converting to AI for that turn? At least that would let you recover from these apparent online bugs without completely abandoning a game or making one of your friends wait for weeks until the next game.

Terra Mystica is a wonderful board game. It has myriad ways to victory, interesting abilities and the right balance of personal conquest versus competitive disruption. If I were reviewing the board game, it would be an easy 5 stars, but I'm reviewing the app—a 10-dollar download that has the polish and feel of free-to-play shovelware.In attempting to play a game with friends, we first encountered the issue that the app uses an outdated and unsupported social structure in Game Center. The user experience in trying to add friends is rocky at best. Email addresses are not accepted, and the interface makes it difficult trying to accomplish what should be a straightforward task, and we were met with further problems as we wrestled with poor-quality English in the app's interface. Be prepared to exit and rejoin your game dozens upon dozens of times before it's over. The alerts come late (or not at all), it frequently hangs at the login screen for indefinite spans of time, and sometimes makes no attempt to connect to the server, leaving you clueless when it's your turn to go. Sometimes it even requests a re-connect, even when it doesn't need to (?).It was always going to be a challenge to get the complexity of Terra Mystica into such a compact format. I respect the size and difficulty of the task. However, for 10 dollars, we should expect much, much better.