Might & Card

The biggest problem with creating something popular is that you have little time to savour the praise before someone takes your idea and copies the hell out of it.

Might & Card is conclusive proof of this fact. It’s a boardgame set in mediaeval Europe where you take turns placing tiles to create castles, roads, and churches. You then put down counters on certain tiles which yield points once the structure is complete.

Yep, you guessed it – Might & Card is an unashamed copy of Klaus-Jürgen Wrede’s seminal boardgame Carcassonne with a different name, a clumsier interface, and tweaked rules.

Might & Card begins positively, with detailed visuals and a jaunty old-world soundtrack. The quality of the graphics should come as little surprise as the game was first launched on iPad, and developer Uwingame has done a decent job of downsizing it for the smaller iPhone and iPod touch display.

Unfortunately, as the play grid expands the tiles become harder to see, which in turn makes it difficult to tap the various icons that appear on screen, such as the tile rotating and place commands.

The inconsistent zoom function – which seems to be controlled via using pinch gesture that has a mind of its own – does little to alleviate this issue.

As in Carcassonne, your aim is to score more points than your rivals. Points are awarded for having pawns (the equivalent of Meeple as they appear in Carcassonne) on completed structures.

These can be roads or castles, but you can also place them on churches, which must be fully-enclosed by tiles before they are considered complete.

It's here that Might & Card is slightly different from Carcassonne: you can't place pawn markers in fields. In the latter, this ability adds a massive amount of strategy and risk to the game.

Meeple placed in fields remain out of play for the rest of the game, but at the conclusion of the match they have the potential to earn massive points and allow you to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Without this ability, Might & Card becomes a little more straightforward. In some ways it makes the game easier to follow because there’s no danger of the final scores being radically altered by pawns placed in fields, but hardcore fans are almost guaranteed to find it an unacceptable omission.

Another feature which is absent in Might & Card is online multiplayer – an element which made the iPhone version of Carcassonne a real crowd-pleaser. You can still battle up to three other opponents, but sadly it has to either be computer-controlled challengers or friends close enough to take hold of your device when it’s their turn.

The game does boast some additional features, including expansion packs which introduce the option to build rivers as well as three additional structures. These can be added to your standard game, yet such bonuses do little to rectify fundamental problems with the game's design.

When Might & Card was first released on iPad the official Carcassonne for iPhone wasn't available, which goes some way to explaining its existence: it filled a gap.

With this iPhone port, the story is a little different. Carcassonne handily trumps Might & Card not only because it's the original, but because of its superior feature set and game design. In the end, there's little reason to champion this flawed and rather lifeless facsimile.