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I had the opportunity to play Fluxx at a friend’s house over summer and instantly fell in love with the madcap, zany game-play Since then I’ve been hoping for an iOS release so I can play at home when I don’t have others around me, and last week the game’s developers Looney Labs in partnership with Playdek finally came through.
Regular gamers will know that there are dozens of different versions of Fluxx available as card games; the iOS app is modeled on a Target exclusive deck released earlier this year. The keeper cards are a mixed bag of themes that include Rocket, Sleep, Milk, Pizza, and Party, and are designed to appeal to a mass audience – not everyone out there knows what a Cthulhu is after all. The game is designed very simply with bold, bright chunks of color on the menu screens – however I didn’t find the menu system very intuitive, the buttons just seem oddly placed and the whole thing feels clunky with some images even appearing pixelated.
I actually deleted the game off my iPhone within minutes as I found it impossible to play because the cards are too small to read. (Yes, you can enlarge them, but as you need to keep your finger on the card the whole time to keep it from dropping back into the deck, this is kinda tricky.) Large card hands are simply lined up at the bottom of the screen with just their titles visible so selecting the correct one is nigh-on impossible on the phone’s small screen – it’s even tricky on the iPad.
The game can only be played in portrait mode on both iPad and iPhone which seems counter-intuitive, as is the vast area at the top of screen given over to your opponent's keepers whilst your hand is crammed down in a tiny space at the bottom. There are two game-play modes, online and offline, and naturally online play pits you against a random opponent logged in at the time. Offline offers two game-play modes: against another player in a pass-and-play style or to play against a bot. Sadly, this is where the game really began to fall down in my opinion.
I have played against the game’s AI dozens and dozens of times over the last week, and it has only beaten me around five or six times. It is simply too easy to beat and it makes the game more a challenge of having the patience to continue playing a particularly long game, rather than actually trying to beat the bot.
Yesterday I decided to test the app by playing 20 games of Fluxx back-to-back and tracking the winners. I won 18 out of the 20 games and as I was playing I noticed two important things. First of all, both times the game beat me it did so by a fluke action (e.g. playing a “Draw Two Cards and Use Them” card, then drawing a goal card that happened to feature two keepers it already had in play.) Secondly, and most importantly, it threw at least one win away. In the instance where I was able to spot this happen, the bot had the Pizza and Party keepers out in play; it then played the “Exchange Hands” action card and handed me, as part of its hand, the "Pizza Party" goal card. For those less familiar with the game, playing that card instead of the “Exchange Hands” action would have been an instant win for the bot.
Now forgive me, but if I’m playing a game against an opponent I don’t want them to let me win, especially when that opponent is a bot. I can only guess at two possible reasons for this error:
- The bot doesn’t fully understand its own game and is struggling to follow the constantly changing rules and goals.
- The bot has developed self-awareness and is toying with me.
Personally I’m going with the former (although if Playdek have managed to create the world’s first true AI, then well played to them – I think.) As such I’m now not sure I want to bother playing against the bot any more – what would the point of victory be if you were constantly wondering if you had actually won or if the bot just hadn’t bothered playing correctly?
Playing against other humans also has some issues. The online mode is, at this point, rather useless as there never appears to be anyone else around to play against; the game just hangs at a seemingly endless “waiting for players” screen until you give up and tap the cancel button. Maybe this will change once the app has had an opportunity to saturate the market a little more but at this point it’s not a selling point. That leaves the play against another human in the same room option as the only one with any remaining merit, and if I’m going to play against someone here with me then I may as well play the physical card game rather than constantly passing an iPad back and forth and being unable to see what’s happening during my opponent’s turn.
I was really looking forward to playing Fluxx on the iPad and introducing my husband to the game, but so far I’ve found that the only thing this version has over its physical predecessor is cost. Whereas a Fluxx deck will set you back between $10 and $15, the app is only $2.99 and features a fairly decent tutorial mode so it’s clearly useful for beginners interested in trying the game whilst laying out as little cash as possible. The ineffective bot would also be an advantage for newbies as it would give them more opportunities to win as they learned, constantly being beaten can be an instant turn-off in any new game. I hope Looney Labs and Playdek can make some adjustments to the Fluxx app that will increase its playability. A better bot is the key here, perhaps with adjustable difficulty for newbies and advanced players, along with a cleaned up interface - more online players is hopefully something that will come with time, although the other adjustments would likely speed that process along. For now Fluxx will be going to live in my Games folder, but I’m not sure how often I’ll be visiting it.
Fluxx is available for iPad and iPhone priced at $2.99/£1.99. A copy of the app was provided free for this review.
