Ramses II

This game is great and not only fun but actually challenging Its hard to put it down                 Great unique fun

This game is as fun as playing memory was when I was a kid but it keeps reminding me how much better my memory used to be growing up                 Fun but hard

Really like this game but its got a sense of difficulty too Youll start to memorize the board and then a sandstorm will come around and turn everything around on you Great game                 Not your mommas memory game

One might think that Ramses II seems like an odd choice for Ravensburger to bring to iOS devices The game has been around for a while plays fine for families but lacks eurogamer appeal and doesnt really have some mechanichook that would make it a shooin for handheld play But from a quick reading of Ravensburger Digitals plans on their website they are bringing lots of their classic family games to iOS in hopes that itll open the door to them playing the physical games too Admittedly the physical version of Ramses II which I owned when my kids were younger is pretty but some of that appeal is lost in digital format since you dont get to handle all those chunky pyramids and see a nice board laid out with them Ramses II is essentially a hideandseek memory game with the current player trying to find the icon that comes up on a card each turn Those icons are in generally fixed locations under a sheet of pyramids that you can slide around to view one space at a time The current player slides pyramids until heshe either finds the icon sought or another icon either of which will end the current turn But the player only claims the card if the right icon is found Although the items are fixed the game has a few tricks up its sleeve to move things around like a sandstorm which will shift the board to another position While the icons stay put the perspective shifts and so players need to remember where the icons are now when the next card with it comes up Play continues with the cards running out and then points are tallied Ramses II is a reasonable implementation The Ravensburger commitment to get players right into the game is served you can start playing with virtually no time needed to read the rules The rules are shown briefly including a short backstory but they are a boring scrolling bit of text So many games on iOS do such a nice job of explaining rules through a series of pages with images that its kind of a shame this one doesnt Its not that the game really requires one of those walkthrough tutorials but a few short pages of text with images would have been more likely to get reviewed that a smattering of text in a box that is likely ignored over just clicking the Start Game option The music animation and sound are all welldone as weve seen in Ravensburger other games There are some gameplay options that are simply not explained and the game crashed on me thrice in just over ten plays which is a higher percentage than I would expect But my tween children have enjoyed the game remembering playing the original board game when they were younger The game has AI players but why youd want to play with them especially all four is beyond me Its best as a headtohead game on an iPad where you can see things a bit better Ramses II is not a universal app however meaning youll pay 399 for the iPhone version and 599 for the iPad app with HD graphics Gameplay is probably not compelling enough for gamers but for those with younger children its a fair and pleasantly portable purchase              Ramses II is a solid implementation of a fine family game