iPhone Recommendation: Sword & Poker

The iPhone, with its ridiculous 50,000 games, labyrinthine app store and tipsy turvy economy, is filled to the gills with hidden gems and sleeper hits.

I won’t bother blathering on about the game’s you’ve heard everyone evangelise in every Top 10 list under the sun, but hopefully I can point you in the direction of some games not everyone’s yapping about. Like Sword & Poker, perhaps.

Sword & Poker is a lot like Puzzle Quest and Bookworm Adventures; quirky new ways to skin the RPG genre and an update the age old formula of picking attacks from a menu. But while Puzzle Quest had you matching gems to beat up monsters, and Bookworm was all about flexing your vocabulary, Sword & Poker lets you deck fantasy nasties by, as you might have guessed, playing smart poker hands.

So the game starts with a grid of cards in the middle, and you’re given a hand to make moves, lay down on the table and unleash attacks - just like poker, but given a few extra dimensions of play.

Everything has different levels of damage, so a ‘pair’ is a little more than a piddling nudge while a ‘flush’ or a ‘straight’ is an smackdown of epic proportions. It’s really quite satisfying to end a grizzly minotaur with an almighty ‘four of a kind’, followed by a ‘straight’ finishing blow.

And much in the same that Puzzle Quest will have you moving imaginary blocks in your hazy pre-sleep dreamlets, you’ll be hunting for perfect card combinations before you doze off. Trust me.

Sword & Poker retains all the tropes that you’d expect from an RPG: equipable weapons and shields, magic attacks (like ordering the base cards in order of suit, for massive ‘flush’-damage), treasure chests and status effects. It does away with overworlds and moving about and all that though, streamlining it into a series of fights activated from a menu. For the best, I reckon.

It is, also, the sort of game that the iPhone relishes; easy to play in short doses, works perfectly on the touchscreen and the great artwork just looks beautiful on that crisp display.

Definitely one to check out, and there’s a sequel dropping soon.

Sword & Poker - £1.19 / Free