Bibliography
Game Title: Road to Legend
Genre: Board game companion
Target: Teens+
Monetization: Free with in-app purchases
Road to Legend is a companion app to the board game Descent. It is a merger between both digital and physical games. This does several interesting things, replaces the overlord player with the apps AI, tracks the character’s progress throughout the campaign and offers new campaigns and dungeon crawls. It also provides ambient sounds and some narrations adding to the atmosphere while playing the game. It also adjusts its content based on the physical collections you tell it you own, giving it a lot of variety and replay value.
There is a tutorial, but it is mainly based on using the app and what changes there are from the board game. A tutorial for someone new to the game would be a benefit and make the learning experience fully tied into using the app. The text is small, even on a large phone or small tablet, making it something that must be constantly picked up and put down during gameplay. Larger font size or text to speech would allow the device to be fully interacted with while it sits at the table. It offers help by directing you to a pdf file you can download to your device. An in-game help reference section that can be searched would be much more useful at the table. Prompts for the monster’s actions look identical and can appear in different orders, so it can become easy to confuse masters and minions when their turn comes up.
This is one of the inspirations for my capstone project and while it brings a useful digital assistant to the game table there is still lots of room for improvement.
Fantasy Flight Games. (2016). Road to Legend [Android].