Croke

Finally, a great crokinole video game.

User Rating: 9 | Croke IOS

By d_parker | Review Date: April 13, 2013

As background, I'm a fan of crokinole and have been playing it for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately you can't always find someone to play crokinole with you. Sigh.

That's where this game comes in. All those lonely crokinole lovers finally have an opponent, albeit a computer one.

The game is bare bones but the game mechanics are solid and that's all that really matters.

I'm playing it on my iPod touch and it's become of one of my favourite iOS games.

The game lets you play single player (against an easy, medium and hard CPU), two player local or two player online.

You can play points (5 to 200) or by rounds (1 to 10).

You can set a shot timer (up to 30 seconds) or leave it off.

You can set the number of discs from 1 to 10 that you and your opponent will use.

There are two types of control schemes offered, spring shot and stroke shot. With spring shot, you move your piece to your desired starting location, then pull back to adjust the strength of your shot. With stroke shot, you flick your finger to hit your shot. I ended up using spring shot as I found I had better control that way.

There are two rule settings that you can't change that might annoy some people but you're stuck with them and it's not that big a deal.

First, when there are no other opponent pieces, your shot must end up in the 15 point ring or it's removed. You can't disable this setting. There's no hiding like a weasel behind a post in this game.

Second, if your opponent has a piece on the board, you have to hit their piece but you can hit their piece by hitting it with one of yours first, that is, if you hit your piece first, then your opponent's piece, you're good. Again, you can't disable this setting. It kind of takes away some of the challenge of the game.

The computer on medium is a pretty fair opponent and so far, I've had fun playing that level.

I guess what would put the game over the top would be if it had the ability to change the design of the board and pieces, allow for four player, have tournaments, have variable rule settings and if it kept track of your games but the game is quite nice without all those things.

For two bucks, if you like Crokinole, you can't go wrong with this game.