Astraware's Classic Board Games is another stunning piece of work from this venerable software house.. one that will keep you diverted and challenged for endless hours. The fact that it's graphically beautiful and packed with features and realistic sounds is just more frosting on the cake, and motivation to tap that icon and launch it.
The only important (IMO) missing element is a true multi-player wireless competition mode: Though you can play CBG against either your Treo, or against real people, in order to play against human opponents, you must physically pass the phone around the room, swapping your Treo from player to player and hope that nobody accidentally uses your turn.
Otherwise, I found all these games were stable, though once in a while a mixture of operations (such as receiving an SMS message while rolling the dice) caused my Treo to crash, but I haven’t been able to “force” it into a crash or reboot, so those problems seem, to me, entirely random.
The graphics are, of course, exceptional, and the games are all feature-packed, often offering enough options to equal multiple, individual sets of games “off the shelf”. I’d say that as far as diversity, and running the gamut from the ridiculously easy Tic-Tac-Toe, to the ultra-challenging Chess, for playability and visual appeal, this package has all the bases covered.
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| Pros |
Vivid, beautiful, realistic graphics, animations, and sound effects.
Set game difficulty globally, or by game.
Play against computer players or humans
Multiplayer mode.
Multitude of options for each game.
Lives happily on your SD card.
Built in instructions, help, and hints
Remembers where you left off if you quit and re-start it again later.
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| Cons |
No data connection, beaming, or any way to play against multiple people on multiple Treos, locally or over-the-air
Occasional, random crash, when SMS messages arrive. |
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