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App Review: Viking Lords is good fun, but could be "borrowing" too much
Sending miniature warriors –- cavalry, spearmen, archers, dwarves and giants –- into pretend battles has a long tradition, and there are already plenty of ways to do so on your iDevice. We looked at Ex Illis a while back, which used your iPhone as a scorekeeper for your physical miniatures, and there is no shortage of Risk and Stratego games in the App Store. Today we'll take a peek at a third: Viking Lords, a US$3.99 iPad app that is fun to play, but has a big potential problem. Viking Lords is an iteration of Richard Borg's popular BattleLore game system (also used in Memoir '44 and evolved from his Commands and Colors System), and this can be seen as a good and bad thing. It's kind of a good thing, because the original BattleLore tabletop board game is out of print and expensive right now. BattleLore was first published by Days of Wonder in 2006, but the rights now belong to Fantasy Flight, which will reprint the game in France. It's a bad thing because this app appears to be, pretty simply, theft of intellectual property. According to the developers, "We have had inspiration from various computer games as well as card and tabletop games. Attempt has been to try to combine the best from both worlds." Rumor has it that Borg is looking into legal action against Puffin Software, the app's developers. Since you cannot trademark game mechanics, any legal outcome is uncertain. Still, don't be surprised if this app suddenly disappears from the App Store. Perhaps it will return one day as a licensed version of either BattleLore or Memoir '44. We don't condone any sort of IP rip-offs, but I wanted to review this game for two reasons: A) it's an iOS "tabletop" board game, and that's kind of my thing, and B) I wanted to show the people who do have the rights to the game that there is an interest in porting this sort of thing over to digital devices. Plus, since Apple is still allowing the app to exist, we'll take a moment to review it. If a miniatures strategy game sounds interesting to you, read on and decide if you want to support Puffin or sit this one out and wait for an official port to hit your iPad.
