Asian poker-like card game with some fancy features which let you enjoy this game to the max.
Gameplay: You play one position in this four player card game. The deck is split between all the players (like Hearts or Bridge). The aim is to either get rid of all your cards, or to have as few cards as possible when one player finishes. You go round the table and each player puts out a hand which is larger than the previous player. The poker element comes from the fact that you play set tricks. The number of cards in your trick is predetermined by the number of cards in the first hand in that round. In this game, the two is the highest, and then the rest of the cards go in descending order from Ace to 3. There’s also a hierarchy in the suits going diamonds, clubs, hearts, spades from the weakest to the strongest. I think I’ve bored most people already, so I’ll stop here, and you can google the game if you want to know more specifics.
Hopefully you’re not confused by the description above because this is quite a good game. Big 2 is famous across Asia, and it’s a great travel game. The strategies and methods are very interesting, and the whole game dynamics are different from Poker or Hearts/Bridge. This computerised version has 3 difficulty levels, Easy, Medium and Hard. It also has a scoring system which lets you track your skill across several games.
Ace elements: There’s an awesome function in this game where you swipe across your hand and the cards are automatically reordered for you by suit or hierarchy or suit and hierarchy. By doing this a few times you can easily see different options in your hand (full houses, flushes or straights etc). The whole theming is good – I like the graphics, animations, accompanying music and sound effects. But to be honest, most people would get bored of the music after a while, though I suspect the developers expect most people to play this with no music on.
Verdict: 2/5 Big 2 is a great game and this computerised version has done the card game justice. However, I have to cap out its score because there’s no active tutorial. There’s a written explanation of the game (which looks like its lifted from a wiki), but nothing which shows the game in action. So for that reason, I’ve scored the game down because most people aren’t going to have the patience to read the game description to learn – instead they’ll look at it for 3 minutes and just get fed up.
Another negative is that the game footprint is rather high – 3.4 MB, and there’s no option to move the game to the SD card.
Fundamentally, the game is good… it’s not like the developer came up with that part, but they have ensured that the animations, the interface, the scoring, and the AI are there.
If you know how to play Big 2 then this is a definite 4 or 5 star game. If you like card games and understand the dynamics, then this is a 3 star game. But if you don’t know Big 2 at all, this might test your patience.
big Big BIG 2 QR Code
Developers: 2-Person Studio
