Glitch Tank review

Glitch Tank sells itself as a ‘digital board game’ but it feels more like a new strain of sport. Its shuffling, awkward movements make playing it a strangely physical experience, and its delight in one-on-one battling means it can be a little too tartly competitive to be filed alongside Scrabble, Monopoly, or Talisman.

Designer Michael Brough is best known for Vertex Dispenser, a game with which Glitch Tank shares a pleasantly garish colour pallete and a desire to explore the lunatic fringes of strategy. For his first foray onto the iPad, this means offering players a simple enough objective – eliminate your opponent – and then throwing in some fascinating complications.

In screenshots, Glitch Tank can look fairly primitive, but there's a twitchy, slightly buggy layering to the animation that renders it strangely endearing.

These come in the form of the action cards, your sole means of moving yourself around the game world and inflicting damage on your foe. With players sat at opposing ends of the iPad, they’re each dealt four cards at a time, and must then choose between the random selection of commands they represent – allowing them to turn left or right, say, rush ahead, or fire a laser beam, drop a mine, or release a drone. Your options are fairly straightforward, but the dealing makes conflict wonderfully, well, conflicted, and for your first few matches, whether you’re playing a human opponent or the canny AI, taking part in a game of Glitch Tank can feel like going for a ride on carnival bumper cars that have had their controls wired together by anarchists.

Eventually, battles settle into a semblance of normalcy, however, although this is a game in which your offensive possibilities are always complex and your strategies frequently precarious. If your favourite chess piece is the knight, you’re probably going to be quite at home in Brough’s world. If you’re more of a bishop or a rook sort of character, you’re going to get headaches.

With both real-time and turn-based flavours of haphazard carnage on offer, Glitch Tank is willing to mess with your brain at a variety of speeds. Michael Brough’s certainly given iPad owners something to think about, then – even if few will have the patience and foresight to feel truly comfortable on this strange new playing field. [7]