Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 09:51 pm
Santorini Board Game – Strategy Game Review
Santorini Board Game is a Strategy/Entertainment/Board game from 1688826 Alberta Inc, first launched in 13th July 2019.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 73+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Santorini Board Game Stand Out
Santorini is a highly accessible pure strategy game where you build your way to victory!
How to play:
1) MOVE one of your Workers. You can move up a maximum of one level.
2) BUILD a block with your moved Worker. Build domes on the third level.
3) WIN if your Worker reaches the third level!
Features:
• Game altering variable player powers completely change how you play, bringing massive replayability.
• Beautifully rendered 3D play area
• Adventure through the land of Santorini in the single player Odyssey mode
• Play with a friend in pass-and-play or online game modes
• Already own the boardgame? Use the "Helper" to select gods to play in the physical board game, and log your matches
• Dare to challenge the insanely skilled "Godlike" AI level
• Watch tutorials on all the god powers!
• Fully orchestrated sound track
Santorini includes 34 characters selected from the original board game, the Golden Fleece expansion and the Underworld promotional characters, with the option to purchase up to 25 more (either in packs of 5 for $1.99 USD, or all together in the Pantheon pack for a discounted price of $7.99 USD).
This Strategy game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Santorini Board Game is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 13th January 2022
Recent improvements include:
Fixed tutorial videos not playing
Download & Availability
Santorini Board Game is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Santorini Board Game on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
You place first and the AI shadows you. Its literally guarantied to win every game.
The most recent update seems to have broken the selection of random god powers. Now, no matter the settings, Charybdis is always selected as the random choice. The game is great, but this one little bug is aggravating.
Excellent adaptation and even better now that speed fixes are in place. Base game is great alone and having almost 60 fairly balanced characters to choose from gives it excellent variety.
Fun game that we bought to play with our friend, but unfortunately private matches work 1 out 10 times we try to set up a match. Hopefully the developer will fix this.
Santorini the board game is possibly among the 5×5 board is the perfect size and the gods abilities are well crafted. The only flaw we see in this game is the lack of a random, god only choice: the random pick might match a god up against a hero (which have single-use powers that dont balance).
An excellent digital implementation for our favorite game. The amount of detail surprises us (especially for a board game app). We dont play online, but its a great way to pick gods (and regulate matchups as it doesnt select banned matchups) or pass the time against the AI when Im not playing the actual game with friends. There is so much to explore and so many ways to play this really simple yet insanely deep game 10/10 give it a try.
This app is a near-flawless implementation of the fantastic board game on which it is based. It is beautiful and elegant. We have played the app off and on for years, and we still find new things to learn. Santorini is a much deeper and more nuanced game than many given it credit for. Minus 1/2 star because we have occasional crashes, which are frustrating. Minus 1/2 star because there is no random player order. We hate resetting a match just to change start order. Please add a random first player option.
The app has a beautiful interface. The game is simply fantastic. However, the app crashes every once in a while, when Im playing an opponentone of our friendsonline. If that could be fixed, and if they added a save mode, so you could play the same match throughout the day, rather than having to finish the game right away when you start (if you leave the app for longer than 20 seconds or so, it kicks you out and ends the match), this app would be perfect.
The implementation of the board game is pretty fine but we were disappointed to find that all the links to the tutorials dont work. The timer just spins and spins. Its been so long since an update that it seems that maybe there are no plans to keep the app up to date. If you like the game and want to play against an AI this is fine but just know that you wont have access to the tutorials. We dont know if the game will continue to be playable over time without updates. It also looks as if the link to contact the creators is dead so you cant contact the company to ask them if they plan to fix the broken tutorials.
We are obsessed with the board game. We burnt our husband out on it though so we had to download it on our phone and play against the AI to quench our addiction. Unfortunately the game keeps crashing, usually when the game is only a few moves from completion. It's incredibly frustrating. We've tried restarting our phone, closing all apps, etc. We don't know what to do to fix it but it's very frustrating.
Beautiful game, but terrible for learning. No undo, no turn-by-turn review, no way to learn from mistakes. It feels impossible to improve because one mistake 5 turns ago can lose the game, but theres no way to go back and study it. Needs a rewind/replay feature badly.
First match is you playing Minotaur against Artemis. Not impossible, but much harder than most random matchups of gods. If you prefer a fun game that gradually scales up in difficulty, stay away.
As resident board game geek in our house, it is useful learning as well as humbling to be able to play against the AI after playing the physical board game with our family. We do wish the helper portion of the game had a map section that would track your piece movement play whenever you are using a god who would otherwise be using the shield/hidden map options (e.g. Hecate). We know you can play a parallel 2 human game on your phone to track things in the board game but we would prefer not to have to pay to unlock gods again on our phone when Ive bought the physical game already.
This game is great and the mobile adaptation is solid. Love it.
The hourglass just keeps going round & round. We left iPad for 30 min & it was still doing that upon our return. What gives.
Odessy mode is ridiculously tough for a 1:1 game against AI. Im 8-10 games with a straight loss on novice mode. Tried to do a pickup game online to play a human and never could find one (not enough traffic)? Game will end up being deleted if we dont not get creamed by the novice AI every game.
Given that we have no choice for picking a character in the campaign mode (odyssey)…dont make each level expert level. Or provide difficulty options. Otherwise, like us, it will be 15 games played and every one lost resulting in the game being deleted and no interest in your in-app purchases. Frustrate the player = no repeat business.
Purchased this game today and the tutorial wont load. Feel like we wasted our money.
Santorini is a wonderfully simple and and tactical abstract strategy game and this implementation is fantastic! There art is breathtaking and the user interface is highly usable on smaller devices like phones. There were some issues losing the video tutorials from within the app last we checked, but you can find them online. Our only request would be that they do PC port. Ive been burned one too many times by iOS changing things and games become unplayable because developers arent generating enough new income on older titles to justify the update. Please release it for PC.
Developer please fix your private matches for async play, Reproduction use case: 1. Player 1 starts room, number 123456 2. Player 2 on different phone, joins room 3. Place some workers, basically start game from both sides, this works fine as long as two players are both online playing the game. 4. Player 2, exit/background out of app, player 1 exit/background out of app. 5. Player 2 relaunch app, cant connect to room! Try to enter room 123456: room not found. Cant ever rejoin a game in progress. You cant play this game asynchronously or even background the app one time. That is completely broken. Please fix this ASAP, players should be able to create a session, then go about their day and play whenever they want to. All other online board games allow for asynchronous play between other players. Utterly ridiculous that you would have to stay online in game to finish a whole game. Dont download if you intend to play with someone without ever closing or backgrounding the app. 1 star until this is fixed as we paid $5 for this and cant even use it.
We play with our life boyfriend a lot but with the last update we cant play together it always says room not found. Loved this app until then. If we didnt pay $10 for the full app and expansion packs we wouldnt be mad.
We purchased this game to play with others online. Otherwise Id play our board game version. The multiplayer does not work at all. Extremely disappointed.
We love board game apps, and this is a very good one: easy to navigate, crisp graphics. Honestly, we dont play much online. We prefer solo play and this version of the game scratches the itch of a quick challenge when we cant play the actual game…which is often. Great job.
You should add Chaos to the roster we just love Chaos.
Really enjoy the solo mode, but am yet to experience multi player because each time we try to enter a friend's code or a friend enters our code, the game says we've entered an incorrect code. Thought it was a cross platform issue (we have apple, they have Android), but the developers assured us in a support email that they do support cross platform multiplayer – so it just doesn't work for everyone we guess. We've tried to find a random multiplayer game but even after over 10 minutes of searching each time, haven't been connected with anyone. We've seen other reviews that say to join their discord community, but that's not the level of effort we expect to have to put in to be randomly matched for an app. Only complaints on solo: 1. Animations are cool, but slow. We'd suggest a fast mode for animations because they get annoying when you can't skip them. 2. We haven't figured out how to just do a random gods game vs computer. We can play the Odyssey where we get to pick a god against the level's god, which is ok, but it'd be nice to also just play an impromptu random game. Overall worth the cost but with room to grow.
Beautiful and faithful to the tabletop version, though multiplayer needs a much clearer setup description for new players. One player will select two gods and the other player picks from those two- its very counterintuitive to new players.
Tutorials dont work on iPhone X – they just hang on the loading screen forever.
We are finding it hard to play this game. The graphic of the pieces falling onto the board and leaving a trail of smoke is really annoying. It makes us jump back a little. Its distracting and makes the game unpleasant for us. We wish the pieces came down smoothly. If they changed that, we could get into the game, we think. We would revise this review. We mean it is after every single move!!! It gets beyond old!!! We like other abstract games, so we are dissapointed. We are highly sensitive, but we have a feeling it annoys other people too.
Im sure it would be less boring if we bought all the IAP, but its quickly lost its entertainment value for us. Just bought a few days ago. We thought you could just unlock things by playing, but that isnt really how this game works. Disappointing.
Online feature is a work in progress :) join discord to make it easier.
When we first played Santorini in person, we were enthralled. It is one of our favorite abstract games ever. It has the right amount of depth, whimsy, and replayability to keep us engaged for long periods of time. However, we always worried that an iOS version wouldnt do the game justice. It would be too hard to visualize the 3D board and make good decisions. The AI would be too complex with all the various God Powers. So it is with a huge sigh of relief and loud foot stomping that we are sooooo happy to report that these worries were completely unfounded. The game looks amazing. Rotating the game board to get different views is organic and natural. The colors are fabulous. The artwork is spot on from the original. The AI is devious with all god matchups. We are just gushing about this game right now. Sometimes the AI plays a god power and we get whomped. Its too unfair. That matchup was impossible!!! And then we swap sides and watch the AI toss our unbeatable god power aside like a used toy. The AI knows what its doing and does it ruthlessly. We play at the Expert level. Im too chicken to challenge God level yet. But we love watching the AI execute a gods power and see different takes on how to gain advantage with it. We can definitely learn from this game. Lastly, Im happy to report no crashes. At all. A few god powers are missing from the board game, we think. But maybe some just dont make sense for the handheld version? Regardless of a few missing god powers, we think this game is a winner. Its perfect for late night game sessions or quiet lunches. Real-time online play is nice, too. Some suggestions as of Aug, 2019: 1) Id like our previous game settings to persist between sessions. We dont like having to re-select an AI player every day. 2) Option to be able to study the board after the game is over to see what other moves we could have missed. 3) Ability to step through the game after its over, from move 1. 4) Randomize start player, or at least make it an option. 5) Can we have stats? ELO? Community win/loss rates with certain matchups? 6) Heres a minor suggestion. Please leave the God names on the screen even when their god power instructions are hidden. 7) we dont need it, but in-game rules would be nice for new players. Its fairly lame not to have them. Literally take screenshots of the rulebooks and paste them in the game. Its not hard. A+++.
Game plays well, there is the occasional stutter but nothing too game breaking. This game is abreast strategy game and the AI does make this game pretty challenging. Would greatly recommend.
Ive loved Santorini since we picked it up at Gen Con the first year it was released. We were so excited to see that it popped up in the App Store. This app does not disappoint. The graphics are beautiful and the interface is intuitive. Definitely five stars.
The AI can be tough even on lowest level. We have the board game so decided to pick this up.
Just an FYI for future purchasers, theres no way in app to read how to play the game. You must watch and listen to a video talk through.
The digital implementation of Santorini is excellent. Everything that we love about the physical board game is represented in the app, plus SO MUCH MORE. The ability to play against the AI takes it to another level. Playing against friends online it great too, we just wish it was easier to share an invitation code. It would be great if there was a button to either A) copy the code to the clipboard or B) automatically populate the code into a text message.
The tutorial is a series of videos, so beware. The gameplay is pretty straightforward, but each god has a twist, so we think it took us 30 games to win one, but even at a 30 to 1 loss rate, the game is still really fun. The sessions are short, which is perfect for mobile. Ive already purchased all the DLC packs, and the new gods are a blast! This is the ultimate simple to learn, lifetime to master game. It is a battery killer, so beware of that. Kinda unavoidable in good premium games.
Love this game; it is one of our all time favorite board games.
Cant watch lag lag lagYouTube video.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.121
- Size: 466.71 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: 1688826 Alberta Inc
Last updated: 13th January 2022 | Genre: Strategy, Entertainment | Developer: 1688826 Alberta Inc