Last updated on June 7th, 2023 at 07:10 am
Terra Mystica
Terra Mystica is one of the best $9.99 to play game in the App Store.
Developed by Digidiced UG (haftungsbeschrankt) i.G., Terra Mystica is a Board game with a content rating of 4+.
It was released on 20th April 2017 with the latest update 15th July 2020
Whether you are a fan of Board, Strategy, games, you will find this game interesting and will absolutely like it.
Rating
71 people have rated 1.64
You can download the game Terra Mystica from APP STORE.
Description
Short Summary:
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In a world of fantasy, called Terra Mystica, 14 races are fighting together or individually against their opponents to gain power and territory. Using their resources smartly and terraforming wisely to gain supremacy and lead their own settlers to victory. The original digital conversion of the highly decorated Terra Mystica board game of Helge Ostertag and Jens Drögemüller. Play against other players world wide or challenge the computer opponent.
Overview:
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Terra Mystica is a strategy game with a simple game principle and very little luck involved: You govern one of 14 factions trying to transform the Landscape on the game board in your favor in order to build your Structures. On the one hand, proximity to other players limits your options for further expansion, on the other hand though, it provides some benefits during the game. This conflict is the source of Terra Mystica’s appeal.
Structures may be upgraded to provide even more resources, like Workers, Pries
The 14 artfully designed factions, each having unique special abilities, as well as the exchangeable bonus cards allow for a large number of possible game plays that constantly keep this game entertaining!
Features of Terra Mystica:
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- easy to learn: the interactive Tutorial helps to get a start in this deep strategy game
- hard to master: Enormous depth and interesting decisions without being too complex to understand. The best strategy always wins!
- replayability: always changing and challenging game experience with new combinations. You want to try all fantasy races! An ideal game for hardcore gamers!
- challenging developments: only strategy and tactics count – not luck!
- game replays: Analyse your best games or learn tricks from the pro settlers
- multiplayer: Challenge the best players across all platforms world wide or play against your family and friends
- three computer difficulties: Try to beat the computer opponent
- newest update: This game uses the newest rules edition of the board game
Awards:
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Terra Mystica has won many awards as a board game, such as:
- Deutscher Spielepreis (German Games Award)
- Spiel des Jahres (Empfehlung) (Game of the Year – Recommended)
- Golden Geek Game Award
- Nederlandse Spellenpreijs
- International Gamers Awards
Updated on 15th July 2020
- Fixed AI in online games from making stupid blunders
- Small improvements to all AI
- "Merge Account" function restored
Terra Mystica Reviews
Yup its good, wish they put the Merchants of the Sea expansion on here.
We’ve played dozens of games with friends and then one day all notifications stopped. Devs won’t respond to in-game bug reporting. We can’t find a fix for this. The game is basically unplayable without notifications. Hopefully the devs see this and respond. I’d love to keep playing, but need notifications back. So frustrating spending money on a game and the most basic functionality fails. Edit: Notifications suddenly working again, still no response from devs.
We love Terra Mystica, but this app does has its problems. The AIs take like five minutes to move sometimes. Its frustrating because it shouldnt take that long. Also, we keep having to restart the game because it keeps bugging out. We really do love this game but it needs to work out its bugs so the game runs smoother. We would do a five stars for the game itself but three stars because of the app. Please fix it developers :(
Game has been fine until recently. We no longer receive notifications when it is our turn, which means we have to constantly check the app instead of being notified. Will there be a fix for this?
So, no doubt, the game is hard! However, when the majority of your games with friends get hung because AI players are unresponsive, it just makes it worse. We also have to quit the game and come back when it says we have moves, but when we choose the move, it says none are valid, and the undo button doesnt work. We are enticed by the game, but theres work to be done on this app.
For some reason this game will not let dragonlords have zero power tokens and therefore dragonlords can never use there last power token. The class is completely unusable until this bug is fixed.
What gives? We paid $4.99 for this and we cant even play the game.
The reviews are low because people are upset the asynchronous play isn’t amazing but as an app that offers great local play with ai and guests, or unranked online games with friends it’s fantastic. In addition the app has beautiful aesthetics, music, and sounds to go along with it. Highly recommend for any new/old Terra fans!
It takes a while to learn how to play. It takes longer to get good at it. Its a challenge every time. If thats what you like in a game, your money will be well spent.
Development team has really put effort into stabilizing, and it feels much better now with rarely any crashes. Solid implementation, though multiplayer performance could be better.
Played the heck out of this app. Id play more if the AIs werent generally hopeless.
Minus one star because of two things; errors and ease of use. The errors, we get sometimes after completing our turn. You have to start the app over again for it to work. Then you have to take the action again. Its always worked after two tries. The second thing is that there are a lot of menus to check through. If we start to take an action we dont have certain information available to us quickly. For example if we want to build or upgrade and we forgot how many workers we had we would have to close the screen, check our workers and potentially our income for future actions, etc. We wish it was all right there. On the positive side, the game looks and feels just like its analog counterpart. Great job with the look and feel. Works pretty well on our iPhone 7 and doesnt require a massive screen to play.
While not perfect, the game does run as it is supposed to. There are glitches yet they are mostly visual and do not impact gameplay mechanics. And as mentioned in other reviews, the tutorial isnt quite as helpful as it could be. It helped to give a basic understanding of the games mechanics but we still had to read the online pdf version of the rules to feel like we understood what all the symbols meant in the various panels. We havent tried the online multiplayer and cant speak for that. Overall, it is a good adaptation that has room for improvement. For the price it is a decent way to test the game and see if you might like it or Gaia Project (the arguably better follow up to Terra Mystica with similar mechanics) as an addition to your physical collection.
This app looks great and simplifies the action in a game that some find fairly complex. We really enjoy it! Im currently in a game with one human player and two AI opponents and weve been waiting for the AI to take its turn for roughly 20 hours. We have to assume the issue is server based, but there isnt any indication in the app that anything is wrong anywhere. Update: Now that AI has completely exhausted his time and there does not appear to be any mechanism for removing him from the game.
We have run across two final scoring tiles in the expansion that did not work properly. Like the app otherwise but get the rules of the game correct please!
Cant save a game. Exits for any reason, wasted time. And so many glitches that you wont finish many games. Such a good game so poorly programmed. Dont waste your money.
When playing vs. AI, the AI is allowed to pass and choose the same bonus card it had chosen during the previous round- this privilege is not extended to the human players, is against the rules and gives a huge advantage to the AI.
We allowed notifications to know when it’s our turn, and now they’re using them to send ads for other games!?!
The game is not integrated well for iPhone users. Additionally, they will send ads that cannot be turned off for other offerings by the maker. No advanced AI exists for the game.
We can use the 4 power special action to terraform and build but the game wont allow us to terraform and build using workers. Totally breaks the game. Unplayable.
As the title says, we want a refund. We’ve never played the game before, and dutifully started to go through the Tutorials. Second one in, THE SECOND ONE, we find a bug that doesnt let us click on the left hand bar with all the tile icons. We need to do so to progress the tutorial. We tried everything to reset the game, and get the tutorial to work, and nothing. We’ve read that the actual board game is great. Maybe with our refund Ill go and buy that. But we definitely dont want to continue with a game that bugs out in the second tutorial.
The game is great. It is a good port of a pretty involved board game and it plays well even on our phone. The game ties itself to Game Center, which we honestly thought would be a pretty good thing but that seems to cause issues with the game sometimes. After a recent reinstall we havent run into any issues but we will try the steps outlined by the developer if something does happen again. The game is a solid port and a lot of fun. We highly encourage people to give it a try.
Played so many hours of this game and the bugginess around online play can be a bit of a pain. Hope the devs fix because its an excellent effort and AI is fun to play as well which is rare!
We purchased this app due to endless reviews about how great it was. We have never played before and was excited to go through the tutorial. Well, the tutorial froze in the basics section and now we have a $10 app we dont know how to play. We’ve restarted, logged off and on, updated our software and it keeps freezing in the same section every time. Please tap the left bar we tap the entire screen and nothing happens.
We love this game, the UI is beautiful and true to the game. HOWVER, the interface makes it nearly impossible to play with others. App doesnt connect regularly with server and freezes claiming you need to login. Its an app problem not a login problem. Im in game center. Worse yet, the app bugs out sometimes even when playing solo and you can no longer read the text unless you restart… Which takes way too long to load. The app looks great, but the app isnt worth the money for the bugs. Play online for free instead. The developer responded saying things like our phone is probably too old and needs to be restarted once a week at least. For the record we have a new iPhone8. The fact of the matter is if the game is such a memory hog, maybe its the app and not the user. We dont have the same amount of lag or difficulties with any other GameCenter games.
We hope the developers make this app better for playing with remote players. For example, setting game timeout and connecting with friends would be appreciated features.
Please update for iPhone X! Great game! Edit: updated! Thank you!
How can you have had so many updates and still not support iPhone X? And you continue to charge $10 for this?
Was fine when it was boxed in iPhone 7 mode, was broken when they expanded it to fill the screen.
Please make iPhone X compatible!
Recently we’ve been unable to start casual games with a friend (both with and without fire & ice features). When the game was working, it was fantastic with great AI. Hopefully the bugs get fixed soon!
First of all, we want to complement the developers. We had never played this game before, and our first couple plays we doubted whether the many icons and windows were necessary. But after playing a few more times, we began to see what a complex and deep board game they had managed to develop. At first it had some bugs, but they have been quick to respond and fix things. They even fixed one bug we notified them of within a few days. Looking at the update history, we count about 25 updates in the last 8 months. We cant think of another developer of iOS games who has been so quick to turn around updates to make the app better. Kudos to them. As to the game, we love it. We use iOS board game apps to decide if they are worth purchasing for real life table games, and we bought the actual game based on this app. One caveat is that this is a pretty deep and complex game, so may not be everyones cup of tea. Expect to spend an up to an hour or more even playing with bots. Looking forward to the Fire & Ice expansion. Our only other issue is not really a fault with the app, but with the game designers. They did not play test the different factions enough, and have come up with different starting scores for the factions. Not a bad idea, but these points were not play tested well either, and the factions are still not properly balanced. Most new players wont really notice it, but more experienced players will. Im hoping Digidiced can gather more updated statistics to make the starting points better balanced for the factions.
Swarmlings maxxed out water and fire cults , but only had one city. Many tiny bugs stamped out, thanks.
We feel like more people would be willing to queue into ranked fast games if people could see from the main menu how many people are already queued up.
Love the game but fix the notification system so we know when its our turn!
EDIT: this review has been bumped up because the developers have pointed out that when a player "times out," they can still rejoin the game until another player boots them. However, we’ve been the player to boot someone for timing out, and the dialog for doing so indicates that we are just acknowledging that another player timed out. This UX should require a confirmation of "are you sure you want to replace USER with an AI?" we still stand by our review that we should be able to select the timeout clock duration when creating a game, but the app is not useless, given what we’ve learned. Just unsatisfactory. —— Original review: This app is useless for asynchronous play. We’ve yet to have a game where nobody times out and gets replaced by the AI. Gonna stick will the browser implementation by Snellman until the devs give users an option to undo an opponent’s timeout or disable or extend the game clock when creating a game.
This is a massive fail of epic proportions non stop buggy mess, par for the course for this company.
Terra Mystica is our favorite board game and love that there’s a app, but as of this version, it suffers from some pretty significant bugs that sometimes make it impossible to finish games. In the last game we tried to play just now, we suddenly could no longer upgrade our buildings despite having plenty of resources. In the same game we were prompted to pick a favor tile (the first for the game) and the one we chose would not work. Our player icon appeared and the confirmation checkmark vanished, disallowing us to select it. All other favor tiles seemed to work fine. Also in the same game we won a free shovel at the end of a round but had nowhere we could use it because we were out of resources. The game would not let us cancel and we were forced to exit and restart the game to continue. Hopefully after we submit these bugs in the app they’ll get fixed because it’s frustrating to not be able to properly play every game :(
The developers have improved the app since it has been released, but there are still some quirks to be fixed. The rewind button hasn’t been working well. You often have to wait days before you take your turn again.
Agree with the still buggy complaint. There have been a lot of updates and happy to see improvements, but our group has yet to successfully complete an online game without at least one player getting converted to AI. We think there are a couple of problems. First, it appears that sometimes the status gets stuck until you swipe to hard close the app and come back in. Maybe this is a game center bug, but slows down the game. Second, a 24 hour window until you get converted to AI permanently is too short and pretty harsh. Especially when the status appears to be stuck at times. How about just converting to AI for that turn? At least that would let you recover from these apparent online bugs without completely abandoning a game or making one of your friends wait for weeks until the next game.
Terra Mystica is one of our favorite board games and one that we thought was too large and complicated to port to iOS. The developers have done a masterful job maximizing screen real estate and allowing for easy access and viewing of the different pieces of the game you need to reference throughout each turn: cult track, bonus tiles, player mats, etc. We’re actually able to play on our iPhone 6s (though it’s preferable to play on the larger screen of our iPad mini). On top of this, the developers are VERY responsive to bugs in the game. There is a "bug" button in the app that allows any user to document a bug or suggestion for improved functionality/visibility, and it’s rarely more than a week between the time we notice a bug to the date it is fixed. The AI is still weak, but the option to play online against selected friends or randomly chosen opponents makes up for this. It’s fun to have a few different games going at the same time and to be able to try different strategies with different races. Make your move within 24 hours of it becoming your turn though, or else you’ll get replaced by AI. Sometimes that’s annoying but it keeps games moving quickly. The game eats up our battery pretty quickly, and we can’t speak to how easy it is to learn the game via the app. We assume it’s pretty tough since there are a ton of moving parts, but every move is fully animated which makes it clear exactly what is happening. But again, that probably contributes to the batters drain. Kinda wish there was a way to turn off the animations if this would save battery life. Also, we often choose to restart the app when opening it up to make a move. If we don’t restart, it takes a few minutes to refresh our list of games so we can select the game where it’s our turn. Despite that sometimes considerable annoyance, we’re still giving it 4 stars because we love the board game and this is such an accurate and well conceived adaptation.
Not ready for prime time. Three of our four games have ended in bugs. Actions that you cannot take but cannot advance until you have taken. AI turns freezing. Game not moving to count victory points after passing in last turn. Poor tutorial. Only easy AI level of difficulty available. This was rushed and has a long way to go.
Game will periodically ask to restart because net connection is lost, and wouldn’t run at all without an update because latest client is required to play online, but we DON’T WANT TO PLAY ONLINE. Offline mode should be just that. The client shouldn’t be connecting to a server EVER unless we want to play online.
We have always wanted to try this game, and now we finally can! It was a little overwhelming at first, but after the second game things started to click. There are so many possibilities and strategies that change every game, it’s gotten us hooked! They did an awesome job making this app. There is a tutorial to walk through some of the basics as well, some won’t make sense right away, but like we said, just stick with it and it will. One problem we find with the game is that if you close the app or switch to another one, your local game will be lost and you will have to start over. This makes it frustrating because you basically have to plan on not doing anything else during the time you play it. Please fix this! It is the only major drawback to the game. Buy it and play it! It’s fun!
Preface this by saying this is a great game and a good start at a solid implementation. However, one of the updates a few weeks ago broke the game on our iPad. It logs in to Game Center but fails connecting to the Digidiced network, saying the user is not authenticated. The game works fine on our iPod, and we’ve gone back and forth with the developers, but none of their suggestions worked. (I’ve logged out of GC, rebooted the iPad, deleted and reinstalled the app, etc.) Now they seem to have stopped responding.
Terra Mystica is a wonderful board game. It has myriad ways to victory, interesting abilities and the right balance of personal conquest versus competitive disruption. If we were reviewing the board game, it would be an easy 5 stars, but we’re reviewing the appa 10-dollar download that has the polish and feel of free-to-play shovelware. In attempting to play a game with friends, we first encountered the issue that the app uses an outdated and unsupported social structure in Game Center. The user experience in trying to add friends is rocky at best. Email addresses are not accepted, and the interface makes it difficult trying to accomplish what should be a straightforward task, and we were met with further problems as we wrestled with poor-quality English in the app’s interface. Be prepared to exit and rejoin your game dozens upon dozens of times before it’s over. The alerts come late (or not at all), it frequently hangs at the login screen for indefinite spans of time, and sometimes makes no attempt to connect to the server, leaving you clueless when it’s your turn to go. Sometimes it even requests a re-connect, even when it doesn’t need to (?). It was always going to be a challenge to get the complexity of Terra Mystica into such a compact format. We respect the size and difficulty of the task. However, for 10 dollars, we should expect much, much better.
Where to start, oh yes, do not buy this game. There are numerous bugs with the one thing you want the app to do, play games online with your friend. The user experience of the app is downright terrible, terrible menus, terrible icons that represent god knows what because nothing has labels. And to top it off? It’s slow and hell and 10 dollars. Do yourself a favor and forget you ever found out this app existed and continue to play the board game.
Pretty good implementation of a great game. Only 4 stars because of a couple of small bugs, and a lack of good achievements. For this price, we had hoped we would have more goals in the game to enhance replayability. But with only easy AI, local games get old fast. If there were more achievements (like Waterdeep for example) we would feel better about playing a ton of games as we work towards mastering the game.
Love the game, but some abilities don’t work as advertised. Giant ability does not work at all as far as we can tell, which has just ruined our ranked game. UN GeneHeist, most recent iOS, iPhone SE.
Every time we try to play a game, somewhere in the second round the cost for building something gets double counted (getting charged 4 workers and 6 coins for a trading post) and our entire gameplan gets thrown way off. This is the fifth game we’ve attempted and it’s unplayable every time because this keeps happening. Absolute waste of $10 until it’s fixed.