This guy must be a genius. I’m talking about Charles McGinnis, creator of several iPhone games. When he first approached me to review his first game, Battle Trivia, I came away thinking that the amount of effort put into the game was tremendous and the fact that he was doing it part time was just, astounding.
Charles is back, and this time his latest game is a totally different kettle of fish. Eschewing trivia for playing cards, his latest game is titled Poker Tower. Now, I’m pretty sure that most people are familiar with the game Solitaire, thanks mostly to Microsoft bundling the game with Windows.
Poker Tower has a similar concept, but instead of arranging cards in a sequence, you are supposed to arrange the cards into poker hands!
Different poker hands net you different amount of points. A straight flush is worth 10 points while having two pairs in a sequence of 5 cards nets you a single point. Each level has a target score to reach before the entire deck is consumed. Reaching the target score allows you to carry forward your score to the next level to reach the next target score.
With three lanes, players can form three different hands at a time. It really boils down to strategy and luck on which lane you want to shunt an open card to. I’m not sure whether the tactic of counting cards would work here, but hey, if it does, do tell.
The game conveniently shows the type of hands and the number of points they are worth on the left hand side of the screen. At the bottom of the screen, you get to see the remaining cards available (that are not yet opened).
The concept of using poker hands instead of the plain old Solitaire-style sequence of cards is a pretty smart one. I’m not much of a poker player, but the game allows me to reacquaint myself with the different poker hands in time for Chinese New Year.
Poker Tower also measures statistics but this feature can be switched off from the main menu. The only thing I find missing here is OpenFeint or some other form of global leaderboard.
At 99 cents, you can’t go wrong with Poker Tower;Â click here to download it. And someone please give Charles an award.
Nine Over Ten 9/10 » Poker Tower (iPhone/iPod Touch) Review…
Poker Tower has a similar concept with Solitaire, but instead of arranging cards in a sequence, you are supposed to arrange the cards into poker hands!…
Hello. I did purchase Poker Tower tonight (August 11, 2010) for my i-Pod touch only to never get
the game started. It continued to return to the application page by default, so I have not yet tried a
game of Poker Tower, which cost me about $1.00 that may become a wasted purchase. I hope you
can make an upgraded version, so that when it is downloaded, it would take me to the game at last!
Good afternoon!
After more than three months of issues, Poker Tower, the card game that uses four-colored suits, finally works on my i-Pod! I originally paid a dollar for Poker Tower, but had frequently taken off the download when it kept displaying the home page of applications instead. Maybe it will become a popular video game in 2011, so move over Angry Birds–and also Sudoku! And yes, there was an updated version but it took an update to get it working! Now I’ll worry about winning at Poker Tower instead of just trying to even play it!