Charterstone has been one of the most popular “legacy” board games since that style of game first emerged. (A legacy game alters rules and board state permanently across multiple playthroughs, often based on an overarching storyline.) It’s also a standalone legacy game, not an extension of previous brands, like Pandemic (the massive hit), Risk (the original), and Machi Koro (the unnecessary).
Acram Digital just released its digital adaptation of Charterstone (read our review of the tabletop version), and it’s a strong one, with outstanding graphics and competitive AI players—but a very crowded screen that, on Steam at least, made it hard to see the entire board.
The game is coming to Steam on March 26, with ports on Android, iOS, and Nintendo Switch going live shortly thereafter.
Building your charter
Charterstone itself is a classic worker-placement game. You start with two meeples, which you can place on the board to use buildings or gain resources, to build new buildings, or to open “crates” that add cards and rules to the game itself. The ultimate goal across the twelve-game story is to earn the most victory points, but within each game you might make choices that are less beneficial in the short term but help more in the long term. The buildings you place on the board are stickers, and they can cover up other buildings, so the board itself changes over the course of the game.
From game to game, you’ll carry over some things you gain (gold, resources, cards); after any game where you don’t win, you increase your capacity to carry these things over by one. You also gain “glory” based on the points you score in each game, and when you achieve enough glory, you can cash it in for a specific reward at the start of the next game. The buildings themselves let you construct a points engine of sorts, although some rules that emerge as the game progresses make that a little less straightforward.
