Yomi is finally launching on the iPad on April 17th. Press kit is here.
First, a reminder of what Yomi is: it's a fighting game in card form. Each deck represents a character and the decks follow poker conventions to help you learn the contents of your deck more easily. Numbered cards are "normal" moves, face cards are special moves, and aces are super moves.
Furthermore, Yomi is a competitive game. I'm really sad to have to explain this next part, but these days lots of competitive games have turned their back on what competition is all about: even playfields. An even playfield is when you can play against opponents who don't have material advantage over you because they grinded more or because they spent more. Nowadays, even some of the top e-sports have either forced-grinds before you're allowed to get gameplay-relevant elements, or they put some kind of collectable barrier between you and gameplay elements so that you play weak, gimped stuff while you grind or open packs of random cards to eventually get to the point when you can finally be even with others (and have material advantage over those who aren't there yet.) Those things trample on the spirit of competition, so I'd like to be clear that in Yomi:
- There's no forced-grind to get characters.
- There's no random packs of cards that would have you end up with half-assed weak characters.
- You always have full-powered characters and you play against other players who do too.
Strategy
Although Yomi looks simple at first, it's really an excellent strategy game. It's something you can play for years and years and continue to get better and better. If you think there's not much to it, watch some of Aphotix's casts and you'll start to realize just how much strategy stuff you aren't aware of. Even *I* realize that watching his casts! Here's a link to our twitch channel: http://www.twitch.tv/sirlingames
iPad Specifics
The iPad version has cross-platform play with the web version. That means any time you join the quickmatch queue, you could end up playing someone from either version. If you have an account already on fantasystrike.com, you can log in with that in the iPad version to keep your same username and your leaderboard stats.
The iPad version will launch at a price of $9.99, and will come with all 10 base characters from the print version of the game. These characters used to cost $5 each ($50 for 10 decks), so that's kind of ridiculously cheap at $9.99 for 10 decks. It's 1/10th the price of the tabletop version.
The iPad version also has an in-app purchase option for $9.99 to get the 10 expansion characters as a bundle.
Yomi has these game modes:
- Tutorial
- Practice vs CPU
- Survival
- Quickmatch (online vs humans)
- Custom game (online vs humans)
You *can* play offline without an internet connection. There are two difficulties of bots: easy and hard. The easy one is pretty easy and is good for learning basic familiarity with the game. The hard one is quite sophisticated though! If you flop around and play randomly, expect to lose.
Leaderboards
There is a leaderboard system where you start out in the "student" ranks, and go up by winning, but don't go down by losing. This is to ease you into things. You also get a longer timer in the student ranks. When you rank up enough, you'll then get to the "master" ranks. Here, you do go down for losing so your rank will become an accurate reflection of your skill.
Replays
Yomi lets you save and watch replays of your games. The most fun aspect of this to me is that you can go to the leaderboard, and by everyone's name there is a "view latest replay" link. So you're always one touch away from watching games from all the top players!
The future
We'd like to add more features, and the more of you who support us, the more we'll be able to do. The first things I'd like to see are an iPhone / iPad Touch version added, as well as translations into a few other languages. After that, we might experiment with random packs of sparkly cards (*cosmetic only*), but not in a way that would restrict you from any gameplay. I'm also looking to add an automated tournaments feature that would let you easily form 8-person tournaments any time. There could be even more, too, if you help spread the word.
Links and Stuff
For more Sirlin Games news, follow us on:
Facebook: www.facebook.com/SirlinGames
Twitter: @SirlinGames
Twitter (personal): @Sirlin
Press Kit for Yomi on iPad
Print-and-play versions of every deck in the tabletop store.
And please come to Fantasy Strike Expo in June!