Abalone Reviews

Well i like this game.As a chess player i find the tactics rather good.First encountered this game when a lady friend bought it and kicked my butt.I always beat her at chess.(apart from once when i gazed into her eyes too long and accidently gave my my Queen away.Too much wine and adoration going on :) Had to practice so got this on Steam.Just like the real thing.No negatives for me.If you like the game its perfect for playing against.Am playing on Regular level to get the hang of it. Havn't lost many games.Thumbs up from me.BTW not interested in online play so cant comment if it works etc.

Abalone is a board game app done by a company called Bulky pix which doesn't seem to exist anymore as I could find no web page and the developers never respond to any customer’s complaints about Steam achievements not working. The game is really awful. It has a terrible tutorial which tries to teach you how to play the game while quoting some random quotes from Sun Tzu as if it's some sort of profound sensei. 4-5 million people have played the game Abalone throughout their lifetime and for those people this version is hardly to be considered fun as it has no proper match making ability. Hence a novice will probably be pitted up against a world champion in no time. The ai in the single player is perfect and never makes a mistake. Some people have made a statement that violent video games make people violent. I don't believe that. I personally believe that BADLY MADE/UNFAIR GAMES make people violent and there are a few of those that I have banned myself from playing. This is soon to be one of them. The game is so unfair that I often start shouting 'FRUIT' at the top of my lungs and yodelling threats that I’m about to get a sledgehammer so I can turn their marbles to gelatine. The board game has often been criticised that it’s possible to make a game go on forever by simply taking a defensive position and maintaining that. This version prevents that from happening as you’re often dictated that you need to win the game in so many moves etc. Because of non-working Steam achievements, deaf eared developers, bad match making and completely unfair ai, this game gets a solid thumbs down as I often found myself losing more than my marbles every time I played it... Below is an example of me playing one of the advanced levels called ‘war stage 3’, originally I was going to give someone 5 steam games for simply showing me the solution to it, but somehow I magically found a bug and was able to win by setting out only one of my opponents marbles though in reality I was supposed to set out two. After that I begin to look at ‘War stage 4’ and after getting frustrated with it after a couple of seconds I now hold out the 5 Steam game reward to the person who can show me the solution to this puzzle. It should be enough of a sample for you to work out if this is the game for you. Thanks for reading… https://youtu.be/LC_5mC8TKDo

Frankly, releasing a game on Steam that loads a black screen on today's resolutions is a bit sad. If you are like me and were getting the janky background music on a small black screen try dropping the resolution of your launch monitor to 1024x768. That at least permitted the graphics to load for my rig, which nominally has a multimon setup at 3640x1920. Once in the game, however, things didn't really improve. ESC doesn't bring up a settings menu, it exits the game. That's massively frustrating when you are searching for the controls in order to get going. Thankfully, the launch sequence takes a while every time you reflexively hit ESC in an attempt to get to any control-map or settings. Ultimately, this is a bad port to PC.

I've recently played the physical copy of Abalone for the first time, and really enjoyed the tactics involved. Shortly after, I found out it was ported to iphone/android. This week, I find it on steam sale for pc. Worth it for the local multiplayer alone, let alone the AI vs and puzzle modes.

People can't unlock any achievements. That's serious, means you dev guys made this just in the "helter skelter" state and show no respect to players. Please show us your attitude of solving the problem, or I won't change my review here.

A faithful adaptation of the board game. Everything works as expected, there is plenty of configuration to choose, and the challenges are a nice touch.

A faithful reproduction of the physical game Abalone. Achievements are broken and the single player puzzles and challenges leave much to be desired.

Abalone is a strategy game with very simple rules (the tutorial will take about a minute of your time), but is pretty tricky to play. I've never played the physical boardgame before, but this digital version seems solid enough, and in addition to the requisite multiplayer options, has many single-player scenarios to teach you the basics and progressively tougher strategies (I've only played SP so far). See those screenshots on the store page? That's exactly what the game looks like--no bells and whistles here. I've encountered only one music track so far, and it loops pretty fast, but I just turn it off and play my own music... or have silence if I need to concentrate, which is most of the time ;) The controls are very simple, and there are easy ways to backtrack if you accidentally click on the wrong piece. However, you can really tell this is a port of a game that had touch controls; small things like having to move your cursor all the way to the bottom right corner to finish your turn could have been a bit more streamlined for the PC version. The big question for single players is: is the AI good? As of now, I'm working through the scenarios to learn the game and the AI is still at the Easy level, but as a complete newbie I find there's still a fair amount of challenge to be had and I'm improving and making steady progress. Would a veteran Abalone player be challenged at more difficult levels? I'm not good enough to judge properly! But for a beginner, the difficulty seems accurate so far. Just a note for achievement hunters that this game does have achievements, but they appear to be broken. Abalone is straightforward strategy game that wears its boardgame origins on its sleeve, and has a good amount of content for the Single Player. It may not have any flash, but it's solid.

The game runs all right after tweaking (black screen if run full screen for me). Whatever you do, do NOT hit 'esc': there's no dialog box, so the game closes to desktop no matter what you're doing. Local multiplayer crashes about half the time, and online multiplayer sits waiting to connect...then exits to desktop. It...looks nice? There's a positive. The rules are consistent, and the AI doesn't seem to cheat. The control sceme is fiddly with my mouse, even turned way down. Don't know about anyone else. Acheivements aren't a priority for me, but it'd be nice if they *worked*. As anyone can see from the forums and other reviews, the developer just doesn't care. If you plan to buy the game, only get it super cheap (say, 50 cents or less) and and don't expect achievements.

I bought this so I could play online, but after quite a few matches I'm not even sure anymore whether I'm playing real human beings or some AI made to pretend there are actual people playing this half-hearted abomination of a port. There really is no way to tell, because the game offers no chat functionality or any way to make contact at all. In addition to that nicknames seem to be masked or something - every search for player's profiles I made on Steam turned out empty. Why? Well, if there are people playing, matchmaking almost always gives you ridiculously weak opponents: they walk into the most obvious traps and let their forces be split incredibly easy. Out of my 50 games I had like 2-3 really good ones. Besides that the game has a lot more issues: - some people seem to be unable to start the game at all - Devs don't care / forum's dead - Connectivity - Ugly unintuitive menus Don't get me wrong though - Abalone in itself is a great tactical game with a certain geometrical beauty to it. Try it if you dare!