7 Wonders Reviews

Wow, talk about a product not even remotely ready for release. I play iOS board games all the time and after poking around a bit it is safe to say this is the worst launch I have ever seen. The tutorial consistently freezes for me when it asks me to play the brickyard. The game itself has no way to zoom into my played cards or those of my opponents. I’ve never been through a game that didn’t freeze before it was over. I read some reviews that said I had to log into the network to play offline - bad design. So, I create an account using a UI that provides no feedback upon submission - bad design. Then I log in and it just gets stuck on ‘Loading User Profile, which I honestly can’t tell if its bad design - meaning it’s actually downloading content - or just a bug. This is not a release worthy build folks!

It has potential, but still very buggy and needs better matchmaking. If I want to play a 4 player game, it means I want to play a 4 player game. After TEN SECONDS of searching, it ignores your request and places you into any size game. Also, if you leave even from the main screen when the game isn’t full (I left because I got put into a 7 player game against my wishes and there was only one other player in it), it counts this as disconnecting. Then, you can’t find a new match for a long time. It says 3 minutes but the counter doesn’t work and you basically can’t play for a long time (I just waited over 10 minutes and it still won’t work).

Also, they need to have some time bank for making decisions. Some people take a long time to choose EVERY turn. There needs to be like 60 or 90 seconds total for all turns in an age.

I have had the 7 Wonders game on my phone for the past 2+ years and have played it on a *daily* basis. The interface was simple and I never ran into any issues with 7Wonders .

Then at the end of February 2021, 7Wonders was updated to coincide with the new release version of the board game, so new cards were added. However, this new update has been a trainwreck. I have encountered issues with the game where certain actions are either not permissible that should be or flat-out lock the game so you have to reset 7Wonders . I have emailed the developers twice about this since the release and have seen little in the way of a fix. The lack of transparency and communication to fix these issues is unacceptable, and a previous go-to mobile game is now a disappointing shell of its previous self.

I’ll change my rating if these issues get resolved, but until then it’s totally warranted!

Just a hint in improving your nice app and why I haven’t played it since I purchased it when it came out———>Most players want to play a private game with their friend online in an ASYNCHRONOUS mode. I know there is a minimum of three players for 7 wonders, but please look at the Le Havre board game app and the way they let you play with a specific friend and add a bot or two, in a glorious asynchronous mode (meaning there is no timed rush to make your next move). That game is almost flawless in app design, ditto with the Puerto Rico, Ticket To Ride, Carcassonne and Istanbul board game apps. You’re up there with a quality app for such a great game, but you have to make it easy and fun for the customer to enjoy.

This is a pretty decent digital adaptation of my favorite tabletop game, all things considered. I mean, sure it’s pretty bare bones right now, but they can always layer ranking and stats on top of a solid foundation. One thing that is an absolute travesty though is the way quick match places you in an open table. It asks how many players you want to play with, and then if it can find that in fifteen seconds it just puts you in whatever. If you back out you’re banned from matchmaking for three minutes. No. I do not ever want to play this with more than 3 players ever. It’s a completely different game at larger player counts and a much, much worse one. I will wait ten minutes for a 3 player match before I will play with more. Please, please, please give me this option. As it stands now, the fact that it asks me for a preference at all just adds insult to injury.

After falling in love with the tabletop version of this game, buying this was a no-brainer. 7Wonders is fun and well done. As they continue to tweak it with updates, I can only imagine it will become a staple on most gamers iPads.

My problems (and reason for the 3 stars) are 2 major issues. I’ve noticed when passing cards that the player I pass to will have somehow have accessed a card that I did not pass them. For example, I’ll be sure to tuck the one green science card left in the hand under my board to complete a wonder and the next round, they will somehow play a green (and did not have access to the discard pile).

My even bigger issue is it doesn’t seem to be calculating points correctly. I’ll have 9 military shields but will lose the military combat because it only credited me with 6. It will also, frequently, miscount my victory points from guild cards.

This is a great app - it reproduces the board game perfectly and the play and very smooth and I enjoy the interface. A week ago it was an easy 5/5 stars. But this recent update has made all the text and even graphics very small and harder to see. Maybe people playing on tablets would be fine but it’s awkward on my phone. Not only is everything in general more difficult to see because of the size, but the new way they indicate when you can buy something, the cost, the chaining, it’s all awkward and not intuitive any longer. I can figure it all out because I’ve been playing for ages but I’d be careful if you’re new to the game. Hoping later updates fix the viewing.

I love this game on table top, and 7Wonders version makes everything more streamlined (no set up, no put away, no calculations). 7Wonders is beautiful, easy to use, and provides many insightful statistics. It’s easier than I thought it would be to use on my iPhone 7, I can see everything clearly except my own military tokens.

But a problem I’ve recently encountered is an error in scoring. It’s a few points off. It’s nearly made the difference in whether I get first place or not. This erodes my confidence in the apps integrity for calculations. I took photos to show the errors in calculation. If this would be fixed in the next update, that’d be awesome. Thanks.

Bought this Day 1, as 7 Wonders is one of my favorite games. I've been very excited to play an on-the-go version of the game, and so far I've liked what I've seen. However, there's some things that prevented me from giving it 5 stars.

- While I bought this as an on-the-go app, you can't play the offline mode without an internet connection. I'm a little confused, as there doesn't appear to be a clear reason for this.
- I wish there was an animation for getting money from other players. You sort of just have your money tick up and it'd be nice to know where it came from.
- AI difficulty settings would be nice. I think as an experienced player the difficulty level is right, but I imagine that newer players would just get blown out all the time.
- In-game speed is fine, but the cutscenes for Military Conflict and End of Game seem slow. I wish you could just click the screen to show you how military went and then click again to jump right into the next age or final score rather than sitting through slow animation.

Good game, but some changes would make it 5 star for me.

Let me be clear, I love the 7 Wonders app. It’s fast, it’s smooth and polished and it’s just a lot of fun. It’s also one of the best board game implementations on 7Wonders Store, in my opinion. There’s one problem, and I’d hoped it would be updated, but so far it hasn’t so I’ve actually dropped my score from 5 Stars to 4 Stars. The fact that there is no pass & play functionality is just unforgivable in a game such as this. It’s the same thing that Colt Express suffered from and it really needs to be added to bring this back up to a 5 Star rating. As it is, it’s worth your money and time, and while the game has been updated for the better since its initial release, this is still the one glaring issue that I see missing. Please Repos give us pass & play!

After the most recent update this week, there are errors in military scoring. This bug was not present prior to the update.

Revised - I’ve also noticed the science calculation was off once as well. Not sure how often that happens. The one time I noticed it was after selecting science as the last card through the Halikarnassos special action. So hopefully that will be fixed as part of the next release as well. Thanks.

Revised 2 - I know what the specific bug is now. It does not occur often in standard play, which is why it was hard to pin down. The issue is this. If playing Halikarnassos, and the very last play is to use your wonder ability that enables a search through the cards, if you choose either a military card or a science card, that card value will be doubled. So, a 3 military will count as 6, and a science card will count that symbol twice. But, again, it is only if that is the very last (18th) turn. I’ve now been able to replicate it, so pretty sure this is the issue. Hopefully, you can get you QA team to review. Thanks.

This is a fun game. I love the art and design. Maybe Im just an idiot, but its very hard to win a game. Ive played about a hundred times and have won 6 times. I cant for the life of me figure out what the strategy or goal is supposed to be or how I’m supposed to use my knowledge of what the players next to me are doing to adapt my approach. It seems pointless because apparently you’re supposed to adapt your card choice based on what those around you are doing, but that just leaves you jumping from goal to goal without completing or collecting anything meaningful by the end of Age III, resulting in a loss. This is not the developers fault or anything wrong with 7Wonders , just my own personal frustration with the design of the game itself and this is from someone who has played a lot of board games.

The game works, it is 7 wonders, it looks good but... it is hard to tell what is going on. There is no indication of when neighbors buy resources or who you need to pay for a resource (unless you have the option to pay either neighbor). You can see what card your neighbors have but it would have been nice to see a short animation of their decisions to make it more noticeable. Heck the game plays in 3 minutes so slowing it down would not be a problem. Speaking of animations, a few could have been thrown in to spice up the game, it feels pretty clinical now. There is no option to select ai difficulty. The first update did address the biggest issue with the game... needing an internet connection to launch. At least now the game can be played while off WiFi.

I love the tabletop version of this game, and 7Wonders is true to the original. I did the quick tutorial, and it was really simple to figure out, but I can see how it might be frustrating to jump in without the tutorial. So far I have only played the AI, and I’m disappointed that I can’t increase the difficulty level. I’m consistently winning, so I foresee growing bored with AI (unlike Carcassonne, where different AI players have vastly differing strategies and skill levels - I’ll never get tired of that!). I guess I’ll have to try the online version. The display is good, but I’d really like to be able to easily see cost of wonders and military win/loss tokens of opponents, and to see opponents’ cards when playing with >3 players (without dragging down). Overall, though, I’m really enjoying it - and it plays so fast!

ALL RIGHT. Fourth time writing. Learning curve is finally taking effect. Did the tutorial again and some of my frustration is gone. I’ve played the board game many times and find the speed of this game disconcerting. Hopefully, my understanding of the nuances will grow. Started out with one star, changed to three, now give it four.

Ok. Third time I’m writing. I am totally frustrated with this game vi play all the way through, get to last move. I have two cards left and have to choose one to play. However, neither is playable, I don’t have what’s needed. So, the game just sits there, keep telling me to choose a card and drag it into place, WHICH IT WON’T LET ME. So, the game is stuck, impossible to move on. Great. I’m liking it less and less and am removing a star from my review.

One of my favorite board games. Game play is incredibly fast - really too fast. It would be better for me while playing against AI to see each players actions one at a time. It’s easy to lose track of their moves.

I don’t usually write reviews of apps and games, but I like this one so much and wanted to throw a couple of suggestions at the devs. 1)Please make a rulebook accessible in 7Wonders so that if someone has a question about why they can or can’t play certain cards, they don’t have to go through the whole tutorial again. Great job of showing what you can/can’t do, but sometimes the “why” helps with strategy. 2)Give players the ability to see how points were counted up in each category to give the category total. Like, if I could hit the purple column and see the cards of that color and how they scored or something. 3)allow for auto log in for online play.

Thanks for a great game. It makes me want to get the board game.

Easy 5 star rating in my opinion. Games vs the AI are tough but not unbeatable. You can finish a match against them in under 5 minutes, which is crazy for a 7 Wonders match. I’ve played maybe 5 games online and found no bugs. Only issue I ran into was inactive players being kept in the round too long before they got booted. I guess I have another issue, and that’s that scoring is maybe a little too transparent. You can check your total score against everyone at any given time, which kind of takes a little calculation out of it, which I felt was a big part of the game. Anyways, those are tiny issues I have; the game is 5 stars, and worth the price.

I can only speak for the single-player features of this game and not the expansions. The quality of 7Wonders is evident in the presentation and the thoughtful layout of what can amount to a large number of cards on a potentially small screen. The tabletop game can take 30+ minutes to play, but you can get the same experience in 5 minutes or less with 7Wonders. 7Wonders also doesn’t seem to greedily consume my battery like some other apps out there and hasn’t crashed on me yet. The game itself is good, but the mechanics of that, for better or worse, can’t be attributed to these developers, as they are working from an existing design. Great job!

I’m a huge fan of the board game, and I think you guys did a great job on the digital format.

My feedback:
There is a bug where Halikarnossus counts the card collected by its wonder twice sometimes. I’ve had it happen a couple times, but people abuse this in online play occasionally if they know how to exploit it.

I would like to see more records kept in game, maybe like a stats page tied to your account (win-rate, number of games played, highest score, wonder win percentages, etc.). Doesn’t have to be too fancy, but this could be a really cool feature that a lot of us more nerdy players would really appreciate.

The user interface is great and I can usually find what I’m looking for, but looking through the card selection history it can be difficult to tell which card was taken. If you held your finger over the icon and it showed the card that would be awesome.

The tutorial was very good and was a nice touch for beginners to learn enough to get started and veteran players to learn the controls.

The games flow very well and are the right pace. It doesn’t feel bogged down by clunky controls or interface. I like the timer in online play and the matchmaking screen is clean and easy to understand.

I almost gave it a 4 bc I do see room for improvement but moved to 5 because you guys did an excellent job making this.

Pros-
•game is super fast to play ! You can get a game done in 5-10 min!
• very easy to play if familiar with actual game. I saw a previous review and I don’t know how you can be confused if you are familiar with the game prior to playing 7Wonders .
•very clear and easy to see what you have and other players.

Room to improve when you upgrade?
• I don’t think you should be able to pick your playing board and side. It takes away the ability to strategize on the spot. I have improved by practicing the different boards.
• notification ability to hurry along a slow player
•allow a lobby room for people to join a game vs. automatically placed into games at random. A lobby room would allow you to add a password and play online with people you know.
•a way to rate players on wins and also if they stay loyal to a game that r if they bail early. (Game ticket to ride has some of these features that I feel works well for an online game)
•maybe on offline mode you could create objectives to make it more challenging
For Example
• win a game with no blue cards or maybe no guild cards
• win a game with having # of science combos.

Overall wonderful and addicting I’ve probably have played it 40 times in the past 10 days!