Beautiful, but involves way too much luck and lacks balance
First of all, this game has one of the most beautiful menu and in-game graphics I have ever seen in an iPad board game. It is an extremely polished game, with just the right amount of animations and sound effects.
Unfortunately, the game itself isnt on par with the graphics. I wish they had implemented another game with the same production quality. Ive seen great games that suffer from low quality graphics (e.g. all of Coditos games) and this one is the opposite.
The game depends way too much on luck, instead of skill. %90 of the time, the player whos gonna keep a region in the end is either the one who receives the last one of the relevant token, or the one that plays last. There really isnt much skill involved. The scoring is also unbalanced. The relationship between the region size and the amount of points it gives should have been close to linear rather than quadratic.
What I think the devs should do to reduce the dependence on luck is, adding larger maps that contain more "thin" areas that can be blocked by 1-2 regions, and also more "natural" blockers such as the lava and rivers in some of the current maps. The number of totem types should also be selectable by the player, rather than being preset to a specific amount for each map.
One other thing I think the devs should add is the option to add a particular AI player multiple times to the same game. With the current implementation, it is not possible to play with 3 medium level AI players for example.
_CutterSlade_ about
Totems: Game of Conquest, v1.04