Peg board games have been around for a long time and are still pretty popular. Some diners even have them tableside to keep you busy while you’re waiting for your food. Idea is to start with 1 open space, then remove pieces from the board by “jumping them” and the fewer pieces you have at the end, the better job you’ve done.
Now, for the youngsters out there, a lot of the benefit of the game comes from the fine grained motor skills it develops. Manipulating the pieces is half the battle, but as they play the game, they become more skilled at their motor skills. These iPhone/iPad versions remove that benefit. But they do introduce the benefit of many more “styles” of the game.
Peg Genius is an implementation that is true to the real world game. It’s striking visually and comes in an iPad version too, but we found that made the game a bit harder to actually use. Though it was very “realistic”, that wasn’t necessarily better when translated to the iPad – lots of tapping involved in playing the game (tap to select, tap to place) and with the 3-D perspective, it was easy to tap the wrong piece to select, or to miss the target for placement. So there’s some additional tapping involved in making moves which can be frustrating at times. Also, there weren’t as many game options available in the lite version – one needs to pay to get more board configurations. Not that you shouldn’t pay for apps, but…
I actually liked Peg Quest, the free iPhone peg game, just fine. It wasn’t as visually impressive, but it was not a big deal. They are using marbles instead of pegs, which wasn’t a big deal. Also, the swiping motion used to move pieces was really natural – makes one feel like a chef or something, swiping away at the marbles. The game also offers a good variety of starting conditions and keeps performance records for each (time taken and # of pieces left). It was really enjoyable for our son – with smooth game play and easy achievements to record and improve upon.
Peg Genius Lite: Free
Peg Genius Full: $0.99
Peg Genius HD Lite: Free
Peg Genius HD Full: $0.99
