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The strategy game Spaceward Ho was ported on iPad last week by developer Ariton. If you don’t know, it’s a game where you have two resources, money and metal, that can get collected by building colonies and mining planets. Using these, you can build ships of various kinds, including scouts, fighters, colony ships, satellites and so on.

The rules of the game are quite simple compared to other strategy games like Civilization, yet it can be quite more challenging. One of the interesting aspect is that it doesn’t bog you down with too much micromanagement (like what happens with Gratuitious Space Battles), yet has just enough detail to make a strategic difference.

One of the big missing feature though is the lack of multi player, which made it incredibly popular in the early days of Macintosh LAN gaming (that and Marathon, of course). But otherwise, it’s a nice port of the game, and already it made me waste several hours getting myself relearn the strategies…