Why I Won't Buy a Companion App Game Anymore

I made this rule after one specific bad night, and I’ve told this story enough times at Wednesday group that Marcus can probably recite it better than I can at this point. We were three chapters into a legacy campaign that leaned hard on a companion app, story text, enemy stats, the whole narrative layer lived on a phone instead of in a booklet, and about forty minutes into a session the phone I’d forgotten to charge the night before died in the middle of a scene. I forgot my phone charger, too, obviously, because if I hadn’t things might have gone differently, and we sat there for a solid ten minutes trying to figure out if we could reconstruct where we’d left off from memory before deciding to just call the night early.

That’s the whole story, honestly. Nothing dramatic happened, nobody’s feelings got hurt, we just lost an evening we’d all specifically set aside because a piece of hardware I own decided that was the night to die. But it crystallized something I’d been circling for a while, which is that I don’t like a game’s actual playability depending on a device that has its own battery, its own software updates, its own possibility of just not working for reasons that have nothing to do with the game itself.

I’m not a purist about this in every direction. Blood on the Clocktower runs on an app for the storyteller’s side and I think that’s a genuinely good use of the format, it’s handling information flow that would be tedious to manage by hand, and if that app breaks mid-session the fallback is just doing it manually, the game doesn’t stop existing. What I’ve stopped buying into is anything where the app isn’t a convenience layered on top of a complete game, it’s load-bearing, where losing the app means losing the campaign, the way that dead phone nearly cost us that legacy run.

It’s a narrower rule than it sounds like from the outside. Plenty of great games use apps well. What I check for now, before I put money down on anything with a digital component, is whether the physical game still functions as a complete experience if the app disappeared tomorrow. If the answer’s no, I pass, no matter how good the reviews are, because I’ve already lost one evening to exactly that failure mode and I’d rather not build my shelf around a dependency I can’t control. Marcus thinks I’m overly cautious about it. Maybe I am. But I haven’t had a dead-battery night since I started asking the question, so I’m sticking with it.