Hey there, things are moving fast over at Uckers.com. If that’s left you wondering what’s happening to the game you’ve been playing on iOS then read on! I’ll talk about why we’re building Uckers.com, what it means for you and how you can join the Uckers global community.
Nearly 8 years ago I built the iOS game as an experiment more than anything else. I was absolutely blown away by the engagement and support from such a wonderful community when the Uckers iOS app launched. The feedback received has helped me to make it the great game you play today (even if the graphics are a little dated). Your continued support saw us land just outside the top 10 of all paid board games on the UK App Store for a time!
Fast forward 7 years and it was clear that something had to be done to deal with the increasing costs of supporting an older piece of software. Also, we were acutely aware of the huge number of players that still didn’t have access to digital Uckers – Android users. Around that time, I met Paul and together, we founded Uckers International Ltd to take on the challenge. Tap to read more about our story. We really believe that this wonderful game should be shared with as many people as possible.
We took our first steps as a new business in 2022 working out how we were going to bring Uckers to the world. For a small team, maintaining a separate iOS and Android app was going to be a big challenge. Instead, we decided to build a single game for both platforms (a cross-platform game to use the lingo). This means that the legacy iOS game you know and love will not be around forever as we build something completely new. Whilst we recognise that many users have built up high scores and some impressive stats so far and might not want to ‘jump ship’ right now, we’re really excited to tell you about what we’ve got in store at Uckers.com.
Firstly, we should say the legacy iOS game will still be available for you to play (if you have purchased it) but it will be unsupported and not on sale from 26 Mar 2024. ‘Unsupported’ means that you can play it as long as it works on the latest iOS operating system but it won’t be updated as new versions of iOS come out. Also, we expect multiplayer to be unavailable on the app from 25 Aug 2025 due to withdrawal of support for certain legacy features by Google.
With that out of the way, what can you expect from Uckers.com? We are really excited to launch on Android and iOS on 26 Mar 2024 with a free to download game. Android users will get a beta preview shortly before launch. A lot about Uckers.com will look familiar to players of the legacy iOS game but there will be a much cleaner interface.
One thing we really want to improve is the multiplayer experience. Players have told us of their frustration when others quit just before they are about to be beaten, or just accept a game, play one move and then time out. Also, we know how difficult it is to get matched with another player. Uckers.com is online by default; we want to bring the Uckers community together so your profile, achievements and leaderboard will all be based around online play. We’ve also developed a scoring system that makes it significantly more detrimental to your overall score to time out or quit a game than to lose it. With these (and other) features as well as the influx of players from the Android world, we’re really looking forward to the multiplayer experience you’ll have at Uckers.com.
Our launch features will include offline play against a computer (or another person) and online games that you can initiate by sending a link to a friend. We will add auto-match games shortly after. Other features in the legacy iOS game that won’t be available at launch include achievements, leaderboards, the ability to add friends and in-game chat. We will be launching much better versions of those features soon but we want our android players to have access to the app as soon as possible.
This means you may want to just keep playing the current app for now, or move between both while we get the new game up to speed. Uckers.com will be free to play online so why not play your online games at Uckers.com and your offline games on the legacy iOS app.
We hope this helps you to understand why we’ve made the decision to give digital Uckers a new home and once we’re up and running with new features at Uckers.com, we think you’ll be blown away! Let us know your thoughts, we would love to hear your feedback at hello@uckers.com.
