Then at some point I remembered that my Kickstarter pledge also gave me access to Tainted Grail on Steam. That is not the companion app, but a PC game made by the same people, and playing in the same world. It is supposed to be similar, but different, to the board game, so as to not have any spoilers. So I tried that out, and was severely disappointed. Yes, the PC game has card based combat, but while the board game combat is a complex puzzle where you can only play a card if its "keys" match the previous card, in the PC game you can just play any card you want. And the effects are much simpler. The exploration and decision making in the PC version is also very much dumbed down compared to the board game. Also the PC game has a game mechanic I absolutely hate: The game is designed so that you can't win, but rather die early. And every time you die, you get some bonuses for your next incarnation, until at the n-th playthrough you are finally strong enough to beat the game.

Now I am sure that some people will like that Tainted Grail PC game, and that there is a market for that sort of game. But there are hundreds of "roguelike" dungeon crawler games on Steam which are somewhat similar. And there are not many games on Steam that are as complex as the Tainted Grail board game. In fact, the Steam tag of board games shows, besides easy family games, some of the more complex games on Steam, like Gloomhaven, for which the PC version is a lot closer to the physical game.

So I am wondering why some game companies feels the need to significantly dumb down a game when making a PC version of a complex board game. Are video gamers supposed to be dumber than board gamers? To me that strategy feels like a mistake: People looking for simpler games probably don't know the brand of a complex board game, and people who know and love a complex board game don't really want a dumbed down version of it.