Do you have any go-to mobile games for those moments where you just need to kill 10-20 minutes of time, without pausing a session to resume later? I'm on iOS but I'd imagine many are available on both iOS and Android.

Preferably without ads or in app purchases. (I'll consider a one-time payment if it seems to be a great fit.)

I discovered Rogue Words from someone here and I absolutely love it and am so happy to see it gaining popularity. But it fits into a different category of mobile game for me since I fall asleep too quickly! And I love Balatro and others that I consider full games (that have a PC version as well). But they're also too long for this use case!

How do my fellow KH fans on tildes feel? I'm honestly kind of relieved. Gacha is an inherently predatory business model, and the game by all accounts was extremely unfun. It's still the first KH game to be outright cancelled mid development, so I'm still worried about what this means for the series.

I'm hoping that the devs never return to the mobile space.

Having received a jury summons, and with my mental health being how it is, I recently took a bus to the nearby used bookstore. The rule of buying secondhand books is this: You must pretend, while in the store, that your phone doesn’t exist; you must not come in looking for anything in particular; you must let yourself be guided by the titles and covers and the blurbs alone. So I followed my nose over to the “poetry and art criticism” shelf of the store (which, I am convinced, is to blame for my poor performance at parties) and started browsing.

There I found Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games and immediately developed a crush. Maybe it was the title, which seemed carefully engineered not to appeal to the general public. Or maybe it was the editor, Carmen Maria Machado, whose short story collection Her Body and Other Parties is a personal favourite. Either way, the anthology of nineteen pieces from nineteen authors about approximately nineteen games was in excellent condition, and had been marked down to eight dollars, so I added it to my little stack of purchases and wandered over to the checkout.

Like all anthologies, Critical Hits varies widely in quality across its component essays (and one comic). It starts strong: its introduction is a delight, with some of the best footnotes I’ve ever enjoyed. Likewise its first essay, Elissa Washuta’s “I Struggled a Long Time with Surviving,” an exploration of her experience with The Last of Us, pandemic, and intractable illness was deeply impactful and genuinely changed how I looked at the game. But this is par for the course with anthologies (at least, well-compiled ones) which know to dazzle you off the bat with their best material, so that you’re willing to endure their worst. Here, in my estimation, the worst is Anders Morson’s “The Cocoon,” which cites Brian Tomasik (one of those insufferable San Fransisco Rationalists) to argue that, in aggregate, it’s unethical to kill video game NPCs. Morson then goes on to list every Aliens game ever released, for six pages, with dazzling insights like “Aliens: Colonial Marines for PS3 Xbox (2013) is definitely an Aliens-y FPS.”

In aggregate, though, the anthology is more good than bad. Apart from “The Cocoon,” the worst essays here are mostly just mediocre, or meandering. And there are some true standouts here: Jamil Jan Kochai’s “Cathartic Warfare,” nat steele’s “I Was a Teenage Transgender Supersoldier.” And the reason I’m here, writing this essay of my own: Larissa Pham’s “Status Effect,” an exploration of depression, damage-over-time, and Genshin Impact.

Released globally in 2020 for PC and mobile devices, Genshin Impact is an action-adventure game which sees players assemble a four-person team from its extensive cast of characters and then wander out into its expansive open world to complete monsters, open quests, and kill chests (something like that, anyway). A live-service game, Genshin has seen regular map expansions and a remarkably stable playerbase for the last five years, and, like WoW before it, has spawned a wave of copycats hoping to take a bite out of the aging titan’s colossal corpus. Larissa Pham and I would have started playing Genshin at around the same time – she describes becoming obsessed with the game in the winter of 2020-2021; I first launched the game in February of 2021, in the icy depths of the pandemic, shortly after failing to kill myself, as something to do while waiting for the hospital bills to pour in.

In Status Effect, Pham recounts a minor controversy from the fall of 2021. Genshin’s meta had stagnated: a year into its lifespan, no one wanted to include healers on their team, when shielders were proactive and dodging was free. So the developers implemented a damage-over-time status effect called corrosion, inflicted by certain enemies and in certain phases of endgame content, which ignored shields and would wipe the whole team if not healed through. Genshin’s community was and is large enough that any kind of meta shift (however necessary) will spark outcry, controversy, and apocalypse prophets heralding doom (I was one of them: “What, am I just not supposed to use my Zhongli? No one’s gonna pull for fucking Kokomi”), but for Pham, that debuff gave her the language to think and speak about her depression more concretely.

Genshin has never given me the language I needed to think or speak about anything. Frankly, I don’t think the game’s story, which is consistently a mediocre slog (with a few bright spots) is capable at this point of doing anything interesting or novel. Even in Pham’s case, Genshin’s “corrosion” debuff might have been fungible with any damage-over-time debuff in any game – Pham just happened to be playing Genshin at the time when she needed it. But even saying this, even speaking as someone who cares about a game’s story more than any other element, I think Genshin is a fantastic game, in at least one major aspect: its exploration and world design.

Upon its announcement, Genshin was panned as “anime Breath of the Wild” a comparison enabled by its gliding and climbing and stamina meter and early-game monster designs and the shade of its grass. But cosmetic similarities aside, Genshin is actually doing something very different – very unique, I think. Genshin presents the player with an extremely large, colorful, and ever-expanding world, peppered with a truly mind-boggling amount of chests, environmental puzzles, and enemy camps. From any given point in the world, you can probably see several little leads to follow: a locked chest in a monster den; a blue faerie waiting to lead you to its court; a movement time trial; a floating elemental oculus. And once you pick one of those, and figure it out, you’ll once again be able to look around and see more chests to open, more stuff to collect, more things to do. So the world is incredibly dense with collectibles, but traversing it is surprisingly weighty. Climbing, gliding, running; all of these are either slow, or stamina-intensive, so you’ll move through the world at a light jog much of the time. This means that you can often see and plan a route to many different puzzle or collectibles before getting to them; it means that, instead of a constant stream of opening chests, each little dopamine hit is separated by a long breath, where you can appreciate the absolutely gorgeous world, and its stirring, melancholy music. And often, quests and puzzles and chests and collectibles will be laid out in a remarkably subtle web, designed to tug the player off the beaten path, towards some of the game’s most gorgeous sights, its most scenic vistas (of which there are plenty).

So maybe in terms of its exploration philosophy Genshin is an open-world collect-a-thon, more similar to a Super Mario Odyssey than a Breath of the Wild. But really, it’s nothing like either game, or anything else I’ve played; so much could be said about the game’s combat, its world quests, its approach to rewards, the way the game’s levelling systems encourage diverse engagement with the open world. I’ll instead conclude with this: Genshin Impact has my favourite exploration experience of any game I’ve ever played, and nothing else really even comes close.

Early in the game’s lifespan (December 2020), the developers added the new Dragonspine region: a frozen mountain, home to the bones of dragons and the ruins of an ancient civilization, introducing lethal new mechanics as a way to shake up exploration. Arguably a precursor to corrosion, while in Dragonspine, a status effect called “sheer cold” would accumulate and, once maxed, drain your health at such a high rate that no shielding or healing could keep up. Getting wet would accelerate cold accumulation; eating hot foods, lighting fires, or standing near heat sources would slow or reverse it. It encouraged a different playstyle; beyond keeping a fire character on your team, sheer cold also encouraged players to explore more deliberately; to stay close to heat sources and not stray too far from the path.

In Dragonspine, the main plot involves restoring an ancient relic called the Skyfrost Nail – an enormous pillar, shattered. Beginning at a base camp at Dragonspine’s foot, you slowly ascend the mountain, fighting monsters, exploring ancient, sealed laboratories, and maybe getting distracted to grab a chest here or a crimson agate there. On the way up, you learn fragments of the story of the ancient civilization that dwelt on Dragonspine, before it froze over; you hear of their research in alchemy, and the celestial nail that was flung down by the gods – to stop their research, before they climbed too high? It was this nail that froze Dragonspine, and somehow corrupted it; it is this nail that you find in broken fragments at Dragonspine’s peak. Beset by truly diabolical monster encounters designed to freeze you fast and absolutely ruin your afternoon, you thaw these fragments and watch as they ascend, reforming the nail, the enormous pillar hanging high above Dragonspine, ready to fall once more. You can, at last, ride the wind currents all the way up to stand on the head of the nail, at what was at the time the highest point in all of Tevyat, to gaze at the world around. All the lands accessible: Liyue and its harbor; Mondstadt and its cathedral, and beyond them, those inaccessible, not yet implemented into the game, represent as abstract hills, mountain, and sea, rolling endlessly into the distant grey fog.

It was February of 2021, and I had failed to die. Had been released from the hospital into the slushy, wet aftermath of a winter storm, with enough medication to last two more weeks and (though I didn’t know it at the time) enough debt to last through to this very day – if only because I stubbornly refuse to pay it. I returned to my on-campus apartment to discover that I had no heating, no power. Hot water, at least, for tea and baths and thin, meatless soups. According to the thermostat, my poorly-insulated home was hovering around 51°F, so I dragged my mattress off the bedframe, into the corner where it was warmer, sealed myself under a mountain of blankets, and opened my laptop.

I had meant to start drafting emails to professors, to explain my weeks-long absence and ask for extensions, grace, and leniency (all would eventually give it, and I didn’t even have to use the s-word, or show the doctors’ notes I had so dutifully accumulated). But in that moment, my hands were shaking from the cold and the anxiety: the knowledge that my life could be ruined, my academic scholarship lost, if any of them declined. So instead, I opened the app store, downloaded Genshin Impact, and, after a couple days of sleepless, bloodshot gaming sessions, climbed the Skyfrost Nail in Dragonspine.

Genshin might not have been capable of giving me the language to understand my experience with depression, dysphoria, and suicide, but it was certainly there when I needed it – the unique, frictional experience it provided offering a strange resonance with my own. And I kept playing it for a long time, perpetually enchanted by its world, its music, the waves of nostalgia and grief that would wash over me at the strangest times.

In the summer of 2021, I wrote a poem, for a poetry class, which began with the lines, “The economy being how it is / Instead of finishing school / I took a job this autumn at the Indiana Dunes.” It was a narrative poem, the only type of poem I’ve ever been able to write. In it, the speaker wanders around on the sandy shores of Lake Michigan in the aftermath of a heavy storm, picking their way around shredded volleyball nets and desolate lounge chairs, all half-buried under wet, sandy drifts. They’re looking for their phone, probably hopelessly lost amidst the dunes, but in the end, climbing Mt. Baldy (a very tall dune; not actually a mountain), they find that what they were searching for was not actually their phone – was, instead, perspective. A broader view of the world’s beauty. “On a clear day, from there, you can see all the way to Chicago,” they think, before beginning the climb. But in the end, reaching the top, the day is not clear, so they are left to “feast [their] eyes on the endless expanse of grey water.”

I must apologize for exposing you to my immature poetry, but the fact that I remember so many lines from that tiny, throwaway piece, from one of my least notable college classes, has always been suspicious to me. I suspect that it contains some sort of heartbreaking insight into my mindset at the time – a tragic longing for the picturesque (to quote a book I haven’t read). I played games where you climbed a mountain, wrote poems where the speaker climbed a dune; some nights, I walked a quarter mile to the parking garage near my apartment and climbed to the top level and leaned on the concrete railing and stared out through life-affirming chicken wire. I wanted to see in color, I suppose; to recapture the vividity of a world that I found increasingly exhausting, but mostly saw only greys: grey distance fog, grey water, and the grey existence of a college-town suburb, shining dully under the light-polluted grey sky.

In November of 2022, Genshin Impact released its 3.2 update “Akasha Pulses, the Kalpa Flame Rises,” which didn’t add any new regions to the map. Instead, it contained the concluding act of the Sumeru region’s main story quest, where the player teams up with a god, a couple academics, a dancer and a cop to fight the evils of the censored internet. For Genshin, this quest (and its preceding acts) were well above par, featuring (among other strengths) actual themes, and a plot that went beyond its gnostic inspirations. So, sure, 3.2 was a timely, relatively compelling update. It was also the update where I quit playing Genshin Impact – for good, I thought. There is simply only so much exploration, questing and combat that can be done in the same world, structure and systems before a work of art overstays its welcome. It wasn’t with any malice that I quit Genshin – I had simply had enough, and that was that.

My life had changed a great deal in the intervening period. I had finished college, moved cities, learned to cook, become a woman. Gotten a second dose of the COVID vaccine, the day before the move, and spent the entire ride to my new home feeling miserably ill because of it.

Around the same time, Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon, compilers for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games would have been working on their collection. It’s a collection that lives in the shadow of COVID-19 – almost every piece here, you can detect the pandemic’s penumbra (if it isn’t explicitly mentioned). For a lot of people, the pandemic was isolating, lonely, cold. For writers, it might have been that too, but we are solitary creatures, and the thing it gave us was, most of all, time: to play games, to write or fail to write, to think, to spiral.

Perhaps to counteract this spiral, Graywolf Press, a Minnesota-based not-for-profit publishing house, spent the pandemic hosting “cute mental health cocktail hours.” Lennon was there, Machado was there (my beloved Her Body and Other Parties was published by Graywolf) and it was there that Critical Hits was conceptualized.

“What we wanted to do was have a really diverse group of writers to provide a very diverse perspective of gaming, by writing about games however they want. We sort of gave them free rein,” Machado says, in an interview she and Lennon gave to Dazed Digital. “It was wild how people were like, ‘Oh my God, yes!’ Everything that came in was so good and so interesting and so different. It was a really extraordinary group of artists who had so many things to say.”

I don’t know how Larissa Pham, who wrote my favourite essay in the collection, first became attached to it. Shockingly, there aren’t that many interviews or monographs out there describing the creation process for Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, a book with fewer than 500 ratings on Goodreads. Pham has written a smattering of fiction, nonfiction and creative nonfiction; essays, short stories, criticism. Avant-garde poetry, presented on an interactive github website. Kinky lesbian erotica. A cultural commentary about tradwives and baking. She also, at least for a while, played Genshin Impact, at the same time I and everyone else did. I am struck by the strange syzygy of our experiences. Pham graduated Yale; I went to a state school. She gets published; I post to Tildes. She teaches classes; I am constantly struck by how much I have to learn. But in the winter of 2020-2021, both of us, grappling with our respective illnesses, crossed paths with this game, and it was there for us when we needed it.

In January of 2025, I bought and read Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games. In early February, instilled with a sense of nostalgia for a game I hadn’t touched in years, and tired of playing Shadow of the Erdtree (another game with excellent exploration of a very different kind) I downloaded the HoyoPlay launcher and, with it, Genshin Impact.

Logging in, I was greeted with an embarrassment of little red exclamation marks, attached to almost every UI element, there to helpfully explain what I had missed, what was new, and all the crazy exciting retention-driving bonuses the game would give me to help me catch up. According to the huge new blank spaces on the map, I had many more regions to explore; according to the quest log, many more mediocre stories to sit through. According to my backpack, enough saved-up resources from before I had quit to immediately acquire and build the 5-star character Arlecchino, the only female character in the game – out of some sixty, now – who could plausibly be described as handsome (her vest buttons on the left). Perhaps I should have been overwhelmed. But sinking back into Genshin’s loop felt like coming home. Swimming through the new undersea regions, Fontaine and the Sea of Bygone Eras, offered a welcome twist to what was still a fundamentally fantastic exploration loop. Quests like “The Dirge of Bilquis” and “Masquerade of the Guilty” might not have been brilliant, but featured gorgeous locations, entertaining set pieces, and even an excellent VA performance or two.

Apparently, I was coming back at a bad time. Shortly before I collected my Arlecchino, a new character had been released: Mavuika. I never got around to playing the quests where she was featured, but apparently she was poorly written and presented a real problem for Genshin’s balance. Mavuika, you see, has a magical motorbike that a). Doesn’t really fit with Genshin’s usual magitech aesthetics and b). Removes all discernible friction from exploration, with its ability to drive super fast, climb walls, ride on water, and even, for a short time, fly. I was slightly scandalized when I heard about her, frankly.

“Sure,” I thought, “This doesn’t affect me, I’m never going to use her. But if a new player spends their limited resources to get Mavuika (a smart decision; she is, in addition to everything else, a very strong DPS, powercreeping Arlecchino) won’t that ruin the game for them? Won’t her ability to bypass all the exploration challenges in the game take away the one thing that makes it so special?” It felt like the game jumping the shark, releasing a broken character to make a quick buck at the expense of its long-term health. But truthfully, I was a tourist in Genshin this time, coming back to gawk at how it had changed after years of absence. I have no real stake in its balance. I don’t really recommend anyone play it. What happens to the meta and monetization of this game I once loved terribly is now water off a dyke’s back.

Things that I used to get very up-in-arms about no longer really bother me. I’m sometimes unsure whether that’s a result of healing or hypernormalisation.

I had jury duty at the Seattle Municipal Court that month, a boxy building downtown. Had to report in at nine in the morning, riding the bus, shaking slightly from the cold and the anxiety. Of course, it’s not yet illegal to be a transsexual in one of the most wonderfully LGBT-indifferent cities on the planet, but the current political climate lends itself to overthinking.

Potential jurors are to report to the eleventh floor, to an airy, high-ceilinged, window-walled space crammed with chairs and tables and an attached kitchenette – the vending machines offering instruction on how to contact the county for reimbursement. We were to be paid twenty-five dollars per day (plus transit and food costs, if applicable). We were to watch informational videos, fill out cursory forms, and read quietly until called. It was all terribly adolescent, terribly bland. I found myself ruminating on the abstract sculpture pieces hanging from the ceiling, wondering whether their creators had intended them for this space, or whether they had been sentenced to hang here – as a punishment for reckless driving, maybe? What kind of cases even get tried in municipal court? Eventually, I went out onto the rooftop terrace, with only my coffee to protect me from the chilly, cloudy February weather.

To the west, I could see out the Port of Seattle, its great cranes priestly in their red and white liveries, their still solemnity. A container ship lay still in the bay, making no progress to its destination. And nearer: a sliver of downtown. An empty pit, filled with the refuse of aborted construction, bags of trash, tiny blue dumpsters. Graffiti, content indiscernible. Brown brick buildings; a yellow taxi (!) threading between them. A whole city, half asleep, stirring amid the late morning fog. It started to rain, a miserable spitting drizzle, and I scurried inside to protect my book and my temperamental hair.

This February, on my last day playing Genshin Impact, I received a DM from a random, low-level stranger named Quentin. “HELP!!” it said. I joined his world in co-op mode.

Quentin was exploring Dragonspine. When I arrived, his shiny new (low-level) Mavuika was frozen solid by an ice mage, a couple steps away from drowning in a nearby pool, like my own characters had been four years ago. There are some challenges, it seems, that even the most broken character cannot bypass.

Quentin and I summited Dragonspine together. I was shocked to discover that, even after four years, I still remembered the climb almost perfectly. Still remembered the jagged ruins; the wind currents; the terrifying monsters that had killed me over and over again. I hadn’t resorted to messaging strangers to defeat them, but it’s pretty common to do so – new players almost always struggle with Dragonspine. And so there I was, the helpful stranger this time, jogging forward, activating waypoints, lighting fires, killing chunky minibosses with a single unbuffed normal attack while Quentin stood behind me and put motivational stickers in the chat (stickers are the de facto mode of communication in Genshin co-op, as it’s never a surety that any two players will share a language). Quentin was there – why else? – to repair the skyfrost nail. Sure, his Mavuika could motorbike faster than my characters could climb, but still he slowed down so that we could make the ascent side-by-side. And when he seemed to struggle with the light puzzling involved in thawing the nail fragments, I sat my Arlecchino down next to important clues that he was missing and posted slightly stern stickers until he noticed.

At the end of the cutscene where the pillar at last rises into the sky, Quentin and I climbed and ran and rode the wind currents up to stand on the head of the Skyfrost Nail. We couldn’t stay long; sheer cold accumulates fast up there, and neither Quentin nor I had brought a healer or a portable stove. But we still stayed, as long as we could, staring out over Teyvat.

Over the course of over four years of updates, scenery that had once been indistinct rolling hills and sea, fading into fog, had been replaced by new regions, sprawling far beyond our view. Quentin and I could just make out, in the distance, the towering Inazuman mountains, crested by the blossoming sacred sakuras of the Grand Narukami Shrine. The curving tree-city from which sprouts the Sumeru Akadeymia. The baroque arches and elevated crystalline waterways of the Court of Fontaine. And more besides – landmarks I had explored, that Quentin might one day explore: a view onto the entire world with all its colors and its vistas, chests and quests and every artifice of gameplay erased by distance.

Quentin teleported away to warmer pastures and I remained standing there, struck still and wordless, once again, by the syzygy.

He and I will never interact again (shortly, he would say, “Thank you Father” – a title often used for Arlecchino – and then kick me from the world). But for that brief moment, our experiences came into alignment with Genshin Impact, across time and very possibly national borders. I know even less about Quentin than I do Larissa Pham, but he and I at the very least got to share that moment of awe and wonder at the top of the world. I wonder what it meant to him.

In the prologue to Critical Hits, Carmen Maria Marchado writes about her experiences being introduced to new games by friends and partners: “As I keep writing I am struck… by the intimacy of the form; the way the experience of it is specific, even erotic. What did it mean to receive someone’s tutelage? To let yourself be watched? To open yourself up to new ways of understanding? To die over and over again?” Perhaps Critical Hits’ greatest strength, its most distinct quality as an art object, across almost every piece within, is that peculiar intimacy. To watch writers and critics open themselves up to games; then, through those games, open themselves up to you. In much the same way Quentin did by inviting me into his world, Pham and Villarreal and Adjei-Brenyah and Washuta and, yes, even Morson invite us into their worlds, show us how video games refracted their experiences to help them understand themselves with new vividity and clarity.

I feel a little guilty to have, once again, dedicated so much time and mental energy to Genshin Impact, a game which arguably does not deserve it. While playing it this year, and since then, I have played Signalis and Lies of P and 1000xResist and (fellow gacha game) Reverse:1999, have read Borges and Dillard and Ian Reid – artists and works that are considerably more unified and artistically compelling than Genshin. But none of them hit me quite as hard as this 2020 open-world live-service Chinese gacha game; none came at just the right moment, to connect with my particular experiences, my past; to color my vision.

My name didn't get called for jury duty, so at 3PM I rode the bus home (stopping briefly for bread and doughnuts at the bakery in order to earn the approval of the women I live with). Genshin Impact no longer lives on my computer. Once again, I got what I needed out of it, and then let it go. Having finished writing this piece, Critical Hits will be put on my bookshelf, probably never to be touched again. But as we move forward into an uncertain future, these small, impactful experiences, insignificant though they were, will continue to live with me. And if you read through this entire meandering essay, maybe some small fragment of them can live with you, too: proof of our shared essence, an invitation into my world.

I really love being able to see all sorts of stats -- number of games played, wins/losses, leaderboard rankings, even obscure stats.

I also love word, card, and puzzle games. Games like solitaire, for example, would be PERFECT candidates to lean heavily into the stats, but I just haven't been able to find a good one yet.

What are your favorite games in these categories? Bonus points if they have an emphasis on keeping records and stats.

Let's list some great mobile games. Preferably ones you can pay for once and be done, or free ones that have microtransactions that you don't need to do to just play the game (e.g. Marvel Snap). Leave out pay for power or games that have "charges" to stop you from playing until you buy more or burn time.

Edit: Thank you everyone for your suggestions! I compiled a list here that is, I believe, mostly Android. If you're looking for iOS only suggestions it looks like Apple Arcade was recommended regularly and also user Recognition101 had a comprehensive list I will refer you to: https://recognition101.github.io/ios-games/

Here is the Android Games List:
-Square Enix re-releases
-Stardew Valley
-Monster Hunter Stories
-Disgaea series remakes
-Vampire Survivors
-Slay the Spire
-Shattered Pixel Dungeon
-Slice and Dice
-Bloons series
-Sproggiwood
-Pysol FC
-Lexica
-Mindustry
-Overboard
-Old PC Game ports like Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, SW:KOTR 1 & 2
-Hoplite
-Simon Tatham's Puzzles
-Rogue Adventure
-Cultist Simulator
-Mini-Metro
-Wordament
-Retro Bowl
-Antiyoy
-Marvel Snap
-Star Realms
-Wingspan
-Team Fight Tactics
-Battle for Polytopia
-Where's My Water?
-Underhand
-Badland
-Eat Me Please
-Z Origins
-Yellow
-Dawncaster
-Ollie's Arcade
-Orna
-Night of the Full Moon
-A Dark Room
-The Ensign
-Universal Paperclips
-Opus: Rocket of whispers
-Opus: The day we found Earth
-TerraGenesis - Space Settlers
-Sheltered
-Seedship
-Framed
-Plague Inc.
-Gravity Defied
-Magic Research
-Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes
-Peglin
-Civilization series
-Rebel Inc.
-Boom Beach
-Professor Layton Series
-Slay
-Ritual

Churchill Solitaire is a mobile game that you can play on Apple or Android devices. It came out in 2016. I found out about it in 2018. It had some very good reviews. It was mentioned that the game is difficult to beat. At the time I was playing some different solitaire games on mobile so I decided to try another. I paid $4.99 to unlock "all deals and free play".

The game is pretty good. $5 was a little expensive to pay for a game that only had one variation of solitaire. For example, I had the game Solebon Pro which has 160 variations. That game cost $10.

So Churchill Solitaire is not a great value. Not all games have the same value of course. But the reason I stopped playing it is because it charges you to get hints and undo moves. A game that is this hard just wastes your time if you can't undo. You can get quite near the end of a session and need to completely restart because you had several choices earlier and picked the wrong one.

Here is the In-App purchase list that is currently on the App Store in 2024. I don't remember if these prices were the same in 2018, but they are the current prices if you want to unlock any of the features:

• Undos - 15 Pack $0.99
• Hints - 15 Pack $0.99
• Undos - 100 Pack $5.99
• Hints - 100 Pack $5.99
• Unlock All Deals & Freeplay $4.99
• Game Pack 1 $0.99
• Daily Game (Monthly) $4.99
• Game Pack 2 $0.99
• Game Pack 3 $0.99
• Undos - 50 Pack $4.99

I understand that the developer should get paid money for unlocking the basic game. I understand that making additional winnable deals may take developer time (most deals are unwinnable in this game, but there is a "campaign" that has winnable deals). I understand that having a daily game may cost the developer to maintain servers and create winnable deals.

But I don't understand charging for hints or undos. I mean, I understand it from a greed perspective. But not from an "I respect the people who paid money for my game" perspective. Yes, I know about Candy Crush and all the other super addictive mobile games that are pay to win and farm money from whales. But this one just pissed me off in particular. This is the mobile game equivalent of heated seats in a BMW.

Since 2018 I've only bought 2 mobile games. So sorry other game devs, I don't even check the app store for games anymore.

Edit: It has been rightfully pointed out that this is a bit of a cranky post. I didn't make clear my intention. Maybe someone can recommend some recent small mobile games, like card or sudoku or something, that aren't pay to win. I am aware of one: Good Sudoku.

I'm looking for something to keep me busy / focused on with minimal actual concentration, planning or learning required. Things that you can't look away from while playing or you lose what you're doing. Nothing that involves interaction with other people.

Things that have worked for me for this in the past are Bejeweled 3 lightening mode, Insaniquarium, driving around mindlessly in Forza Horizons.

I'm kind of terrible at anything that requires twitch reflexes, so anything that punishes you for slowness isn't great. Bejeweled it's not a problem because the game is basically identical no matter how you score.

I finally swapped my pre-historic phone for something a little more current and would like to play some games on it. I'm not a big fan of touch controls for games, so I got one of those adapters that allows me to play games with my Xbox controller while the phone is attached to it. Right now I would be interested in MMORPGs as well as things that resemble MMORPGs. Other than that, I appreciate pixel art in general. I am well aware of emulators and will be looking into those, but I have played emulated games for years so it might be interesting to try something else for now. The phone can probably handle most games unless we're talking about something very intensive.

Preferably games that were either made for mobile or adapted well. I don't care for tiny text or tiny UIs.

Zaniness, wackiness, and fast pace are appreciated.

Thanks!

Hello Tildes, I wanted to share with you a project that I have been working on for quite some time and have finally released.

63 is a modern version of the classic public domain party game known by many names, but listed on wikipedia as Celebrity. (Some people might know it as Hat Game, Fishbowl or by some of its commercial versions such as Time's Up or Monikers)

The game works exactly like all these other games except you only need your phone to play it, no pen and paper or decks of cards required. The game is pass-and-play so only one phone is needed for a any size group.

For this initial release, the english version of the game only has 2 packs of cards available to choose from (General and Celebrities) but my goal is to add more packs and create a platform where anyone can create and share their own packs of cards.

You can download the game now on Android or on iOS.

For those not familiar with the rules I'll leave a brief explanation below but inside the game there's a more comprehensive rule section and tutorial.

GAME RULES:

A random deck of cards is generated for each game based on the packs chosen. Each card represents a concept and the objective of the game is for teams to guess as many cards as possible.

Two teams take it in turns to guess cards. Each turn is 63 seconds long and the player from the active team holds the phone and gives clues to their teammates.

There are three rounds, each with different rules for giving clues:

ROUND 1 - Forbidden words
You can’t use words from the card’s title

ROUND 2 - Only one word!
You can't make sounds or gestures nor use any word in the card title

ROUND 3 - Charades!
Words are forbidden, only gestures and sounds are allowed

At the end of the three rounds the team with the most points wins!

This is one of the first places I've shared the project in, especially for a global audience (since the game is also fully in portuguese), so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Hope you enjoy 63!

Hey all, hope everyone is well today and staying cool!

Lately I've been very interested in incremental mobile games, and also idle games. I'm not 100% on the terminology, but for whatever reason I've found myself enjoying games that simply make me wait. It's odd, I know, but I think it's related to a recent personal decision to distance myself from online apps; an oxymoron, I'm aware.

Anyway! Recommend your favorite incremental/idle apps please. I'm currently enjoying:

• Kittens Game

• Tiny Tower

• Pocket Trains

And.. that's it! If you have any recommendations yourself, let me know. Thanks in advance, and have a wonderful day.

PS: bonus points for outer space! I swear there's a space trading game that was mostly text-based, but the title escapes me.

PPS: Android!

I’m a big fan of simple incremental/idle games to burn a few minutes on the bus, but most of the games for mobile are pretty low quality.

My all time favorite is easily Idle Apocalypse, but there are bound to be other good ones as well.

Hi friends,

I’ve been enjoying listening to audiobooks a lot lately but find I generally have to be doing something (e.g. going for a walk, doing dishes etc) while I listen to them since it would be strange to just sit in a chair and stare and if I closed my eyes I might fall asleep.

I have found a couple of mindless games I can play on my phone while listening that don’t distract me from the story such as temple run, desert golf and amazing brick, but I’d be interested if anyone else had any suggestions?

I’d also be open to more substantial games as well so long as they didn’t have a lot of dialogue or require a lot of brain power (I’ve found trying to solve chess puzzles while listening to the audiobook just distracts me too much from the book for example).

Thanks in advance!

It seems like every game these days is just some idle clicker or some other lazy game that tries to peddle in app purchases.

Is there anything that actually is worth playing still, for someone that usually plays PC games?

I'm getting on a 5 hour flight later today. I've got my Android phone (S22 Ultra) and cheap Android tablet (Lenovo P11 G2) with me. What are some of your favourite games you'd recommend to pass the time?

Because I'll be on a plane they'll have to playable without an internet connection. I also don't have any controllers with me, so would prefer games with decent touch controls. I'm open to any genre, but I particularly like RPGs. Thank you in advance!

I've been enjoying Legends of Runeterra for the last couple of years. It's a collectible card game with really nice art and voice work. I'm not a very competitive person, but I put up with the deckbuilding and competitive bits because I enjoyed the gameplay.

About a year ago Riot added a new PvE mode where instead of playing against humans, you play against increasingly difficult AI decks. Every few wins you get your choice of 3 random passive abilities, some of which can dramatically increase the power of your deck for the rest of the run--kind of a roguelike twist on the CCG formula. This has completely spoiled me--I enjoy it far more than LoR's base gameplay. Unfortunately, despite the popularity of the new mode, Riot made the inexplicable decision to give it only token support, focusing instead on PvP.

I've mostly run out of content for the new game mode, and I'm wondering if another game has something that will scratch the same itch. I'm looking for PvE games with deep gameplay and good production values that aren't too fast-paced or actiony. Bonus points if the game gets new content occasionally. Extra bonus points if it has a good story. Any of y'all have a favorite?

This may seem like an odd request and I'm not sure if I can properly explain this, but for some reason I dislike games that require me to drag things with my fingers. I prefer games that allow me to "click" stuff using my finger as a mouse, like Go (baduk), checkers, and other board games. Any genre. Any suggestions on Android? Thanks!

In about 20 days I'll be taking a cruise and will effectively have no internet access. It's going to be a long trip with many sea days, so I'm looking for something that I can pick up on moments when I just want a bit more stimulation. The last time I took a trip like this I ended up playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

I do have a preference for action-based titles since they tend to be easy to pick up and stop, but I also like games that require a bit of thought.

I was considering subscribing to Apple Arcade again since it would let me access a number of games I would enjoy, but I'm not sure how often it would need to contact Apple to confirm the status of my subscription. Data will be extremely expensive on this trip, especially when out at sea.

I upgraded to Apple One because it was only $3 more a month for TV and Arcade split between my family plan members. So why not?

Looking for recommendations of what's fun to play in the Arcade. I'll take anything, but if you're looking for what I like the last games I really enjoyed playing were: Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Disco Elysium, Persona 5 Royal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As you can tell, I really don't play mobile games much.

Thank in advance.