I don’t care much about mobile gaming, and when I play something to kill time on it, it’s often Minesweeper, Sudoku, Dominoes… back when I first got an smartphone (2019) I tried out several games, mindnumbing idlers, big-IP gacha-crap, they all look pretty much the same and looking at the store today I can’t find anything that looks remotely interesting… I mean, I just saw this one Tomb of the Mask but then at the reviews you see people saying this game used to be good but now it has aggressive monetization on everything.
I remember having some good time with Autochess, an Elder Scrolls card game and some Warhammer 40k games, another fun game I played for a bit was Magic Rampage, and I also really liked Stranger Things: The Game (I just saw it was renamed to Stranger Things 1984), but it has been some years since I last played so I don’t know if they became an Ad hell as well.
Back then, I bought two games: Solitairica - which I recently reinstalled and it’s still great. And Rebel Inc. - which I also recently reinstalled but they released several packs of premium content so everywhere you tap they are trying to sell you something… and since I last played they also added a new difficulty setting that is looking very p2w and it’s quite sad. Night of the Full Moon is another game I liked a lot, I tried to buy the full game back then but I was getting an error in the store and gave up, I might buy it now.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a great one, Balatro is exceptional in every way, and Slay The Spire is crazy good.
FOSS (no ads, available on FDroid):
Puzzle games:
- Simon Tatham’s Puzzle Collection
- Gurgle (Offline, infinite Wordle Dupe)
Strategy games:
- Mindustry,
- Tanks of Freedom
- Unciv (It’s Civilisation V, but free)
Mindless games:
- Ricochlime
Emulator:
- RetroArch (just need the ROMs)
Free (no ads): Seedship (by John Ayliff)
Paid (no ads): Beyond the Chiron Gate (also by John Ayliff)
Nice seeing seedship here
If you love seed ship, you have to try beyond the Chiron gate. It’s genuinely the culmination of what seed ship started. Its amazing.
I tried it butit didn’t have the same hook for me. Maybe the complexity wasn’t my thing.
Fair enough! For me, it scratched the itch of “procedural exoplanet biogeochemistry” that I always had, but could never scratch.
Simon Tatham, the PuTTY programmer.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
2048 is chill and addictive
I enjoy ppsspp myself. The psp had a good collection of games that work very well as mobile games. All the Dj max games, half minute hero, cladun, disgaea, Patchwork heroes, and my personal favorite title for a game series
Holy invasion of privacy badman, what did I do to deserve this?
Puzzles. No ads, no monetisation, just puzzle games.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles
Also on fdroid.
https://f-droid.org/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzlesThats my most common, first recommendation for such questions. UP!
Dicey Dungeons is great.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon for some great (truly) roguelike dungeon crawling.
+1 for Unciv, although I haven’t played much yet. I really should…
Also, Balatro
Sorry if these are all super basic
Haven’t played Unciv, but the other two are ones I went long runs of addiction to. I would add Slay the Spire, Knights of Pen and Paper and Merge Maestro to that list.
Great suggestions but pen and paper directed ä switched to a disgusting microtransactional monetisation scheme and os unplayable now.
Last time I played KOPNP2, I saw that you could pay for some stuff, but I never paid for anything. There was a lot of grinding, so maybe they purposefully slowed progress to make paying more tempting. I guess I didn’t finish the game, but I did get pretty far. That is very disappointing of them, though. (UPDATE: I just tried to play the game, and it put a big banner saying I have to upgrade and stops me from continuing my game, I went to the play store to upgrade, and the game is no longer “compatible” with my phone despite me playing for months before… So it is an even bigger problem than in game transactions)
Slay the Spire and Balatro is kind of the sweet spot for mobile gaming imo
Surprised I don’t see Mindustry here. It’s a Factorio-like automation building and tower defence game. Open source, available on a bunch lf platforms including android.
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Kingdom two crowns
Bad north
Alto’s odyssey
Geoguessr :)
And i won’t mention Shattered PD because everyone else did…
I’ve been playing unciv which is a civ clone. Nice and clean. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.unciv.app
Slice and Dice. A rouge-like dungeon crawler where each party member has a unique dice that you roll to decide which ability is used each turn. You can get it on itch.io. a cross platform license is $18 but an android only license is $9.
The game has an incredible amount of depth so I highly recommend looking it up.
Going to second this - there’s just so many game modes, it’s all so well balanced and 10 bucks is EXTREMELY reasonable with the amount of well made content
Oh man I love games that are just games. You pay a price, you get a game, you play the game.
On the turn based side we have Slay the Spire, Slice and Dice, and Lost in Fantaland. All kind deck builders but with pretty different combat. Great games with lots of depth. Also Kingdoms Two Crowns by Raw Fury is an incredibly good game. But a little more real time. I can say great things about all of them.
On the heavier note, fucking Subnautica has a mobile port now, which I hear is good. Of course you have Stardew Valley for a farming sim.
On the annoyingly spammy with pay to win features but still good games underneath, all the Ironhide games are good, especially the tower defense ones (Kingdom Rush)
I’m currently playing Balatro and it’s also a one-time purchase with a good amount of content and time played.
