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.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection
I quite like Funky Smugglers, but AFAIK its discontinued. If you can find an APK and can stand waiting a minute for it to realize that the server is down, it works fine though
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)
Simon Tatham, the PuTTY programmer.
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.
Kingdom two crowns
Bad north
Alto’s odyssey
Geoguessr :)
And i won’t mention Shattered PD because everyone else did…
2048 is chill and addictive
I recall 2048+ being a great time killer when I had to wait for anything else.
Generally, the best options are ports of PC games. Things like Slay the Spire, Balatro, Mini Metro, Terraria, BaBa is You, or Stardew Valley. Not as cheap, but worth the price tag.
A couple of my favorite free options:
Unciv - Its an attempt at recreating Civ. It’s got a lot of issues, such as lacking a lot of the more in-depth mechanics and having terrible world-gen, but its also free.
Vampire Survivors - a fairly simple but content-rich arcade game, reminiscent of old flash games.
Super Auto Pets - an autobattler like autochess but stripped down to its fundamentals making it easy to get in to, and easy to play in short bursts
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.
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
Dicey Dungeons is great.
This list is a bit old so many games aren’t supported on the latest android versions, but there are no micro transactions for any game on it. https://nobsgames.stavros.io/android/
I’ve been playing Walkscape. https://walkscape.app/
For anyone interested: emulation works great in modern phones. Eden emulator runs Switch games and some work very well with just touchscreen controls (e.g. Into the Breach).
If you’re ok with on screen controllers or with carrying around something like an 8bit Zero 2or Micro, then you could emulate a mind-blowing number of consoles and games.
Most every game I can think of when it comes to games, most people have already suggested. Though I haven’t seen Feudal Tactics ( available on fdroid ) mentioned. The game isn’t all that complex, but it can be time consuming on larger maps.
I also just looked something up and Maze Mice from TrampolineTales ( the Luck Be A Landlord dev/team(?) ) is available on the play store, if you don’t mind paid apps. Cannot say what the price is in other currencies, but $4.99USD is the price I saw.
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)
Holy shit! I hadn’t heard about Subnautica, that’s crazy.
I’m currently playing Balatro and it’s also a one-time purchase with a good amount of content and time played.










