What Android games would you recommend?
Of course, this has to come with a health warning: games that are
too good are likely to suck up too much time that could be spend doing productive things (especially given the Gemini's nice keyboard)!
The games I've always returned to are puzzles, as they can fill a couple of spare minutes, while still giving an interesting challenge (either a single small game, or returning to a more complex one). Currently I'm enjoying:
- Simple Solitaire Collection: a nice app with 17 solo card games. Fairly configurable, with a range of difficulty levels and themes. I'm already spending far too much time playing Simple Simon and Spider…
- Shortyz Crosswords. This comes set up to download daily ‘American-style’ puzzles (straight clues, few black squares) from several free American sites (Washington Post, Newsday, &c). However, as a Brit, I eschew such puzzles (and such spellings)! Luckily, it can also download cryptic puzzles from CruCryptics — and it can use any puzzles in Across Lite format (.puz) that you throw at it, which gives quite a range of options. It works well. (Niggle: it's set up for portrait mode, with the current clue across the top; a landscape option would make better use of the screen space.)
- A crossword solver is also useful (for finding words matching given letter, solving anagrams, &c). The best I've seen so far is Lexeme which seems to have a big dictionary, a large variety of search types (using its own entry format), and tapping on solutions can jump to their definitions in another app (e.g. Aard 2). Only niggle is that the large font size doesn't work well in landscape mode, showing no more than 3-4 solutions at a time.
- Simon Tatham's Puzzles. This is a collection of 39 Japanese-style logic puzzles: sudoku, hitori, fillomino, light up, nurikabe, slitherlink, and many more (though given different names). This is also available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, and accounts for most of my wasted time on the desktop! The puzzles don't work so well on the small screen — especially in the more difficult modes, where the finer detail in larger puzzles is hard to tap on. But they're all playable from the keyboard too.
- Fabularium is a player for interactive fiction — i.e. text adventure games. These have come a long way since I played them on my BBC Micro many years ago… Now there's a huge range available free in standard formats (Infocom, TADS) that can be played with a variety of apps. There are several such for Android; this one seems good, but I've not compared them.
What other games or puzzles are worth looking at?
