Gaming

My favorite games on Android:

1. Shattered Pixel Dungeon

• [Endlessly replayable roguelike. Clear each floor, identify potions, drink the right one to level up so you can use better weapons and armor, keep your health high and see how deep you can get in the dungeon. Game time only advances when you move.]

2. Slay the Spire

• [Deck building game. Use attack, skill, and power cards to beat enemies and earn new cards, use your choice of cards, relics, potions, and card upgrades to create synergies in your deck and make it past all three acts to win the game. Deck resets when you lose (or win).]

3. Infinitode 2

• [Tower defense game. Stop enemy shapes from advancing to earn gold, use gold to buy new towers, upgrade your towers, and swap out various types of tower to maximize your efficiency. Keep an eye on how close enemies are getting to your base or it will be overrun before you notice.]

4. Super Auto Pets

• [Pocket monster-style battling game. Use a limited amount of resources each turn to buy new bitmoji animals and watch your team face off against a random opponent at the same stage of the game, keep hearts if you win, lose hearts if you lose, get better quality pets each round you progress. See if you can win ten rounds to claim victory.]

5. Tomb of the Mask

• [Classic-style 2D arcade game. Use the four directional controls to zip past moving obstacles, collect all the dots on your way to the exit if you can, enjoy the snappy movements and fun retro sound effects. Very reflex-driven.]

6. Antiyoy

• [Turn-based hexagon-tiled conquest game. Buy houses to get more income, buy soldiers and towers to protect your land, upgrade soldiers and towers to face off against enemy assets, careful you don't upgrade them more than your income supports, enjoy the many hundreds of user-submitted maps. Single player by default, or get Antiyoy Online to compete against other players.]

7. Mindustry

• [Realtime strategy. Research new technologies, build mining drills, create weapons, face off against enemy forces to control the map. Steep learning curve.]

8. Dungeon Cards

• [Tile-based strategy game. Pick a card, help your card survive on a 3x3 grid by using the four directional controls to swap places with any adjacent card, while being careful not to pick fights you can't win, be strategic about when you pick up weapons and potions. Don't get caught surrounded by poisons, explosives, or enemies at the wrong moment.]

9. Atomas

• [Science-themed matching game. Distribute atoms around a ring, watch atoms merge and transform into larger atoms when they match, set up chain reactions of many atoms each finding their mates at the same time, careful not to fill the ring beyond its capacity. Learn the periodic table in the process.]

10. I Love Hue

• [Relaxing color matching game. Get a mess of jumbled tiles on a grid and swap tiles around until they form pleasing gradients along both the y and x axes. Breathe in. Hold... Breathe out.]

Honorable classic game mentions:

• Chess [It's chess.]
• Rummikub ["Rummy-cube", compete against other players, using tiles from your hand to form "runs" (red3, red4, red5) and "sets" (red3, blue3, black3) in the playing area until a player wins by using all their tiles. At least 3 tiles per set/run, must play 30 points from your own hand on the same turn before manipulating tiles played by others.]
• Rommy's Gauntlet [Level-for-level remake of the Windows 95 "Best of Windows Entertainment Pack" classic, Chip's Challenge. Tile-based puzzle game.]