

50 iPad and iPhone Games You Should Be Playing Right Now

Delete Words With Friends. Forget Flappy Bird. And for goodness' sake, get rid of Candy Crush. These are the mobile games you want on your phone.

Games, Cartoon, Adventure game, Pc game, Technology, Fictional character, Graphic design, Anime, Massively multiplayer online role-playing game,
Michael Stillwell

It's easy to get into a rut of mobile game-playing, trying over and over again to raise your score in Crossy Road or conquer the world in Clash of Clans. But there's a whole world of great games out there waiting for your to try, some of them decidedly under the radar. It's time to load up your smartphone or tablet and get ready for some better gaming.

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Apple Store
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The Witness

BUY - $10

This is the best puzzle game I have ever played on any platform. Better than Monument Valley or Braid, Myst or Lemmings. And yes, it's better than Portal. Granted, $10 is steep for a mobile game, but you're buying 60 hours of pure battery- and brain-draining enjoyment.

Much like Myst, in The Witness you are stuck on a 3D island, free to roam and discover, solving intricate puzzles to advance in the game. Most of the island's puzzles are various incarnations of the same concept: drawing a line on a checkerboard studded with symbols. The absolutely ingenious conceit in this game is that you are never explicitly taught what those symbols mean, or how to otherwise solve a new puzzle. Rather, you learn them (painfully) through trial, error, and imagination while exploring your island.

You can spend 15 minutes scrambling around a section of the island, attacking a puzzle from all conceivable angles until, something clicks in your brain. You realize the key to the puzzle lies in the shadow of a tree, or the noise of your footsteps. An entire section of the island suddenly makes sense to you, and your excruciating frustration is washed away by glorious satisfaction.

2 of 50

BUY - $2

This is, hands down, one of greatest—if not the greatest—pure mobile puzzle games we've ever played. The game builds upon a familiar foundation where (a la Candy Crush) you shuffle around a grid of tiles to delete matching-colored groups. But Swapperoo brings more than just fresh blood to this puzzle genre.

Like all legendary pure puzzle games, Swapperoo fulfills what we think of as the Tetris trinity of requirements. First, the game's minimalist, simple conceit (that each tile moves in just one specific way when pressed) is inversely proportional to just how friggen hard it can be. Second, advancing in Swapperoo is a result of mastering the game's subtle mechanics and tricks, and knowing how to chain moves, not just the process of crunching through various levels. Lastly: When you close your eyes after playing a few levels of Swapperoo, you may very well find that your brain hasn't stopped playing.

Green, Light, Lighting, Line, Design, Pattern, Rectangle, Symmetry,
Apple Store
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BUY - $2

It's remarkable how much world-building has been fit into a game so deeply minimalist and abstract. In Linelight you guide a short line segment through a series of puzzling mazes, avoiding traps. It's a simple conceit, but Linelight stays fresh through over 100 levels by continually switching up the challenges. Some traps only move when you do, or mimic your movement. Some levels require you to shorten and lengthen your line segment in interesting ways.

How does this work out to world-building? Well, along some seriously immersive music, in each unique world you physically travel through connected levels, slowly learning the required skills, getting used to each world's challenges, and unlocking the path to the next puzzle. We liked Linelight enough to give it a pass for the improper geometrical terminology. Also, Linesegmentlight doesn't have the same ring to it.

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Death Road to Canada

BUY - $11

Like Oregon Trail meets Shaun of the Dead—yet somehow better than both—Death Road to Canada is undoubtedly the greatest zombie survival game there is. You're embarking on a journey from post-apocalyptic Florida to the save-haven of the cold north, and as each day passes this 16-bit sprite RPG throws everything at you. You're constantly running low on medical supplies, ammunition, food, and fuel, which you find by breaking into shops (with names like Y'all Mart) and fending off zombies.

Adding more refugees to your journey helps immensely, but each new addition quickens the pace at which you run low on supplies. You'll run into trials on the road, like breakdowns and traps, which you solve according to each of your character's skills. You'll be seiged by zombies, where you'll lose ammunition, break your melee weapons, and lose beloved characters. Your original character will probably die. But the doom and gloom is counterbalanced by hilarious dialogue, offbeat characters, and one ludicrous shop name after the next.

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Captain Cowboy

BUY - $1

Captain Cowboy's 8-bit graphics and flip-screen play may evoke an earlier era of PC and arcade classics, but rest assured nothing about the game feels even remotely antiquated or tired. You guide an astronaut through a massive, sprawling space cavern, with the sole responsibility of finding your way out of the maze. You'll dig tunnels through boulder-filled dirt, learning how to avoid avalanches that can kill, or (worse) trap you. You'll dodge lasers and aliens, constantly check your map, and thrust yourself across unknown expanses of empty space.

Games, Pc game, Collectible card game, Adventure game, Recreation, Massively multiplayer online role-playing game,
Apple Store
6 of 50
Bottom of the 9th

BUY - $5

If baseball is the statistician’s game, Bottom of the 9th is the insane statistician’s game. An extraordinarily peculiar re-imagining of the sport, each game of Bottom of the 9th starts and stops with just half of an aggravatingly tense inning. That's it. Baseball's dual requirements of speed and hand-eye coordination have also been finally deemed irrelevant, superseded by the superior skills of bluffing and dice-throwing.

Totally asymmetric, you pick either a pitcher (and a relief) or the at-bat team. No switching sides, and the game ends with three outs or a single run. Each turn pitchers pick one of four quadrants above home plate to toss the ball, and batters try to guess where. This works out as a bluffing mechanic, because it slowly exhausts the pitcher to throw in certain corners. After pitching, both the batter and the pitcher toss a pair of six-sided dice (with re-rolls and adjustments depending on who bluffed who) in an extremely strange duel of strikes, balls, base-hit, and of course game-ending home runs.

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BUY - $3

The spiritual precursor to 2048, Threes is much harder but equally more rewarding. Swipe in any orthogonal direction to move numbered tiles on a 4x4 grid and try to combine tiles of the same type. Unlike 2048, tiles move only one place. They are replenished with less randomness, too, meaning the game requires far more foresight and planning. Can you get past the 768 tile?

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Card Crawl

BUY - $3

Sometimes you just want to relax with simple game with straightforward and comfortably repetitive play. Enter Card Crawl, which is what we imagine characters the Dungeons and Dragons universe play instead of solitaire. The game deals out 54 cards (gold, deadly enemies, useful weaponry, rare items or potions) in sets of 4. Each game lasts about three minutes as you try to defeat all the enemies in the deck with the other cards, all the while hoarding as much gold as possible.

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Apple Store
9 of 50
Hades' Star


Hades' Star is the best massive multiplayer iOS game there is—a pocket-sized Eve Online for people that still have to go to work. In the game you slowly grow a galactic empire, conquering and upgrading worlds, building a fleet of ships and space stations, mining asteroids, decoding ancient technology, and waging war against an alien race (which, I have to wonder, may just be trying to protect itself?)

The game feels big, which is the paramount draw. It takes time to advance your colonies, or traverse your spacecraft through open space toward war or economic trade. As you progress through the game, it becomes important to team up with other players to scour certain sectors of alien fighters.

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Spaceteam works like this: You and three of your friends huddle and sync up the game on your devices. Each of you is in charge of a single control panel, and you must cooperate to frantically complete the game's ridiculously worded demands. Here's the catch: Your phone may be flashing a demand that must be completed on someone else's control panel. The result is minutes of madcap action in which people are shouting things like, "Turn on the transmogler! On!" Or, "Dial phasers to 7! Phasers to 7!" Or, "Flip the thermocoupler… Who has the thermocoupler!? For the love of God, flip that thermocoupler!"

11 of 50
Mini Metro

BUY - $5

Do you ever curse the transportation gods, swearing you could build a better transit system? Well, now's your chance. Mini Metro is a mobile game that lets you decide how your city runs. The game offers 13 different maps to play through of real cities around the world, like New York, Cairo, and Osaka. Each cities also has its own types of transportation, mirroring the real world. For example, cities in Japan have bullet trains while other cities don't. If anything, the game will likely make you appreciate how hard a job it is designing a transit system for millions of people.

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BUY - $7

A mobile port of a beloved board game, farm-themed Agricola is a complex, European-style game that challenges your ability to manage multiple resources at a time, with the end goal of collecting as many points as possible. Imagine the exact opposite of Farmville. Despite the steep learning curve, you will learn to love Agricola.

Angry birds, Adventure game, Font, Games, Animated cartoon, Graphic design, World, Illustration,
Apple Store
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For a free game, Drag'n'Boom is almost an unconscionable steal. You flick a pint-sized dragon around several dozen medieval levels, terrorizing knights with fireballs, avoiding damage, and nabbing countless coins. It's not a particularly clever game, but it's on this list for one big reason: fantastically slick controls. Your left thumb controls the dragon's leaps and mid-air direction changes, and your right thumb launches fireballs. There is something ineffable about the way the dragon accelerates, turns, and belches fire. It reminds me of the satisfying way Mario accelerates into a run on the original SNES Super Mario World.

But the absolute best part of this game is the bullet-time slow motion, which happens whenever you hold down to redirect the dragon. The music muffles like it's pulsing through the back door of a club and for a moment—as you 180 your dragon toward a foolishly charging knight—everything is bliss.

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Alto's Adventure

BUY - $5

We know, we know. Yet another immersive, llama-collecting snowboard adventure set in a pastel-tinted world? Haven't we had enough?

From a strictly gameplay perspective, Alto's Adventure is nothing new. You slide down a randomly-generated mountain, do a few flips, avoid rocks and fissures, and collect as many points as possible. The beauty of this game is not in its concept, but its execution. This game is like a spiritual successor to Monument Valley that you will play over and over again just to experience the gorgeous and constantly shifting atmosphere.

Water, Water resources, Organism, Games, Watercourse, Recreation, World, Leisure, Screenshot, Ocean,
Apple Store
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Cat Quest

BUY - $5

Sprawling and airy, Cat Quest is a truly delightful open-world RPG. Sure, there’s not a lot of originality in the game. You traverse an open map as a feline cavalier, fighting monsters (from cutesy hedgehogs to equally cutesy dragons), discovering new spells and gear, and leveling up at a steady clip.

But novelty isn’t why Cat Quest is worth your time. What the game eschews in uniqueness, it makes up for in pacing and the sheer perfection of the touch-and-drag controls that dominate movement and combat. With extraordinarily little down-time, each quest blends seamlessly into the next as you zip across the map at breakneck speed.

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Monument Valley

BUY - $4

An M.C. Escher-inspired point-and-click puzzler, Monument Valley was not only the most beautiful game to come out on iOS platform in 2014—it might be the most beautiful game that's come out this decade.Mind-bending yet strangely intuitive, Monument Valley will have you playing it at least twice just to see and experience it all over again.

If you love the original, don't forget to check out Monument Valley 2 on iOS (and hopefully on Android soon).

Text, Font, Turquoise, Graphic design, Illustration, Design, Clock, Organism, Pattern, Games,
Apple Store
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Tales of the Tiny Planet

BUY - $3

Here's a single-button puzzle that that defies its touch-command limitations to bring plenty of complexity to the table. Your goal is to guide a small, cartoon-y planet across a maze of spiky scaffolding into a series of cosmic wormholes. Instead of directly control a planet's movement, your single button causes the scaffolding to shift and move in predictable ways. Beating the timed levels boils down to discovering the quickest combination of Morse Code-like touches and taps.

I do have one largely irrelevant complaint. The plot hides some insane backstory I demand to understand. In most levels the background clearly details mountains or clouds. What? How are these planets on other planets? Who built this scaffolding? What the hell is going on here?

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Ridiculous Fishing

BUY - $3

Ridiculous Fishing oozes with character, excess and, well, absurdity. Things start off with rather ordinary angling: You toss your fishing line into the water and tilt the device try to hook as many fish as possible. That's when things take a turn for the delightfully absurd: As your haul is flung into the air, you gun down your aquatic harvest with frantic fire from pistols, bazookas, miniguns, and more. You revel in the rain of well-polished blood and money, and then try again.

Comics, Games, Fiction, Fictional character, Illustration, Art, Graphic design, Comic book, Photography, Adventure game,
Apple Store
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Miracle Merchant

BUY - $2

From the makers of Card Quest and Card Thief, Miracle Merchant is yet another extremely inventive, medieval-themed solitaire card game. Who knew the niche had room for three?

In Miracle Merchant you are an arcanist-for-hire, crafting potions for a steady stream of customers. You do so by picking and choosing recipe cards picked from four colored decks. The composition and order of each four-card recipe creates a unique potion, and nets you points. The trick to the game is that each ingredient card is unique, and will increase in point value depending on when you play it or if its next to certain neighbor cards. If deeply challenging solitaire games are what you're after, Miracle Merchant is a must have.

Orange, Red, Black, Yellow, Text, Blue, Brown, Light, Line, Graphic design,
Apple Store
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BUY - $2

STANDBY has the cruel heart of a NES platformer: It's really, really freaking hard. Ghosts 'n' Goblins hard. After a friendly epilepsy warning, you take control of a zippy acrobat, who you guide to shoot, leap, dive, and slide though level after level at an unconscionable speed. Lights strobe your eyes numb, the soundtrack thuds. Make even the slightest mistake, and you're dead.

What's redeeming about STANDBY is that, much like the PC classic Spelunky, the controls are so precise and elegant that each death was unquestionably your own fault. As the corpses pile high, you'll turn each new frustration inward, jamming it down until you reach the gamer's version of nuclear fission ignition—your rage continually refueling itself and producing ungodly STANDBY skills.

In the end you either rage quit or pass out. Warning: nobody finishes this game happy.

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Space Marshals

BUY - $4

Think of it as an overhead wild-west shooter with a stealthy sci-fi glaze. In Space Marshals you gun your way through a sleek and sprawling storyline while completing missions, earning new weapons and armor, and taking orders from an increasingly sardonic AI. With its intuitive faux-dual-stick touchscreen controls, Space Marshals is the most fun iOS shooter we've ever played. It feels like a full-fledged console game for your phone, and once you've mastered it, you can always move on to Space Marshals 2.

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BUY - $5

Transistor, an action/RPG hybrid set in a richly painted cyberpunk world, was easily the best iOS game to come out in 2015. You, as the game's protagonist Red, set out to battle through hours of winding, dark, whimsical levels. All the while, you're unraveling the backstory of why you stabbed an unidentified man in the opening scene. The most compelling aspect of Transistor is not the story, though. It's the tight, clean battle mode, one that's focused on switching in and out of a unique "planning mode," where the live-action breaks into stasis and you expend energy to plot and execute a combination of moves.

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BUY - $7

If you mixed equal parts Minecraft with your favorite hand-held action RPG (say, Golden Sun) and topped it off with enough tongue-in-cheek dialogue to fill a novel, you'd get Crashlands.

An RPG behemoth, Crashlands was one of the biggest and best games from 2016. You will easily spend 40+ hours scouring the game's massive worlds, collecting alien materials, fighting exotic monsters, and crafting an endless armory of weapons and gear.

Pc game, Games, Strategy video game, Adventure game, Screenshot, Video game software, Recreation, Fictional character, Play, Massively multiplayer online role-playing game,
Apple Store
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Iron Marines

BUY - $5

This nostalgic homage to the original StarCraft may be the real-time strategy game we've been waiting for. In Iron Marines, you send out your Terran warrior to combat a planetary infestation of Zerg, with the help of some Protoss buddies. (They're not named this in the game, but we call 'em like we see 'em.)

It's hard to make a worthwhile real-time strategy for your phone. Touchscreens can't really replace the function or utility of keyboard-commands and hotkeys. But Iron Marines has slimmed down the experience just enough that you'll find the game challenging, without ever really bristling at the limitations of your touchscreen controls.

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A welcome addition to the increasingly stale genre of tower defense games, Digfender may have been the best free mobile game of 2015. As in other tower defenses, your job is to build shooting towers in various flavors (long-range, splash damage, et cetera) to keep oncoming waves of baddies from swarming through into your castle. Digfender's shines in its interesting conceit—you get to decide and dig which path leads your castle to the enemies' spawn point—which creates a riveting double layer of strategy. Which route will be the best to dig, and which towers will you place along your particular path?

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BUY - $1

Designed by the same folks that brought us Space Marshals (see above), Xenowerk takes everything we loved about that stealthy, top-down 3D shooter and distills it into an action-packed, alien mutant murder-fest that is somehow even better. No more sneaking. Way more shooting. Although Xenowerk's 50 levels are essentially 50 versions of the same beast (move through the map; kill lots of aliens; try not to die), it has the endless armory of weapons to earn and the console-quality shooter controls we've come to expect from Pixlebite. The buck you spend on this game will be the best deal you've had all year.

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Kingdom Rush: Origins

BUY - $3

Kingdom Rush: Origins is the most balanced tower defense game you may ever play with your thumbs. Thrilling, frustrating, and featuring striking graphics, Origins tasks you with fighting off wave after wave of killable baddies, picking the best strategy from an impressive number of different towers and special abilities. Buy this app if you already love tower defense games. And definitely buy it if you've never even heard of them.

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Badland 2

BUY - $4

At long last Badland, 2013's mobile game of the year, has a sequel. (If you've never played the original, do yourself a favor and download it ASAP.) As in the first game, Badland 2 is a innovative physics flyer. Your task is to guide an army of flapping puffballs through a kaleidoscope of gorgeous worlds, threading endless silhouetted traps and puzzles. To further complicate your task, your puffball creatures regularly morph shape and multiply into dozens of creatures, which you control all at the same time. (Don't worry, only one needs to live.) Honestly, Badland 2 feels more like a expansion to the original—more levels and more tricks—than a full-fledged sequel, but we appreciate it. Don't mess with a winning formula.

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Exploding Kittens

BUY - $2

What started out as a hugely popular card game developed by Matthew Inman, the cartoonist behind the The Oatmeal, has now reached its true potential as the mobile game Exploding Kittens. Strip away Kitten's offbeat theme, comedic sound effects, and wacky art, and what you have is a card game that mixes strategy and luck to a maddeningly effective degree. Players take turns drawing from a central pile of cards, hoping not to pull one of few deadly "exploding kitten" cards. Meanwhile, they use cards from their hands to skip their turn, peer into the deck, reverse play direction, make opponents move, and more.

There's two reasons why mobile so perfect for Exploding Kittens. First, the app continually reports the changing odds of pulling an exploding kitten card, which is a fantastic addition. Secondly, the online play with random players is fast and frustratingly competitive, but flawless.

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BUY - $1

Cavernaut is easily my favorite reincarnation of Atari's classic arcade game, Lunar Lander (and boy, there are many). Angle your phone or other mobile device to pilot a landing craft through a randomly generated cave system, avoiding walls and touching down at refueling way-points. No,this is not a revolutionary concept, but where the game shines is when you find yourself torn between options. Should you spend your rapidly diminishing fuel reserves to investigate branching passages for potential upgrade items? Collect more glowing green currency? Or gun it to the next refuel station? There are no right answers, only unavoidable cave crashes.

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