Overview · Choosing a game

Casual mobile games: what I actually recommended across the counter

For six years the same conversation happened two or three times a week. Someone would come in holding a phone, having installed something a relative told them about, and ask why it kept ending after eleven seconds. This page is that conversation written down — not a ranking, just which sort of game suits which sort of person, and roughly what you are signing up for.

The only question that matters

Not "which game is best" — that question has no answer. The useful one is whether you want the game to wait for you or not, because everything else follows from it and people are usually very clear about their preference once it is put that way.

Games that wait. Threes, Wordscapes, the Ice and Fishing puzzles here. Nothing moves until you move it. You can stop mid-thought, get off a bus, come back three days later and the board is exactly as you left it. If your day gets interrupted a lot, this is the whole category you want.

Games that do not. Alto's Odyssey, Geometry Dash, Mini Metro, the Chicken and Airplane walkthroughs. The clock is theirs, not yours. Sessions are measured in seconds or in one unbroken half-hour, and putting the phone down mid-run means losing the run. They are better for a queue than a living room.

If you genuinely do not know, start with one that waits. A reactive game played badly is just noise; a puzzle played badly is still a puzzle, and you can put it down mid-sentence.

How long a session honestly lasts

Store pages are no help here, so these are timed from my own play rather than taken from anyone's marketing. Alto's Odyssey and Geometry Dash run under a minute an attempt and expect to be retried immediately. Threes and Wordscapes sit at five to twenty minutes but stop cleanly anywhere inside that. Mini Metro is the outlier at up to half an hour with no way to pause, and it is the one game here I would not start on a short journey.

The well-known ones

Games most people have already heard of, each written up from a cold start.

• Alto's Odyssey — endless sandboarder. A person on a sandboard travelling right, forever, across dunes at sunset.
• Mini Metro — line-drawing strategy. You draw underground lines between stations with a finger, and passengers ride them.
• Wordscapes — word puzzle. A handful of letters on a wheel at the bottom and an empty crossword grid above it.
• Geometry Dash — rhythm platformer. A square moves right at a constant speed and you tap to jump.
• Threes — sliding number puzzle. Tiles slide, matching tiles merge, and a new tile enters from the edge you swiped away from.

The quieter ones, by theme

Smaller puzzle games grouped by what they are about rather than who published them. All of these wait for you.

• Chicken — lane hopper. Go now, or wait, repeated a hundred times.
• Aviation — routing puzzle. Draw landing paths and keep them from crossing.
• Airplane — distance arcade. One throw down a hallway that never ends.
• Fishing — deduction puzzle. Find a shoal from sonar readings alone.
• Ice — sliding puzzle. You cannot stop, so you plan the stopping.

What I will not write about

Anything whose first screen is a shop. If a game hands you a currency before it hands you a rule, then the rules are not really the point of it and a walkthrough would be out of date inside a month. That is a judgement about what is useful to explain, not a complaint about anybody's business.

I also leave out anything that will not open without a signal. Half the reason a casual game earns its space on a phone is that it works on a bus in a tunnel.

About this page. The Game Lantern is an informational site about mobile games. Every game named here is described as free-to-play entertainment: played purely for fun, with no financial element of any kind, nothing of monetary value paid in or taken out, and no prizes involved. We have no commercial or contractual relationship with any publisher or developer named on this page.