Buy card packs with your gold, or with real money. It’s made plenty of profit for Blizzard. But SuperCell weren’t satisfied with that. Instead, they chose the greedy path with Clash Royale and made what could have been a truly great game into merely a very good one.

If you’re the kind of person who enjoys the battle systems of JRPGs but couldn’t care less about the story, Quest to the Future is for you.

I Keep Having This Dream is a quick-playing game with an innovative design that’s easy to get into and develops real complexity as you play.

If you are a fan of 4X games though this is an easy purchase.

If the developers can get it to work reliably, Patchwork: The Game has the potential to be one of the most-enjoyed boardgames on iOS of the year. Until then, the weak AIs and online frustrations leave it as only a tempting appetizer.

All things considered, I would recommend The Daring Mermaid Expedition only to diehard CoG fans, to someone who is looking for a light, entry-level gamebook or who doesn’t have a lot of time on their hands to really delve into a complicated and multi-layered story.

It’s still quite approachable to children, and the bright colors and yesteryear pulp theme may give the impression that it’s suited only to them. But, on the higher difficulty levels, it manages to wring quite a challenge out of its simple rules.

Space Grunts is a winner, have no doubt.

It’s a fantastic game, even for those of us who aren’t big sports or baseball fans, and having it at my beck and call is a good thing.

Puzzle Strike gives you a few distinct characters and access to 20 possible opponents and it is still a challenging game even if you don’t want to invest a time playing it or you want an interesting game to fill some free time.

It’s a smashing success in game design for the purposes of luring in new gamers and giving everyone a reasonable second choice when a game group comes together and has difficulty choosing a game.

There’s just enough crunch here to offer a thrill of nostalgia to anyone who’s ever pasted up an article by hand or worried about whether the Opinion pages were getting bloated. If you’re dying for a hardcore newspaper management sim, you’ll have to wait.

If you played and enjoyed Aralon: Sword and Shadow then this game is more of the same with a better UI. In any other case, there are much better RPGs available for the iPad.

Though the interface isn’t quite as natural as I’d wish, you do get used to it pretty quickly, and what’s left is a genuinely wonderful game.

Punch Club might have worked better as a card game, or with the immediacy of a visual novel interface.

While Hex Mechs has some good elements to it, ultimately it isn’t enough to make up for sloppy QA, mediocre art and some very quirky design flaws.

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build is a delightful little puzzle game.

It’s just a shame that Buried leaves some of its greatest potential, well, buried on the table.

Sometimes the narrative stutters due to the need to grind and upgrade your tools and items, and you’ll remember that what you’re playing is just an artfully disguised Skinner box. As you’re ploughing over unexplored savannah in search of Glutterfly eggs, however, you’ll realise it doesn’t matter because it’s a hell of a disguise.

Any fan of either Puzzle Quest or Magic: The Gathering would do well to check the game out.

In the end, if you’re in the market for Hearthstone with tanks, or just looking for a new deck-builder, World of Tanks Generals is worth a try.

Silent Night isn’t quite as good as the original Lifeline…, but it’s still worth playing.

Aural nitpicking aside, and despite a distinct lack of multiplayer, Star Hammer: The Vanguard Prophecy is a quiet gem.

It should be immediately evident to anyone who plays or even looks at the game what an incredible effort went into making it. Unfortunately, the tedious and frustrating nature of many of its puzzles undermine the considerable charm State of Play cultivated through their craftsmanship.

It’s impressive both visually and mechanically, showcasing lots of innovation to get the most from its minimalist mechanics. The fact it doesn’t do better is, I suspect, more a comment of the difficulty of making satisfying real-time strategy on mobile than it is on the game itself.

If you’re willing to play it in small doses over a very long period of time, with either a lot of in-app purchases or a long grind, there’s absolutely a game worth playing here.

Pea Ridge by HexWar has some blemishes but it offers an interesting gameplay experience with different problems for the Union and Confederate player.

SRPGs don’t generally have very strong or interesting AI, but Templar Battleforce is trying to be a deeply tactical SRPG, and the one-trick AI can break one’s sense of immersion even as it presents a rough-edged challenge. Even so, the varied maps, missions, foes, and extensive character customization keep things interesting throughout the extensive campaign.

Overall, it’s a lot to enjoy. But you need to know what you’re getting into. There are dragons here. Sometimes they are logical ones, sometimes iron. Either way, there’s a lot of satisfaction to be had in slaying them.

Because of the use of monetization shenanigans, that feels like a deliberate attempt to push players to be more committed to the game so that, when their carefully-developed Dice Monster expertise no longer avails them, they’ll shell out for some extra boosts. It’s like the twist ending of Frankenstein, in which you discover that the real monster is the creator.

Cublo managed to take a game with a lot of information and complex interactions and turn it into a fantastic digital edition that both fans of Brass and newcomers to Wallace designs can enjoy.

The controls aren’t perfect and it’s still on the short side, but The Room Three delivers exactly what you’re promised: brooding and beautiful atmosphere with epic-length puzzles to solve.

So it’s a puzzle within a puzzle, made all the more vexing because there might be nothing to find.

If you’re a fan, there’s nothing here that’s going to shake the foundation of puzzle games in the future but if you’re looking for a quick puzzler to kill some time, Magic Flute does what it sets out to do. If you’re not a fan of sliding puzzles and find them the bane of all that is good in the world, stay far, far away.

Advance Wars fans looking for a fix could do much worse, as could anyone else looking for a game that balances the simple and the cerebral.

As bad as the user interface is—and it is completely horrible—I still can’t hate too much on XenoShyft. Much like those old VASSAL modules of mine, once you get over the learning curve and figure out how the UI works, it’s manageable and the game underneath isn’t hurt by it.

As negative as I’ve been about it, Arcane Magic isn’t far from being a pretty good game. Its card mechanics are an interesting idea, but there’s just nothing of substance underneath it.

The mechanics are occasionally a loose fit for the theme, but Rebuild 3 atmosphere and gameplay create compelling narratives of growth, progress and hope.

A strong sense of mystery, puzzles which are either inoffensively brief or intriguingly maddening, a considerate user interface, and a promise of future updates add up to a generally pleasing experience.

An approachable beer-and-pretzels wargame like this one needs to have an inviting user experience that makes it more rewarding to play in short sessions and less of a management chore.

Where Lara Croft GO surprised me was in improving on the Hitman GO formula I loved in a few crucial ways, without losing anything I liked about it other than the tabletop-style presentation and the Ave Maria.

It’s the very essence of what indie gaming is all about: this is no game made by committee, but one man’s utterly original and compelling vision brought to life.

Cyber Hacker is definitely worth a try if you’re into (fake) cyber security or lite-sim games, or if you just want the barista at your local coffee joint to think you’re toppling “the corps” on your tablet over a nice espresso.

Loot & Legends works hard to stay just on the right side of inoffensive. Both the battles and the deck-building offer enough options to give your mind something to chew on, but not so much as to cause anyone to choke.

Like its predecessor, this is a complex game with a lot of interesting ideas — but possibly a few ideas too many.

For all its pretension about history, Spirit of War is a disappointingly generic experience that could be set in any time period. Even on an App Store that’s chronically short of hex-based tactical games, it’s not particularly noteworthy.

Still, Sproggiwood is a clever, fast-paced RPG disguised by a tawdry facade. Is it particularly deep? No. Is there too much grind to it? Yes.

But Kindo is literally the only strategy game I’ve played which seems to me worth playing in a grocery store queue, and it delights me as an artifact which reflects its environment so insightfully.

Don’t Starve is unlike anything I’ve played before and I can’t stop myself from playing it. It’s frustrating as hell at times–finally getting farms built and then getting eating by roving hounds comes to mind–but I can’t turn it off.

It can be convincingly argued that Rodeo are the Blizzard of mobile gaming at this point — their commitment to polish and detail is like no other mobile-focused game dev studio going.

The app certainly doesn’t get in the way of the gameplay, and actually enhances it by making it easy to play and beautiful to look at.

Her Story is a unique experience. You’ve never played anything like this before, and might never get the chance to play anything like it again.

A breeze to control, exciting to play and to excessively replay, laden with tactical playgrounds.

The game has got a couple of UI glitches, a tendency to crash, and a prodigious appetite for battery power. More abstract concerns arise from the basic limitations of the genre — these micro-session games are too far diluted from the formulas of Dungeon Keeper and Sim Tower to have any real bite to them.

Infection is one of the good ones, a board game port that will live on my iPad for a long time, and one that has me excited to see what other board games HexWar might be bringing to the platform.

Buy it, gift it, skirmish it, campaign it; whatever happens, just enjoy it. Spacecom is nothing more than it needs to be, and it very much is.

You Must Build A Boat is such a rare combination of frenetic speed and methodical planning that its closest relative might be Dark Souls.

It’s a marvelous structure, easily allowing players to learn the game’s basics and discover whether the interface suits them better than it did me.

Atlantic Fleet retains the endlessly playable turn-based combat of its predecessor, but now it’s been fitted with a thoughtfully designed open-ended strategy game superstructure.

It’s basically grinding for 8+ hours with nothing to really show for it and, unlike its forebear, doesn’t even have the humor to hold your interest all the way through

MicRogue is a game where, even if you fail seven times in a row, chances are you’ll have failed each time on the eighth or ninth stages. Even when you’re losing it doesn’t feel like you’ve lost much at all.

It’s a nearly perfect port of a classic PC game, something we haven’t really seen since Firaxis brought us XCOM.

From the perspective of a licensor, Coup is just about the perfect iOS adaptation: it’s polished, with some genuinely interesting value added (including probably my favorite game art in memory and a satisfying achievement system), and introduces the game very well without making a physical copy seem superfluous.

Last Voyage is a puzzle game which is uncharacteristically comfortable with—and perhaps cautiously optimistic about—the unknown.

It’s not going to knock off Agricola or Galaxy Trucker as a full-blown euro, but as a quick diversion, Pickomino is an excellent choice and another really well made board game app for iOS.

The game translates a board game of the same name which itself borrowed very heavily from Kingsburg, a well-regarded Euro. Like the joke, there’s very little about the result which is original, and the new expectations created by the digital format create requirements it fails to satisfy.

Once again, inkle Studios has bested themselves in creating the gold standard for interactive fiction, and causing us all to start wondering when the next chapter will arrive.

Despite being a tad beige and not hugely ambitious, The Trace is a palatable concoction of hidden object and traditional first-person adventure gaming. Worth trampling a crime scene for, if only to see where the series will go.

The lack of content undermines the feeling of exploring beyond the final frontier and the limp combat is an awkward step back from the elegant Ace Patrol.

The most interesting lesson Pentaction: Medieval has taught me is that there are some game mechanics I genuinely like which respond poorly to refinement.

Marble Age can sit alongside other quirky tactical takes like Empire: The Deck Building Strategy Game and provide a snappy, short­-term bit of strategic jerky.

The twee aesthetic is going to be a deal-breaker for some, but behind it lies a surprising degree of craftsmanship that makes this a strong example of it’s genre, a lengthy and consistently joyous experience where the gameplay’s polish makes up for the game’s weaker elements.

Corto Maltese is a visually diverse, moderately well-designed adventure which simply fails in a few key areas.

It’s truly a fantastic gamebook, and one I would recommend to anyone.

Hadean Lands is an endlessly clever experience.

Seen as a first episode, it offers a strong foundation that, if followed up on by more ambitious level design and greater focus on its strengths, could be a real Wild West legend.

In its current state it’s a better-than-average digital that’s fun to play until you pull off the AI’s fake Fidel beard and realise that it was Woody Allen all along.

This is the Enlightenment in video game form, and that’s a perspective I can really appreciate in moderation.

The Detail is often nice to look at, but it’s a game that most adventure fans can safely skip.

Space Age loves its endless inane cutscenes a lot more than you will, and it tops them off with a completely discordant endgame boss that fulfills Space Age’s cinematic aspirations while throwing the game bits out the airlock.

XCOM: The Board Game is an elegantly presented and thoughtfully executed game that pumps out tense atmosphere like a neurotic smoke machine.

Fahrenheit’s a high concept effort, and while not wholly successful in the delivery, there’s nothing really quite like Fahrenheit outside the Quantic Dream repertoire.

There’s something about a solitaire card game that really does it for me, and Card Crawl is one of the best I’ve played.

It is truly a fantastic gamebook and a great way to spend time with Shakespeare, even if you end up searching for sunken ships on the bottom of the North Sea.

Vietnam ’65 is a surprisingly different and refreshing wargame experience that might win hearts and minds outside of Vietnam, too.

That’s not a deep criticism, of course, and as a logic puzzle Ento is clever enough, but I find myself reflecting back to Zendo with a bit of nostalgia for the forthright inaccuracy of calling the rule the Buddha nature.

Swap Heroes 2 is smart, but slight, and could have been much improved if its main mechanic was given the proper room to stretch.

It may be slightly more demanding up-front than a Tetris sure, but show it a fraction of the forbearance given to an RPG or a 4X game and you’ll be entranced by a beautifully efficient design that makes the player feel like some arcane trickster genius.

For those with an interest in the period or the temperament to appreciate its pitched battles, Pike and Shot’s mix of the cerebral and the visceral make it a compelling and unique game, and its range and longevity of content make it an essential purchase.

Simogo are capable of making extraordinary things, but this isn’t one of them. The name “The Sailor’s Dream”, it turns out, is apt. Like a dream, this an experience you’ll forget all about soon after leaving it.

Essentially, FRAMED is even more Monument Valley than Monument Valley. It’s stylishly attractive and milks its central mechanic, but there isn’t all that much to milk. Rather than getting repetitive or losing focus, both games just end gracefully after a relatively brief, not very challenging, but unique and thoroughly enjoyable experience.

I’d really like a set of Baltimore levels so I could imagine a crossover with The Wire.

In a complex genre where games like Unity of Command and Battle of the Bulge are like precision-engineered Gothic cathedrals, Russian Front comes across like a Las Vegas one-hour wedding chapel. It seems to have the basic form and function of an operational war game down, but it’s missing the nuance and subtlety of a truly good one.

With the digital version, the bookkeeping is automatic and the game is so much quicker than its cardboard counterpart that, if you’re in a no-win situation, it’s easy to just reset and start again. All of that combines to make digital Sentinels the ideal way to play Sentinels.

In the world of home electronics, I’ve never been interested enough in apex experiences to bother with 3D, but puzzles are dearer enough to me that I’m quite glad to have played those final levels.

Outside of these control niggles, Battle Academy 2 makes a strong case for itself. A solid AI showcase to bolster and balance the online experience, though you’re likely to never be too long without an asynchronous foe given the cross-play antics and established community.

The Magnificent Pixel Dynasty isn’t a case where more is better, or even a case where more is unobtrusive—rather, these half-baked mechanics that have been bolted onto the same construction toy as All Glory to the Pixel King! only serve to detract from the core experience that lays at the heart of both games.

Battle Worlds: Kronos is a fine, if somewhat unremarkable strategy title that does justice to the lineage. It doesn’t rock the boat, but might not do enough to float one, either.