iOS

Most mobile games are little time-wasters, suitable for entertaining yourself while you wait for the bus; few are deep, involving, and require strategic thinking. Plague Inc does, however.

In Plague Inc., you play a disease, and your victory condition is the complete extermination of humanity. Experiencing fiero because you've just killed every man, woman, and child on the planet is... strange, but interesting.

The game comes with seven different plague types (bacteria, virus, parasite, and so on); only bacteria is unlocked at first. Each poses somewhat different difficulties; for instance, the virus mutates frequently, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can gain new abilities without requiring you to spend "DNA points," but you may also evolve in a way to alarm humanity more quickly than you'd like.

Spaceteam is a crazy, highly creative little game that has more of the feel of a party game than a digital one. Like FTL, it's a kind of spaceship command sim, but the games could not be more unlike each other in terms of gameplay.

Its for two to four players in the same physical space, each of whom needs and iOS device. You connect locally to each other, and the game begins. Each player's screen shows a bunch of controls -- sliders, knobs, toggles, areas with two or more buttons. At the top of the screen, a command appears -- like, say, "Set Newtonian photomist to maximum." But the command on your screen references a control on some other player's screen.... So you shout "Set Newtonian photomist to maximum!" and hope that whoever has the Newtonian photomist control hears you, identifies the control on their screen, and turns the know or whatnot accordingly.

Slapshot is a highly abstracted hockey simulation card game with a great amount of luck. The original edition was created in 1982 but reprinted multiple times, including a recent reprint and an iOS app. The publisher, Columbia Games is famous for making one thing -- block war boardgames. Slapshot is an odd game in long lineup of hard-core wargames from Columbia Games.

Slapshot's core gameplay is similar to Reiner Knizia's Battleline, because both games use lane-based "combat". Each player gets six cards that represent six players (suits): three forwards, two defensemen, and one goalie. On your turn you can draft, trade, or play (challenge) a team. Drafting improves your hand by exchanging one of your low cards with a draw from a common pool of face-down cards. Trading is similar to drafting but you randomly draw a card from another player's hand and you must exchange a card of the matching suit. Thus if you draw a forward card from an another player, you must give one of your forwards in exchange.

Ascension: Storm of The Souls (ASOTS) is a deck-building game, akin to Thunderstone and Dominion. Players build a custom deck with in-game currencies like the aforementioned games, but ASOTS is simpler, and looks and feels more like the original source of inspiration, Magic: The Gathering. Another major difference is that ASOTS has more randomness in deck-building.

In both Dominion and Thunderstone, the card market is randomized in fixed sets, allowing players to see all the cards available for deck-building. In ASOTS, only six cards are available for purchase and the rest are revealed as cards are bought. Thus, one cannot fully plan card mix strategies, rather one must acquire cards tactically, carefully watching the card purchases of other players.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (TOTAN) is a hybrid electronic and mechanical pinball game. Bookkeeping, combo chain states, and scoring is managed by the electronic components while gameplay -- keeping the steel ball in play -- is managed by sloped angles, gravity and mechanical parts. TOTAN is ranked number seven of all pinball machines in The Internet Pinball Database. TOTAN gets interesting if you understand the goal and the various "side quests," and the subtle meaningful choices that designer John Popadiuk put in TOTAN. There are many ways to achieve your goal of rescuing the princess from the evil genie Saleem Bagazi. However because there is no tutorial for TOTAN (or most pinball machines), players cannot fully appreciate the intricate and clever game design. Even after reading the official manual (PDF), it is difficult to understand all the different scoring and combo options. Many players, unaware of specific goals, will play TOTAN by hitting random bumpers and other targets, and watch the pretty lights, unaware of the deeper gameplay.

'Take It Easy!' is bingo improved or Euro bingo by Peter Burley. Burley took bingo (arguably a game because there are no meaningful choices) and added risk management and real choices. Each player gets their own a hex shaped board divided into smaller hexes. The designated caller picks and announces a random hex tile and other player play that tile. Each player can place the called tile onto any open space trying to line up high value rods. Each tile has three color rods that go in three directions. When you connect the same color rod across the board you score the value of the rodss. So if you manage to connect four orange rods, value 8, across your board, then you earn 32 points.

The difficulty lies in that each tile has three rods; when you match one color rod, two other colors may mismatch and you have to decide which colors you want to score and which ones you want to sacrifice. Like bingo, there is no player interaction because your board does not influence another player's board. Hence 'Take It Easy!' can accommodate unlimited players as long each player has their own set of tiles and board and be ear's reach of the caller.

Since over 500,000 copies have sold, multiple digital implementations of 'Take It Easy!' exits. The best are the iOS and Facebook app by Zabu Studios.

We tend to overlook gambling games and casinos. While arcades and pinball parlors have disappeared, their cousins, casinos and slot machines (slots) are thriving. In fact, many casinos dedicate two-thirds of their floor space to slots. Fireball is a video slot, an upright arcade cabinet-like, digital adaptation of a physics-based random number generator game. While slots, like pinball, are a hybrid of mechanical and electronic parts, newer slots like Fireball are purely electronic. Fireball is developed by Sierra Studios (not Sierra Online), a division of Bally Technologies. You may recall Bally for their famous pinball games like The Addams Family.

Thunderstone is the second most popular deck-building game after Dominion. Many people like one and not the other. If you like elegant Euro-style, streamed-lined game mechanics, you would prefer Dominion. If you enjoy more depth and a stronger American RPG style narrative, Thunderstone is your game.

You can test and refine your strategy with the Campaign mode of the Thunderstone Facebook app or with the upcoming iOS app.

Dixit Odyssey is the European answer to Apples to Apples. Dixit Odyssey is a party game, light enough to play socially even with a drink or two. The game is composed of 84 large, Tarot-sized cards, a scoreboard, player boards, and rabbit score tokens. Each card depicts a childlike, innocent, surreal painting. The beautiful art of the cards make this game magnificent.

The gameplay is simple. At the beginning of a turn, the active player picks a card and describes it with a word or a short phrase. Other players then submit a card from their hand of cards that best matches the active player's description. The active player then shuffles all the submitted cards including her card.

Everyone that guesses the active player's card scores, and players who have their cards (wrongly) picked also score. However if no player guesses correctly, all but the active player score. Thus the goal is to pursue the golden mean of giving clues that are not too easy but not that hard.

English Country Tune is a little puzzle game in which you control a blue square, flipping it in different directions with the arrow keys (or, on an iOS device, with a swipe). In each level, there are some number of yellow balls that you must get into yellow boxes; sometimes, there is also a blue square where you must end yourself.

The level itself is 3D, so you're flipping in three dimensions; some squares are blocking. In addition, wherever you are at present, gravity is "local down" to you, and if you flip a yellow ball into space, it will fall down, relative to you; quite often, this means losing the ball as it falls out of the screen. But if you were to approach it from the other side, it would fall in the other direction, which is often the desired behavior.