What started as a simple puzzler eventually turned into a marketing juggernaut, spinning off into countless sequels and sister releases. As much fun as some of those may have been, though (Angry Birds Transformers, we’re looking at you), none has managed to live up to the high bar set by the original two versions. If you’ve never played an Angry Birds game, start here. To play, you farm for resources that you can spend on new buildings, defenses, or troops, all of which are of the utmost importance if you want to ransack other players’ bases while defending your own. Clash of Clans wasn’t the first game of its sort (a few Facebook titles like Galaxy Life and Backyard Monsters predated it), but it’s easily the best. If you’ve been playing any of the “me too” games that followed in its wake, be sure to include Clash of Clans in your rotation. There’s nothing like the cry of a barbarian to keep your spirits up. Competing in real-time battles, you build a team from cards you collect, then play those cards to unleash a variety of troops on the battlefield. In a few short minutes, one player can destroy the opposing player’s castle and emerge the victor, earning a chest filled with more cards (delivering more troops). If you’ve ever played a game where you spend earned currency to unlock a random creature and add it to your collection, then watched a video ad to earn even more of that currency and did so with a smile on your face, you have Crossy Road to thank for that. Similarly, if you’ve played a game in recent years with a voxel appearance that wasn’t Minecraft, there’s a good chance Crossy Road’s influence came into play there, too. The premise couldn’t have been simpler: Your pet monster, Om Nom, needs to be fed his nutritious dinner of candy. Getting it into his mouth, however, requires careful planning and quick fingers. Cutting strings in the right place at the right time sends the candy swinging, flinging, and floating across the screen. Even when you fail (and you will fail), it’s impossible not to wear a smile on your face. If you like Cut the Rope GOLD, check out Cut the Rope 2 on iOS and Cut the Rope Magic GOLD on iOS. DEVICE 6 isn’t a traditional gamebook by any means, but that’s exactly what makes it so enticing. Rather than following a choose-your-own-adventure style, DEVICE 6 presents individual chapters formatted as works of art. Sentences change direction and wrap-around visuals that tie into the narrative; audio cues present new elements to further frame the story. To proceed to the next chapter, you’ll find a puzzle in which the solution is brilliantly hidden within the story you just read. Don’t expect obvious answers, though. Instead, be prepared to comb through the entire tale again as you try to solve these head-scratchers. Fruit Ninja was one of the first truly great high-score chasers on the App Store — a game not only about splitting produce but about beating your personal best. Frantically swipe your finger to destroy as much fruit as you can while also trying to dodge the bombs that can bring a quick end to your life as a sword-wielding warrior. The studio behind Fruit Ninja Classic, Halfbrick, has done a great job of keeping the experience alive, eventually delivering the (equally great) Fruit Ninja 2.0 update that added plenty to the experience. To play, gather your friends. Then, place your phone on your forehead while it displays a word. Everyone else needs to help you guess that word—the faster, the better. The object of the game is to guess as many words as you can in 60 seconds. What makes Heads Up! work so well is the sheer variety of themes available, everything from animals and sports to licensed content like Star Wars, Sesame Street, and Disney Parks. There’s something for everyone. A card game set in the Warcraft universe and designed by the premier game makers at Blizzard, Hearthstone retains all of the warmth and charm of its source material while crafting a new experience that’s both deviously strategic and infinitely collectible. It’s a well-balanced game that’s forever growing: Blizzard has continued to add new expansions, adventures, cards, and modes long after its release. There’s a comfortable onboarding process that welcomes you no matter your skill level, and the game’s matchmaking ensures you’ll always end up in a fair fight. Don’t be intimidated by your preconceived notions of games like Magic: The Gathering. Hearthstone may offer plenty of strategy, but it does so in an incredibly accessible way. Touch your fingers to the screen to initiate the jetpack worn by hero Barry Steakfries as he attempts to navigate his way safely through an increasingly dangerous lab. From lasers to missiles to electric gates, there’s plenty to dodge, duck, and dive through. With power-ups ranging from a teleporter to a cash-spewing red bird (that looks suspiciously familiar to the hero of another game on this list), there are more than enough ways to help you get ahead. And, with how fast things will be moving, you’ll want every advantage you can get. Kero Blaster, from the creator of the classic indie hit Cave Story, solves the run-jump-shoot conundrum by letting you adjust a slider so that your lizard hero will auto-fire in whatever direction you choose. Add to this a gorgeous 8-bit art style, brilliantly crafted levels, and a brutal difficulty, and you’ve got a game that every old-school player can get behind. A big part of what makes Kingdom Rush work so well is its limited range of buildings that you can upgrade in different directions. So, you may start with an Archer Tower, but you can eventually turn it into a well-armed Musketeer Garrison, a Crossbow Fort, or a Ranger Tower that would impress Robin Hood. Powerful hero units also become a part of the experience, which only continues to grow in the game’s sequels. You might also be interested in Kingdom Rush Frontiers for iOS and Kingdom Rush Origins for iOS. Apple selected this game as a 2015 Game of the Year. Whether you’re a fan of Lara Croft, puzzles, or both, you’ll find plenty to love in Lara Croft GO. The puzzles are absolutely charming, and the art is simply breathtaking. Monument Valley isn’t a terribly difficult experience, but it doesn’t have to be. In opening new paths for Ida, you feel less like a gamer and more like a caretaker. If Monument Valley looks familiar and you’re sure you’ve never heard of it, you might have caught a glimpse of Frank Underwood playing it on House of Cards. The game was so compelling that it actually provided an important plot point in the show’s third season. Vlambeer’s angler-to-hunter experience managed to take home Apple’s coveted Game of the Year in 2013, and it’s not hard to see why. The game combines three different though equally fun experiences: guiding your fishing line away from fish to sink it as low as you can, touching every fish you can on the way back up to catch them, and tapping like crazy to blast those sea vermin out of the sky. It’s not the most conventional way to make fish and chips, but who really likes conventional, anyway? The Room Pocket is the very best kind of cerebral experience. The only problem is that once you finish, you’ll find yourself wanting more. Lucky for you, Fireproof Games has released three sequels: The Room Two for iOS, The Room Three for iOS, and The Room: Old Sins for iOS. A game about combining like numbers to grow their value, the objective of Threes! is to get as large a set of numbers as you can before you gridlock the board. This can happen sooner than you expect if you’re not careful. Swipe to move all the tiles on the board at once in their preferred direction: up, down, left, or right. As a result, you can end up pushing pieces into problematic places. The game is simple and clever: Few games live up to the App Store Essentials title quite as well as Threes. If you’ve played a variation on this game with 2048 in the title, do yourself a favor and play the far superior game that started it all. Stripping the genre down to its basics, rymdkapsel is a minimalist strategy game about building rooms and assigning workers—and hoping you prepared the right balance to survive the next wave of alien attackers. Long play sessions don’t make rymdkapsel a natural fit for mobile devices, but once you get playing, that hardly matters; you’ll enjoy every second of it. Each player has a different set of controls in front of them and is given a different set of instructions, but those instructions aren’t usually for the player who receives them. Things devolve pretty quickly into a group of friends yelling things like, “set shiftsanizier to 1m” and “refrigerate leftovers!” It’s hilarious, delightful, and one heck of an icebreaker should you need one for your next party. You finally break 18 seconds. You feel like a hero. Super Hexagon is a minimalist survival game about spinning left and right on an endless quest to survive geometry that’s flying toward the middle of the screen. You’ll have to dodge the geometric shapes that are crushing in on you and do it all in time to a killer soundtrack. Tilt to Live doesn’t just control beautifully; the design ethos behind it — that players need to pivot from defense to offense and back again quickly — is executed to perfection. Fans of Tilt to Live will want to be sure to check out the game’s successor, Tilt to Live 2: Redonkulous for iOS. Vainglory is the one exception to this rule. Offering a single map, a diverse cast of characters, and gameplay that caters to MOBA and mobile enthusiasts equally, Vainglory has become a mainstay of e-sports competitions while remaining incredibly accessible to newcomers. If you’ve never participated in a team-based battle for territory, Vainglory is the most authentic MOBA experience you’ll find on the App Store. Its main competitor, Call of Champions, may be a little easier on beginners, but there’s no question that Vainglory is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
