Looking for a little fun? Ready to start your new week of boring meetings, long classes, and other drudge-like Monday stuff? Good, 'cause neither are we. Which is why we're here to distract you with a fresh batch of iPhone games! Hooray for postponing work!
Yoku-Gami - Fashioned by German board game designer Reiner Knizia, Yoku-Gami is a great numbers-based puzzle game that requires a little addition and a lot of strategy. The game is played on a grid of numbered tiles. Tap to select a number and drag to highlight groups of adjacent numbers. If the total of all the numbers in the group equals the greatest number, that group disappears. New tiles don't drop until a row or column is cleared, so you've got to plan your moves very carefully or you'll be left with stranded numbers out in the middle of nowhere. A surprisingly dense game with a simple surface concept.
Sticky - In an abandoned factory, two professors are working on a new energy source. They end up creating a small jelly creature that left orange goop everywhere it went. This is Sticky, and after the reactor overloads and spreads black goop across the lab, you have to use your skills to save the scientists. What are your skills? Sticking to things, of course! Tap the top of the screen to fling yourself there, the bottom to go down. You have to take out the creeping black enemies as they emerge from the sides of the screen. If you don't, bad things happen! Sticky makes great use of physics to turn what would be an ordinary game into something filled with strategy and fun.
Nurikabe Vault - Logic puzzles continue to fill the catacombs of the iTunes App Store, with sudoku being the most prolific. Enter Nurikabe Vault, a good-looking game that recreates the nurikabe experience on your iPhone. Your goal is to fill in islands and mark off non-filled spaces using the given number clues. For example, if a block says "4", then there will be four adjacent squares colored in connected to that block. Finding the non-shaded areas is also a challenge, but keep in mind that four of these blocks can't exist together, and that each block must be connected to another. The rules become instantly clear when you play the game, and this game both looks great and is surprisingly challenging. A free version of Nurikabe Vault is also available.
NOTE: Games listed may not be available outside of North America. Prices are subject to change and are therefore unlisted. Please see the individual game pages for purchasing info.
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