If you don’t mind a classic chess. Blitz/bullet/rapid/horde are different styles that don’t take as long to learn enough to have fun. Chess puzzles or against the computer are available if you want to keep it strictly single player. Lichess for multiplayer or I like chess tactics pro for puzzles.
Crosswords, there are programs like alphacross that aggregate from other sources to try different puzzles to find ones that aren’t too easy or hard.
Galaxy Genome, it’s a space exploration game. Sort of a project to make a comprehensive 2D version of Elite: Dangerous. Or at least it started as that, I don’t know if it has achieved and surpassed that by now. It was pretty far along last I played. And that was a while ago now. I kind of play games on and off for years, so that is mostly gonna be a running theme of all the games I post here. Games that you find yourself wanting to pick back up again, over and over.
This isn’t exactly what you asked, but I highly recommend emulation. I have had ePSXe downloaded on every phone I’ve had for the past ten years to play PS1 games. There are so many good titles, all of them free, playable offline. You might like Intelligent Qube Mr. Driller Devil Dice for puzzles. I love playing final fantasy, legend of dragoon, suikoden, Spyro, crash bandicoot. I don’t care about graphics, but I am a sucker for playing through a story.
Isometric Zelda / Metroidvania / bullet hell with a lot of accessibility features and neat art where you’re a lil spaceship guy. Has a demo to see if it’s your jam. Already beat it twice, would really love for them to make DLC or a sequel.
Grim Quest and Grim Tides. Two games by the same person. I haven’t played Grim tides yet, but it’s also free. Grim Quest is not a particularly large game, but I’ve still managed to play it over many years. I did a full run of each difficulty one by one. There is a bit to learn before it feels easy and casual, but it does get there. To be fair, I try to play it without dying. If I let myself die, it would be alot more casual even from the start. Dying is not heavily penalized on default settings, but you can alternately choose to play hardcore. Otherwise dying usually just means you gained less money for that run, and didn’t make the game any harder. The game only gets harder when you successfully clear a dungeon. You can also just exit the unfinished dungeon without dying and keep most of what you have acquired so far on that run, minus a small fee for quitting the dungeon.
There are preset difficulty options, but you can also craft your own custom difficulty. There are things you could spend money on, I think it may have started out with ads. But I consider games with ads that you can pay to get rid of as basically a free demo, and getting rid of ads is the purchase price if you like the game. So they don’t deter me if they don’t basically break the game to add ads to it, or affect the flow of the game whether the ads are there or not.
It doesn’t quite fit, but there are a lot of boardgame phone adaptions, and they rarely have microtransactions. Cat lady, carcassonne, ghanz schoan clever, doppelt so clever, hex roller, rail road ink and roll player are some of my favorites
Exiled Kingdoms, its an older isometric 2D adventure RPG. Kinda feels like it would have been made 30 years ago for pc, but it was made relatively recently for phones. I don’t think there was any micro transactions. It may have had an initial purchase price, not sure. That’s usually what I look for in a phone game. The traditional model of buying a game and then just playing a game. No gross mobile game stuff.
Andor’s Trail, it’s barely recogniseable as a “phone” game, other than that it does indeed run on phones. I don’t remember if it had ads or anything, been taking it from phone to phone for over 10 years now. I don’t think it had ads or anything. It’s open source, but has a pretty consistent feel despite having like 50+ contributors so far.
It’s an adventure RPG. The low level experience might be best with a bit of grinding, but… casual grinding… lol. I kind of just wander around collecting “meat” until I feel strong enough to leave the areas near town and set out on the rest of the adventure. But there has been alot more work around town since the last time I started a new character. So it might feel more natural now.
Friends and dragons. It’s a bit like easy chess with d&d style classes and species. It has transactions, but you can easily do well for free. I’ve been free playing for years (though I did throw them $10 around year 2 because of how much entertainment I got from it)
80 Days - it’s not free but I think it’s worth it. It’s a sort of steampunk version of Around the World in 80 Days where you have to plan your routes, and buy and sell things in different cities to make money. The main gameplay is sort of choose-your-own-adventure events that happen during travel and in different cities.
Card Thief - I just started playing this recently. It does technically have a microtransaction but it’s more like, they let you play for free if you don’t mind waiting for chests to unlock, or you can buy the game to bypass this. The main gameplay is sneaking through dungeons represented by a 3x3 grid of cards randomly drawn from the deck; collecting treasures and avoiding getting caught.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze