iPhone games (also Ipod Tooch/iPad games too)

dream quest is one of the best iOS games. if it had decent graphics, it would be huge. i'm not even a huge fan of CCG/hearthstone-style games and i've found it addicting

i guess we all slept on it in 2014 because it didn't even appear in coint and plick

Yes! Dream quest!

yeah, on your recommendation upthread! i read very positive reviews of it last year but then completely forgot about it til you mentioned it.

Currently trying to beat it with the Druid. Tough, because you alternate rounds as a human and as a wolf. The human can only use spell/action/mana/equipment cards, the wolf can only use action/attack/equipment cards, so you essentially have to build two decks in one that can stand on their own. And make sure you're battling the right enemies with the right character.

It's so heartbreaking, I'll get a game going and have an awesome poison generating deck, where I can get like 30 poison on someone quickly, but then the final battle is the stupid Vampire who is immune to poison and I lose in like 5 turns.

I've beat it with the paladin, thief, samurai, and ranger so far.

I'm waaaaay toward the beginning I think. I only just unlocked the monk. (Also I am bad). But the difficulty curve is so good. I feel like I get a little better every time, due not just from the occasional passive boost or whatever but also my underlying skill

Best beginner class - samurai?

I get farther with the samurai but have more fun as a wizard.

I think samurai was the first one I beat it with.

Thief is fun because you can string together massive hands with circle/slice/swiftness/jab/alacrity and then nail them with a backstab or dice.

man i downloaded dream quest on the bus earlier and yes, i will happily spend a lot of bus journeys playing it, and no, it is not good

'wouldn't desktop dungeons be better with CCG combat? ... and also grinding?'

obviously your choice on whether to keep going or not, but it's a lot different than desktop dungeons (which i also liked). i mean, of course it shares many similarities with it because it's a roguelike with different classes, but desktop dungeons shares those characteristics with a lot of other games as well. and although it's true that it's probably impossible to defeat the final boss (who i haven't even seen yet) within your first few plays because you have to improve yr passive traits and gain access to new cards, the gameplay doesn't feel like grinding to me. it's just fun.

oh come on, this guy obviously saw desktop dungeons and decided to make his own thing. it has the exact same ui! also the health pickups, the 'wacky/goofy/tongue-in-cheek' flavor text

it's fun but also frustrating because with a few more whacks of the balance stick it could be actually good

he also apparently got hired to the hearthstone team on the strength of it so more power to him i guess

I originally tried out Cardinal Quest 2 on my ipad mini and rated it pretty lame at the time. Now there's been a ton of updates apparently, I put it on my phone a while ago, and just picked it up today because I had a bunch of stupid timer things going in Spirit Lords. I have now put in probably a total of at least 3.5 hours and it's not even close to bedtime.

maybe i should start playing it. been playing some wayward souls finally but i'm not v. good so its too much a grind.

went back to classics -- super mamc and punchquest and yeah there's really nothing in the last year that i've enjoyed remotely as much. just so frenetic and energetic, like real pick up & play ish. idky why games feel like they're so asset-heavy and draggy lately (or just post flappy-bird type one-note minimal obsessive things).

good old punch quest. I quit playing after I reset my ipad and realized that I couldn't restore my progress (wigs, hats, perks etc) without restoring my entire ipad backup. F that.

rick and morty has a pokemon style game
also lifeline is v good
both free

Getting Lifeline now

I've only followed one story path, and it's a doozy. Curious to rewind and play again, see how differently I can have things turn out. This kind of game (like, say, 80 Days) is interesting to me in exact proportion to the branches of its narrative.

imho when starting out in Cardinal Quest, save your mana to unlock the Ranger first. That little dog is a bad ass.

I think the thief with a couple of lucky drops is the most fun I've had so far (specifically, getting the displacement spell so I could just pluck individual monsters from a crowd, send them off to some other part of the dungeon and then sneak up and backstab them at my leisure). Imagining the sheer terror of those poor goblins and ogres after I got shadow mastery. I'M THE BATMAN.

I also grabbed Pixel Starships because why not
Anybody else tried it out?

Crashlands!

are you playing it ON IPHONE or ON IPAD? looks fun but if the interface is bad on phone then I'll skip it

on iphone -- interface is pretty good for the running and exploring. the only rough spot in the entire thing is the map isn't touch & drag, but that's so inessential to gameplay it hardly matters.

ok cool, I'll have a look. hope it's not a battery killer, feel like they should add info about that on the app store.

oh yeah, its reputedly a battery killer

http://www.wsj.com/articles/former-defense-secretary-marches-into-new-territory-videogames-1453483137

I think Churchill Solitaire is the first solitaire game I've played that has a campaign mode. Definitely the first with a rousing action movie score.

I need to hear more about Crashlands, I'm holding off getting it until I get my ipad screen fixed and all the streamers playing it on Twitch are kind of unbearable

i deeply regret starting to play dream quest

Jeff when you say 'beat' just to confirm you mean 'beat the guy at the end with 1,000 hp' right

god i just skimmed a terribly written review of crashlands and it noted that the game included both pets and a crafting system while pointing out it might not be deep enough for some players

these things are both true -- the system is very pick up & go and streamlined, moreso than any other pet or crafting system i've seen. that said, this game has eaten lots of time so far. if it came out a month earlier it would have been my 2015 goty for sure. if people haven't played towlfight its pretty great too.

through two of the three worlds now and its been p. great. the combat is really nice & the open world is very well done.

still waiting to find out if jeff has actually beaten dream quest

Oh missed that! I've beat it with several of the classes but I think there is another big bad guy that somehow I haven't reached? Because I still have unlocked those "reduce boss to under xxx hp" achievements. I should research.

Taking a dream quest break, been digging card crawler, even though it's more of a grind at times.

You need to play it on the higher difficulty level to find the boss at the end.

Oh geez, it's hard enough as it is.

...

this is like when the younger relative with the pad that's not even plugged in has opinions about games

Pixel Starships appears to have no point whatsoever at least as the single player mode goes - set timers, come back, spend more timer-based resources to set new timers, OP your ship and then aim for the other guy's reactor because that is literally the only part of the ship that matters in combat

I am clinically moronic for consistently being disappointed by free-to-play phone games, correct?

so crashlands and dream quest worth buying?

twofold, inc.

crashlands is pretty serious.

mordy i would be interested in what you make of dream quest. it's a lot better-tuned than i thought it was (and i dread to think how long i've spent playing it at this point) but it's still pretty kitchen-sinkish.

thx for the recommendation. i really like dream quest. it's v hard! i only just beat it with the thief class and that took a dozen runs or so.

crashlands looks cool too and apparently available on every platform

Wait, you beat beat it? I must suck so bad. I've played thief around 15 times and haven't even reached the dream lord mega boss

it looks like you have to play on the velociraptor difficulty to face the real final boss so i only just beat the boss for grizzly bear