Logic puzzles, simple as! This is my go-to recommendation when someone wants simple, free mobile games that are fun and don’t have microtransactions, ads, tracking, and all the other shit which you think of when you hear the phrase “mobile game”. Minesweeper and sudoku are the big names, but there are plenty of better ones in there too.
These will run on most devices you can think of, and the source code is available if you want to port it somewhere else.
- There are versions (newfangled web assembly or classic java applet) versions you can play in browser from the main page
- Android version on Google Play or GitHub
- iOS version on the Apple App Store
- Windows exe files for each individual game, or a zip file of them all
- Windows msi installer if you fancy
- Windows version if you prefer the Microsoft Store
- Mac dmg which might not get any more updates unless someone with a newer Mac wants to maintain it
- Source archive to compile for Linux
- Symbian version for old (but not that old) Nokias (I think!)
- PalmOS version if you’re still rocking one of them
- Rockbox version if you want to play on a classic iPod
There are tons of great games in this collection. My favorite is probably Keen, which is a bit like Sudoku (also included) but with arithmetic constraints. Lately I’ve been solving a lot of Loop puzzles, where you trace a line around a grid (lots of types of grid available) while making sure certain cells have a specific number of adjacent lines.
I’m a big fan of Loop, I played the simple squares version in physical puzzle books back in the day but there are like 20 different shape combinations which make for a completely different puzzle