The Best Mobile Games for Traveling
As mobile devices have gotten more and more capable, we’ve seen an influx of console ports and increasingly more complicated mobile games coming to the App Store. Many of these games are amazingly convenient to have on your phone or tablet, but few of them feel like games you can play while you are actually mobile—that is, when you are on the go and/or traveling. With that in mind, check out these recommendations for some of the best mobile games that you can truly play anywhere.
Looking for a hardcore strategy game with tons of replayability and no data connection requirements that plays beautifully in portrait mode? Look no further than Tuesday Quest’s A Planet of Mine. What looks like a simple clicker is actually a real-time strategy game where you mine planets for resources in order to explore new worlds, encounter new species, and crush any enemies that stand in your way.
Even though the game moves in real-time, its pace is slow enough that it’s extremely easy to jump into an out of at a moment’s notice. As an added bonus, it’s not a graphically intensive game, so you can spend hours with the game without needing to recharge your phone.
Card Thief is TiNYTOUCHTALES’ follow up to the awesome Card Crawl, both of which are phenomenal games in their own right, but also as games you can easily play while traveling. Card Thief is (as you might expect) a card game, but in it you play as a thief on a board of cards that you must move around to take out guards, steal treasure, and avoid being caught.
The main strength of Card Thief as a travel-friendly game is its turn-based nature and incredibly convenient auto-save feature. This one-two punch of features ensures you can close out of the game at a moment’s notice without losing progress or getting confused.
Word games are almost always a good choice for a travel game, and TypeShift is the best word game of them all. It’s got a unique letter-sliding mechanic that’s both novel and really intuitive, plus it’s loaded with content and modes for you to tackle at your leisure.
TypeShift is ideal for travel because its flexible in giving you different types of word-based challenges. There are some really tough puzzle sets for when you want to dig into if you have a bit of downtime and other puzzle sets that are ideal for a quick diversion of puzzle goodness. What’s also really neat about TypeShift is its Daily Puzzle, which—conveniently—doesn’t require a data connection to access.
Meteorfall is a game that strikes an incredible balance. It’s a simple card game, but it also feels like a satisfying and relatively deep dungeon-crawler. If you want a more rpg-like experience in a mobile package, this one is hard to beat.
What really makes Meteorfall work on-the-go is the fact that it’s run-based. There’s no continued storylines between play sessions or increasingly complicated combat systems you have to re-learn when returning to it. It’s just good, quick combat that can satisfy instantly.