Games

2048. Though im sure that one has ads. Probably depends on what you grab from the internet, as usual.

Mobile games suck.

Any of the PAID games from Kairosoft. Dungeon Village, Grand Prix Story, Game Dev Story. He has since re-released all his games as f2p microtransaction junk, but the full price versions are generally really good.

slay the spire has a mobile port

Try searching on https://www.darkpattern.games It seems like a vast collection with reviews aimed at finding and naming healthy and unhealthy games

There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here's their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.

My recommendation l is going back to the basics: chess, especially lichess.org

You can choose a mode however you want, and it may or may not be stressful. Multiplayer with friends or random online people, choose a time between 30 seconds for a game and infinity to move.

If you don't want to play right now, you can solve tactical exercises.

Some good games I recommend are Alto's Adventure / Odyssey, any bejeweled game, Cell to Singularity, Idle Slayer, Monument Valley, Reigns, Sky Force Reloaded, and Stick Fight Shadow Warrior. Hopefully that's enough!

Mindustry is amazing, and free somehow

You can check out whatever is available on F-Droid. I personally enjoy playing Freebloks once in a while, it's a mobile version of the Blokus boardgame

An alternative is checking out itch.io, searching with the proper tags, like puzzle, might yield decent results for your tastes.

You can also get Cookie Clicker or play the web version

Solitaire, straight out of classic Windows (pre-advertising death throes):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.potatojam.classic.solitaire.klondike

Hoplite, classic turn based dungeon/puzzle:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.magmafortress.hoplite

I really like Usagi Shima. There is not much gameplay, but it's a nice game to just relax for a few minutes. Also "Really Bad Chess" is a nice twist on chess. :D

Assuming that you have Netflix, open it, scroll to games and open the section. There are tons of great games without any microtransactions or ads. They're overwhelmingly commercial games licensed by Netflix.

Polytropia

Word Cookies. I absolutely love it. You can pay for things, but it is absolutely not necessary and is basically only if you feel the need to use boosts that allow you to cheat your way past the level. I think it costs $2 to go ad-free.

It does give you regular popups asking if you want to buy coins, which I admit is annoying, but they are unnecessary to enjoy the game. There's also endless opportunities to get coins and other boosts for free. I have something like 80,000 coins and dozens of boosts and other than the $2 to go ad-free, I've never given them any money.

You do have to have certain word skills to enjoy it as much as I do. If you're the sort who can crush it at Boggle, it's the game for you.

I have clocked a lot of hours in Slice & Dice both on mobile and on PC well worth the 8 bucks even though I've paid it three times now I think. Honorable mention to Suika(Watermelon game) about 3 bucks on the Play store.

Golf on Mars and Desert Golfing. Super simple. No ads. Its just 2D golf that keeps on going with any gimmicks.

You should download Mini Review

It is a currated version of the Play Store with many filters including paid/free, IAP, genres, ...

The reviews are very thorough and always include a paragraph about the "presatoriness" of IAP if any

A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that's it. I think there's an expansion pack but it's a single purchase. Whether that's your idea of "casual" really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.

You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn't supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.

I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It's just that good. I've built a custom digital drum to play it and I'm now making a custom MIDI controller, so we'll see if that does better when connected to the game.

The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.

Blooms TD 6 - fun tower defense game with solid progression and everything can be earned by playing what I think is a reasonable amount.

I used to play Unblock Me. Made it maybe 1000 levels in various difficulties before stopping.

Royal Match and Royal Kingdom are both add free and free to play. You can buy stuff, but you dont need to

I liked egg inc for a while, if you're looking for clicker type games.

Other than that I can recommend

• Stardew Valley
• Peglin
• Sudoku
• Nanograms
• Dungeon Village 1 & 2

Multiple of these are paid, but I'm 100% on board with paying a small amount for an app rather than paying a multiple of that for in-game Battlepasses and whatevers.

It annoys me a lot to say this, but Netflix has some excellent games in their roster. So if you have a Netflix subscription, check those out. I personally very much enjoyed

• Storyteller
• Into the Breach

But they also have ports of some very good PC games like Spiritfarer, Terra Nil or World of Goo.