Scurvy Scallywags is a hybrid match-3 puzzle game created by Beep Games, that studio where that guy Ron Gilbert works, not to mention his DeathSpank collaborator Clayton Kauzlaric. Scurvy Scallywags dresses you in your piratey best and sends you to the sea on a quest to discover the ultimate sea shanty (a.k.a. "song"). Along the way you'll defeat all sorts of foes, swap and match piles of gold, attach swords, coconuts and rats, spend your pirate booty on ability upgrades, and witness one of the most awkward pirate dramas ever performed.

The newest "100" room escape game (well, I say newest; another 30 have probably just popped up in the time its taken to write this) is 100 Dreams by Daisuke Suzuki, the maker of the excellent Kagi Nochi Tobira. The format should be secondhand by now: Each stage presents you with the simple task of opening a door under increasingly complex and puzzling circumstances.

Locking horns with a great puzzle is an almost zen-like experience. There's something wonderful about letting the world slip away as you sink into the pure logic of a mind-bending puzzle. Of course, when that puzzle is as beautiful and engaging as Quell Memento, it makes the experience that much sweeter. Created by Fallen Tree Games, the lastest installment of the raindrop-sliding brainteaser Quell takes place in an abandoned house, filled with the memories of its previous owner.

Greedy Grub is a freemium town building game from Pixowl with gorgeous artwork and gameplay that's just left of the norm. It immediately captivates you with its tale of a cute orange grub falling out of a tree, and every character you meet afterwards is just as quirky and lovable. Layer on top of that an honestly entertaining collection-centric gameplay mechanic and you've got the perfect recipe for an addictive mobile game.

Travel the world. Find exotic kittens. And put bread on their faces. Pokemon meets internet meme in this bizarrely endearing free iOS game, where adorable art and simple yet addictive gameplay war with some monetization issues.

Name and function, this game is! Tilt and Swipe is a mobile arcade diversion from Charlie Dog Games, creator of Burble. The game gives you a screen full of objects and challenges you to move your phone to shift things around. Get two or more like-colored objects together and you can swipe them to get rid of them. It's a little bit of a physics puzzle but involves a touch of dexterity as well. And if you play it in public, people will give you strange looks.

Logistics is a physics puzzle game from Robb Akerson. Using only the most basic features from building games such as The Incredible Machine, it's your job to move objects around the screen, one piece of candy or one block of ice at a time. It takes a bit of fiddling to make sure everything is in the right place, but Logistics is built with casual players in mind, providing a good logical challenge but never making you feel frustrated.

This barbecue is being crashed by some seriously unruly lizards of the prehistoric sort! Most gophers would turn tail, but you're not giving up your delicious steaks without a fight! Plan strategically and make use of a variety of clever tower types to defend your 'cue against incoming dinos of all sorts, ranging from hordes of sprightly compys to enormous bosses in this indie defense game.

One night, Luke decided to go out and visit the love of his life. But an unfortunate note on the door informs him he's now alone in this world. To console himself, Luke wants nothing more than to stare at the stars. With all the buildings in the way, though, how can he? That's where you come into play. Luke at the Stars is a simple but charming puzzle game that's all about moving buildings out of the way so you can get a good view of the sky.

Douglas Chase, the hero of Tasty Poison's arcade puzzle game Dig!, has it rough. He works as an archaeologist for a failing museum, and in order to save his job, appease his boss and rescue the museum, he has to dig up new and exciting artefacts, pronto. And he has to do all this while mummies, tentacles and moles chase him, which never makes things easy. Oh, and toilet seats count as priceless artefacts, by the way. Have fun!

Daddy Was a Thief is a solid little arcade game from Rebel Twins, creator of the gorgeous mobile release Crumble Zone. The story begins with dear old dad losing his job, then picking up a How-To book on robbery so he can nip off to the bank for a bit of thievery. When the action begins dad is making his escape. The only problem is there are hundreds of things standing between his high-rise hijinks and the safety of terra firma.

Armed with only an arsenal of letters, the Banana Breakers are here to save the day! In this Mastermind-meets-Boggle word logic game, you've got to split the grid of letters into a series of words. You can use clues from submitted words to help you deduce the positions of letters in a word, but your next guess might give you clues somewhere else entirely! Can you solve the grid without going bananas?

Perfection is a simple, casual puzzle game from Dumb and Fat Games, creator of Sling It! and Phantasmaburbia. It tests your spatial resolve by challenging you to slice bits of an object away until it fits inside an outline. There's no timer, there's no move limits, and there are no missions to complete. Just some relaxing music and a great game of self-challenge at your fingertips.

You can't help but smile when you make these monkeys happy in Pencil Kids' wonderfully interactive point-and-click puzzle game. In each stage, figure out what will make the weepy-eyed simian dance in glee. This means using objects creatively, solving puzzles and even completing a few arcade-type mini-games. Finish all 15 stages to be treated to a coin collecting adventure bonus level. But the joy on those adorable faces is what makes the effort worth it.

Explore a mysterious paper world and help the Paper Titans reunite as they work together in 45 levels to gather up three stars and reach the envelope sealed with a kiss. Fold up these quirky characters then put to collecting, throwing, flying, exploding and shamaning past obstacles in an elaborate 3D world which is instantly accessible via a touch and a swipe on your mobile device. Playing more as interactive art than a challenging game, those who enjoy distinctive visuals and relaxing gameplay can let their imagination run wild in this papercraft playground.

Bart Bonte is back (ok, so he never really went anywhere) with a brand new game, this time on iOS! Factory Balls began as an entry in one of our early Casual Gameplay Design Competitions in 2008. The puzzle game has grown and expanded since then, producing several sequels and finally landing on mobile devices with a stylish visual upgrade. Get ready for a new generation of infuriating, satisfying sphere painting!

Do you like numbers and loops? Of course you do! You're only human. Conceptis, the team who brought pencil puzzles like Link-A-Pix and Nurikabe to the web, are continuing their trend of porting their browser puzzles to the iOS platform, trading in the scratch of a pencil or the click of a mouse for the tap of a finger. Their latest App Store addition is Conceptis Slitherlink, a mobile iteration of their loopy logic puzzle Slitherlink Light.

In Hummingbird Game, you play a mother hummingbird trying to lead her babies — and some friendly butterflies, dragonflies, and other animals — into the nest while avoiding wasps. The gameplay is neat, the artwork is gorgeous, and there are a lot of little details that really give it polish.

Manipulate cells and bacteria to your liking in this shiny match-3 game. As you play scientist, get three of the same cells adjacent to each other to form a higher grade cell. Trap pesky bacteria to stop their roaming, and complete level goals to move on. Don't forget to try the shop if you get stuck!

Combine squishy blocks according to colour. What could be simpler, you say? Not much, but it's important to remember that simple doesn't always mean easy, and this free stylish little indie puzzler will give you far more than your value with its devilish design and 40 levels.

Describing Blendoku, a mobile puzzle game from Lonely Few, is simple: it's sudoku with colors. Blendoku is such an intuitive game that reading about its mechanics will take longer than grasping them through experience. Puzzle freaks are advised stop reading now and gobble up this colorful and satisfying gem. Everyone else, read on for all the convincing you'll need!

Hiversaires is a game about not knowing. Not knowing where you are, or why you're there. Not knowing what those markings on the wall mean. Not knowing where you're supposed to go, or how to get there. But eventually, piece by piece, figuring things out. Created by Aliceffekt, Hiversaires is a first-person point-and-click adventure that drops you cold into a dark, mysterious, monochrome world full of cryptic symbols and machines.

Why do 100-floor buildings always insist on making you jump through a bunch of hoops just to make it to the top floor? Well, we don't care, because it's makes for a nice distraction. Created by Perfect Games Inc. 100 Floors Escape is a new escape game with "100" in the title (a theme so oddly prevalent it has become a genre in itself) for Android devices.

New from Halfbrick Studios, creator of Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride, comes Fish Out of Water!, an arcade game that's one part fish tossing, and, well, another part fish tossing, too! Pick up a scaly friend and give 'em a throw, sending each one across the ocean to see how far you can go. Get an impressive distance score and skip off the surface of the water as many times as you can and you might just impress the crabby judges at the end. Seriously, the judges are crabs.

It's been three years since the first Cut the Rope game, but our little green buddy is still hungry! When a time machine so rudely nabs his next snack, Om Nom jumps in and chases after it. But really, can you blame him? Cut the Rope: Time Travel follows the well-established formula from the previous games, adding themed levels that take us through the history of the human race one era at a time.

Admit it: you know you wanted to solve a jigsaw puzzle today. Well, the team at Plexus Puzzles has granted your wish with Plexus: Rebuild the Earth, and the results are adorable as ever. Go! Play! Rebuild

NonoCube from Graycode Software takes the familiar picross puzzle and bumps it into the world of 3D. Now, instead of filling in squares on a flat grid, you carve out a shape by twisting and turning a cube shape floating freely in space. The same rules of logic still apply, you just have another dimension to worry about solving!

Yummies is a logic-based puzzle game from YUMMY Factory, the team behind the mobile brain teasers IQ Mission and IQ Mission: Epilogue. Your goal is to guide squishy-looking aliens to their respective capsules, nudging them along paths while you deal with all sorts of barriers and blockades. It's an extremely cerebral experience that's softened by a phenomenal visual presentation, right down to the grinning little aliens you'll be helping out.

Fester's brother has gone missing shortly after discovering gold, and Fester is determined to find him in this retro point-and-click adventure game. Your journey takes you through a small town in the wild West filled with quirky characters and humorous descriptions. Enjoy a Western-inspired soundtrack and great old-school graphics as you search for your missing brother.

Months after the tournament that decided Kurestal Kingdom's next ruler, one of the knights sacrifices his life to save the new king. In The King's League: Odyssey, the sequel to Kurechii's popular game from 2011, you manage a team of fighters who are looking to fill the job opening.

Pah. Tossed out with the rest of the garbage. The nerve! At least you have your freedom, though once you see what's ahead in this surreal world of shadows and machines you might want to go back to the junkyard. Badland is a one-touch action game from Frogmind that's sort of a cross between an endless flying game and a platformer. It tells a charming story without using a single word, expressing a range of emotions using little more than clever level design and plenty of beautiful, beautiful artwork.

Orion has one of the coolest jobs in the universe: creating constellations. While we'd really like to sit him down to find out how a bunch of random stars is actually a centaur with a bow, Trinket Studios has something better to offer. Orion's Forge is a new mobile puzzle game from the studio that brought us Color Sheep. Instead of defeating wolves with rainbows you'll be working with gravity as you manipulate energy to fill stars so they shine bright and clear in the sky.

Alien Hive, a game by Appxplore is a blend of match 3, sliding block puzzles, and resource management with some alien breeding mixed in. It's all a bit reminiscent of Triple Town, where you shuffle items around to fill in gaps and help tiles evolve to be all that they can possibly be.

Stack Overload is a mobile puzzle game from Bonus Level that feels like a cross between WarGames: WOPR and a memory game. It's your job to crash a series of increasingly complex programs by causing memory overloads one block at a time. This isn't as complicated as it sounds, as all you have to do is match pairs of tiles by turning them over one at a time. Overload the stack and you'll move on to the next level!

Fetch is the story of a boy, his dog, and a bunch of arcade games living in a futuristic sci-fi world where robots and mega-corporations rule. A point-and-click adventure at its heart, Fetch is littered with so much gorgeous artwork and creative elements that its world springs to life, making it feel almost like a free-to-roam sandbox game.

The latest release from Pocket Planes developer NimbleBit, Nimble Quest drops the simulation formula in favor of a good old fashioned arcade game. And we're not kidding when we say "old fashioned". Nimble Quest is essentially the 40 year old game of Snake with a layer of RPG elements and free to play features draped on top. It's a very different experience than, say, Tiny Tower, but it's got that same level of simple charm we've come to expect from the studio.

Solitaire Blitz is a fast paced addictive card game for your iOS device. It comes with all of the charm and atmosphere you've come to expect from PopCap. Challenge the clock and your friends as you try to clear all the cards within 60 seconds. Earn silver as you play, then spend it on boosts to help you up your score and unlock achievements.

Bobbing is a fast-paced, finger-twitching, reflex-hounding action platformer from Little Bobby Games. You play as a little eskimo creature whose only ambition in life is to run endlessly through a circular labyrinth filled with twists, traps and lots and lots of fire.

Totems puts a simpler spin on the classic Risk (or Galcon) style of strategy game. Handing you a fistful of animal totems and placing you on a map, it's your job to outwit your opponent as you take turns dropping pieces on the board, claiming territories and fighting for control over the largest chunk of land.

Golf is, well, not traditionally the most exciting sport in the world. The clothing alone should tip you off to that fact. That's why everyone should play Super Stickman Golf 2 instead. The basic goal is the same: knock a little white ball into a hole somewhere on the green. Getting from start to finish means traversing some of the most impossibly mixed-up terrain ever seen. Laser beams, teleporters and sticky surfaces should have been part of golf from day one.

Last Train to Timbuktu is a puzzle game by Green Eyed Games that plays like a sliding block puzzle fused with a Rubik's cube. A grid of tiles sits before you, each decorated with some grass, maybe a bit of water or some bushes, and a section of track. Simply shift the grid around so the track pieces line up, allowing the train to get from Point A to Point B unimpeded!

Adrift is a stylish logic puzzle game from Tack Mobile. It follows the gameplay outline of classic browser games such as Hyper Frame and 3D Logic II, eliminating the rotating cube in favor of a fixed isometric viewpoint, simple touch controls, and a sweet-as-candy visual presentation. Don't think that just because you only have three sides of a cube to worry about that things are going to be any easier to solve, however!

As the saying goes, there's no use crying over spilled milk. Or in Yuri's case, a toppled bucket of water that has unleashed monsters that inhabit the lab where he works. The only real option available in Monster Meltdown, a new puzzle platform game from Ambient Studios, is to put on a spiffy suit that will allow him to teleport around the lab and find those creatures as quickly as possible.

You'll tap, pinch, slide and tilt, uncovering useful objects and deciphering enigmatic clues in this sequel to the quintessential multi-door escape game made popular by 58Works' original DOOORS. With at least 40 stages to delight your logic and lateral thinking skills, DOOORS 2 serves its purpose very well: opening the door to multiple opportunities for puzzling amusement on your mobile device.

The only thing that could make Plexus Puzzles better is more... and that's just what you get in Plexis: Together Till The End. Four times the jigsaws mean four times the fun, and with a cool chalk-art aesthetic and added animations between each puzzle, it definitely makes the most of its expanded ambitions.

Kuruma is a room escape game from MyGames888 with fantastic minimalist design that features a room that's empty except for a shiny new car. In this one you will use found items several times until you are breathing the fresh roof air. It's a quick and fun experience perfect for a break, be it mid-day or mid-week.

Created by a studio called, of all things, Taco Graveyard, Penumbear combines light-based puzzles and a platform adventure game into a very good-looking mobile experience. Playing as the aforementioned bear, you find yourself awakened by a color-changing firefly who leads you out of the dark castle where you dwell. Getting from dank cellar to sunny field is going to be quite a feat, though, but luckily you have a very special ability involving lights!

And if 2013 is the Year of the Snake, well, then there's absolutely no reason why it can't be the year of the Shadow Snake 3, the new arcade game from Play Panic, also as a free download for iOS and Android. Snake gameplay is as familiar as it is difficult to mess up, but this is a very soothing and fun interpretation.

Eighty-Eight is a puzzle game from Premiere Liaison that smashes together numbers and logic. The simple set-up places you on an 8x8 grid of squares with a few blocks resting comfortably at the bottom. New blocks appear, ready to be dropped, and with a little bit of forethought (ok, boatloads of forethought) you can create some elegant chain reactions and keep the screen as empty as possible. Or, you know, panic and start crying because THE NUMBERS ARE EVERYWHERE.

Briquid is a physics puzzle game from Gamious that quite neatly combines brick removal, brick creation, and flowing liquids. With a few simple taps it's your job to shift all of the water on the screen to the designated zones, all while staying under your movement limit and without wasting a drop of the precious stuff. It's a bit of an extreme brain bender at times, but it's just accessible enough to work!

Art restoration is a tricky business. Make one false move, and you turn a beautiful fresco into a bowl of mashed potatoes. You can try your hand and bringing pictures back to life with Puzzle Restorer by Gavina Games. Mix and smear the paint around the grid, and try to match the target image. Your paints and brushstrokes are limited, so make every move count!

Color Sheep from Trinket Studios is an intense arcade game about a sheep that can change colors and shoot lasers. Wolves have escaped the Wolfcano and are stealing colors from the world. Sir Woolson, the Knight of Light (that's you), can change the color of his fleece to defend against the dark minions. But wolves don't adopt one or two basic shades. Instead, they sport almost two dozen different colors, meaning you got a lotta mixing to do and not a lot of time to do it!

Spunk and Moxie is a one touch platform game by Tilt Studios that relies on split-second timing and perfect reactions. It's a game of extremely high difficulty and no room for error, as the slightest little mishap will send you back to the beginning of the stage. That may not sound like a terrible punishment, but Spunk and Moxie is about high scores and unlockables, not raw level progression, so anything less than a perfect run is just not satisfactory.

Puzzle game plus farming plus mega-mustachioed man equals Sprinkfield, a logic-based game from Webstar Works that's as simple as watering the lawn. Well, not that simple, but it starts out with that basic direction and adds a little extra complexity from there. It's also a mighty handsome looking game, which is always a nice plus!

Relic Rush from Jason Pickering is a one-touch arcade game that makes Indiana Jones' job look easy. Relics are stashed at the end of a series of levels, each one guarded by a few denizens of the environment. As the creatures do their things, it's your job to tap the screen to put a temporary restraint on the protagonist's boundless energy. Pick your way across over 100 levels divided between five unique themes and see how good you are at not running!

The clock is ticking, the fuse is burning, and the stakes are high... You're the only bomb technician in town who can defuse the logic puzzles in ShellBlast Forever, a mobile version of the Minesweeper-esque downloadable game by Vertigo Gaming. As you slide the SDUs around the grid, can you tell which tiles are deadly triggers from the numerical clues provided?

Everything's better with a buddy, and this vibrant iOS physics puzzler wants you to reunite two of them with the help of some very weird but very friendly critters. Though a familiar concept, Be Together shines with an exceptional amount of polish in everything from its design to its gameplay to be the sort of casual mobile game you can enjoy at any age.

There you are floating around on planet Eena, a world with unpredictable gravity, deadly walls covered in sharp things, and sentient triangles that shoot spikes at you. If you were some sort of nigh-invulnerable rock this might be ok, but you're a crystal ball that will shatter if a cloud looks at you the wrong way. Oh, and in order to move around, you have to wobble by temporarily defying gravity with quick screen taps. That's Tapforss in a fragile nutshell, a mobile arcade game from Like a Crocodile that cranks up the difficulty and provides a quietly impressive experience that's probably going to drive you mad.

Sometimes a puzzle game comes along that's so smart and so well-made, you wonder why it wasn't created like a billion years ago or something. Puzzle Retreat from The Voxel Agents is one such game, combining elements from sokoban and a sliding block puzzle to create an impressively challenging game that is almost completely void of frustration. You just sit, stare, and play, all while marveling at the beautiful visuals before your eyes.

It's the end of the world, but turn that frown upside down, because the apocalypse has never been so cheerful! In this free iOS simulation, you're in charge of rebuilding a utopian society in space... by yourself. Fortunately for you, you've got an endless supply of incoming clones, and a bunch of genetic material to mix and match to create more jobs and more buildings. A vibrant pixel style and cheeky sense of humour make this one light, addictive casual sim that's hard to put down.

Kairosoft's latest free simulation for your Android device might have a weird idea of just what being a landlord entails, but darned if it isn't addictive. Build your apartment complex from the ground up, enticing new tenants and enriching their lives to help them grow and succeed. See your people become successful from the cradle to old age and compete in a variety of categories to have the best apartment around in this colourful, casual sim.

The only thing cooler than being a helmet-wearing space surfer is having the ability to travel through time while surfing through outer space. With a science fiction slant and some stylish artwork, Time Surfer from Kumobius is a bit like combining Tiny Wings and Braid, adding in smashable objects, creative challenge missions, deadly obstacles, and a handful of helpful/decorative items to equip and party down with!

Pinball may be just a decade or two from its 100th anniversary, but the genre is far from a fading memory. Momonga Pinball Adventures from Paladin Studios takes the familiar concept and wraps an adventure around it, allowing you to explore a world packed with secrets by guiding characters around with pinball flippers. Take all of that, add a heartfelt storyline and charming artwork and you've got a dangerously attractive arcade game that can capture just about anyone's interest.

The Tribloos 2 from Bumpkin Brothers is a sequel to the 2011 simulation/time management game The Tribloos. Set in a 2D world starring energetic and eternally optimistic creatures, you'll guide the fuzzballs on a quest to discover the origins of some troubling storms looming near the island. What they find beyond the clouds, however, isn't quite what they expected!

Imangi Studios resurrects their smash-hit iOS arcade game with this bigger, badder, and altogether better installment that keeps all the action you loved and buffs it up with an improved look and more. Once again, you've stolen a forbidden idol from a dangerous temple and have to run for your life, but with new locales, obstacles, power-ups, abilities, and much more in your way (including one very big, very angry monkey) you have your work cut out for you.

From the imagination of MyGames888, enter a dreamlike aquatic abode full of enigmas. If you want to escape—and avoid a permanent case of prune skin—you'll need to find the answer to many questions such what does that turtle have on its back and why is that fish behind bars? Put together clues and creative tools to solve puzzles and find your way out to one of the funnest "Congratulations!" screens in the genre.

Noble Nutlings is a physics racing game by Boomlagoon, a studio formed by several members of the original Angry Birds team. Don't expect slingshots and piggies, though, as this one's a very different sort of ride. Using a combination of tilt controls and good old fashioned upgrades, you'll pilot a trio of squirrels through different landscapes as they collect acorns and try to make it through the countryside in one piece. Also, the squirrels are the cutest creatures in any mobile game, especially the grumpy brown one. You can quote us on that!

Blizz is a mobile matching puzzle game from Hex3d set in a futuristic world where ice is a bit of a problem. Hexagon tiles on a hexagon grid form your playing field, and all you have to do is drag things around to make matches and shut down the reactor. It's familiar enough concept to rope you in from the start, but the shifted focus from making matches to freeing up frozen cells that need to be matched creates an endless cycle of preparing and setting off chain reactions, one of the most satisfying parts of any puzzle game. Do your job well and you just might save the world!

More mobile Conceptis puzzles, hooray! The team that practically invented the online presence of pen and paper logic puzzles has released an iOS conversion of one of its browser-based offerings. This time it's Conceptis Nurikabe, a touch screen friendly incarnation of Nurikabe Light. It has a very similar interface to the browser games, offering an easy way to work on hundreds of puzzles on the go without having to sharpen a single pencil.

The pixel is mightier than the sword, if only because a sword can only be used for stabbin' and the pixels in Social Titans' addictive iOS match-3 defense game can be used to summon vampires. Create matches on a battlefield to summon and merge new warriors and classes in order to protect your VIP, who is SUCH a VIP that they can afford to wander around said battlefield without actually lifting a finger to do anything useful. Sigh.

Hundreds, you should be a really easy game, you know? Tapping on circles to make them grow, increasing their value so everything adds up to 100. Making sure red active circles don't collide. Easy idea, easy to play, but when it comes down to actually getting somewhere, you present quite the little challenge. Part puzzle but bigger part arcade game, Hundreds from Semi Secret Software (which includes Adam Saltzman, creator of Canabalt) and Greg Wohlwend (from Solipskier team Mikengreg) is a minimalist experience that nabs your interest from the first level and refuses to let go until you've driven yourself mad with numbers and circles.

Originally released as a Windows Phone game, Wordament from Microsoft is a straightforward Boggle-like word game that's heavy on statistics and competitive scores. Round after round of letter arrangements you'll see, utilizing your precious few minutes to spell as many words as you can before it's on to the scoreboard followed by the next letter grid. And if you're not as interested in beating everyone over the head with your fast-finding word skills, you can also just, you know, play the game and have a good time!

The world is crumbling beneath everyone's feet, and there's only one hope for survival: rockets to the moon! In Handy Game's puzzle release Rocket Island, your job is to develop hexagons of land into functional rockets as quickly as you can. Start with the sea, build solid ground, prop up a platform, then make a rocket. All you have to do is keep everyone alive as you frantically swipe between meteors and volcanic eruptions!

Squishy and malleable, colorful and in great peril. That pretty much sums up the creatures in Clay Jam, an arcade game from Fat Pebble that lets you save a world of clay creatures from the clay nemeses that are gobbling them up like tasty appetizers. You've got the power of physics on your side, however, rolling down hills, squishing small monsters to gain mass and make a mad leap from the island to knock the big bad guys away. Heroic!

Pangolin from Feed Tank is a physics-based arcade game that does a fantastic job straddling genres to create a very different, very entertaining sort of game. You indirectly control a bouncing orange critter by creating temporary trampoline platforms on the screen, guiding the little guy through some crazy stages filled with bumpers, tunnels, portals and more. Pangolin is almost like a game of vertical mini-golf. Except not. And it's way better!

What's the last thing that happens before Christmas? You go to sleep! That is, you would if there weren't so much going on in your house. A follow-up to Quiet, Please!, Nostatic Software has released Quiet Christmas, a sidescrolling puzzle adventure game that's all about getting a bit of rest before Santa arrives. The sooner you get your brother to chill out, fix the tree, get rid of the neighbor's annoying decorations, and find a way to warm up the house, you're good to go!

You're lost in some archaic remnants of an ancient civilization, verdant jungle surrounding an ancient structure peppered with archeological enigmas. Find the clues and useful tools, solve the puzzles blocking your path, and you will soon uncover untold secrets and escape from these mysterious Ruins.

Swampy still needs a bath, and Perry is still trying to solve a mystery. Who has time for celebrations? These guys do, apparently, as they've managed to squeeze in a little Christmas cheer in Where's My Holiday?, a free release from Disney Mobile that turns the Where's My Water? and Where's My Perry? games into something special for the holidays.

Paper Galaxy from Liquid Entertainment is an arcade game that's just about as charming as a game can be. Once upon a time there was a happy little blue-eyed moon named Luna. While momma Earth was snoozing, Luna caught sight of a beautiful space butterfly. As she followed it, she encountered some space dust that gave her a terrible case of the sneezies, propelling her off into the wild yonder. Now, lost in the cold blackness of space and far from her home, Luna needs to find her way back, navigating an array of planets, black holes, comets and other obstacles using little more than the power of her own sneezes.

The Puddings need your help! Without legs or traction, they're helpless against the selfish humans willing to ignore their pleading eyes and chow down on them, so they need you to help them slide around and combine into more formidable monsters! With different flavours of Puddings with different abilities and a whole bunch of levels, ZeptoLabs brings another gorgeously high-quality puzzle game to your iOS.

Such an easy concept, but such a challenging game. Zyl is a one button arcade release from DevilishGames (whose work you might recognize from Cube Droid Saves the Galaxy) that's all about patience and timing. It looks so calm and peaceful on the surface, but once the game gets going, you'll quickly realize it's in your best interest to leave nervous anticipation in the other room.

Choose your hero and embark upon a dungeon crawl in Dungelot. In this roguelike you'll face a myriad of monsters as you fight your way deeper into the dungeon. Collect items to increase your stats as you find the key needed to exit each level. How deep can you delve?

There's no need to bother with crazy cryptic clues when you solve a Gryptics puzzle, because they're all about finding the twelve words that fit perfectly in each mini-crossword. There's only one perfect solution, but there may be plenty of red herrings waiting to trip you up. Fire up your vocabulary box and see what words you can come up with in this intriguing minimalist word puzzle.

It's been a while since we've seen serious activity from Kloonigames' Crayon Physics games. From its debut as an experimental project in 2007 to the release of Crayon Physics Deluxe a few years later, the crayon-drawing physics/puzzle game went from being a neat-o toy to OMG WANT MORE. And now, not too long after its initial mobile release, the game has fully grown up and is ready for its HD iPad debut, sporting a few nice extras along with the visual upgrade.

So, this exists: PlantPot's Finger Hoola, a simple arcade game where you do exactly what the title suggests! It's not code for nose picking or anything strange, you just place a finger on the screen and play a game of two dimensional hula hoop. Weird, right? Strangely fun, and with a nice ambient score and abstract backdrop to soothe your eyes and ears. Who knew drawing tiny little circles on the screen would translate into such a great game?

Color Alchemy is a sparsely-styled mobile puzzle game from Element Modulus that challenges your ability to mix, split and alter beams of color. By dragging paths and adding special tiles to manipulate colors, you'll create some complex scenes that look like a truck carrying rainbows crashed into a Skittles factory. Just, you know, not as tragic. And with loads of levels and some painfully mind-bending puzzles, you've definitely got your work cut out for you.

Last Day of Work loves virtual sims. I mean seriously loves them, at least according to their lead designer. And, well, their product line, which includes the massively popular Virtual Villagers series. For those of us who love messing with the lives of little virtual people without all that faffing about on an island, Last Day of Work created Virtual Families, a game which featured the animated people without the exploding volcanoes. Now they've come out with the sequel to that fabulous game, Virtual Families 2: Our Dream House, which deepens the gameplay of the original in new and interesting ways, and all for your handy portable iOS device!

Ever wondered where baby bunnies come from? The cuddly protagonist in La Ventanita's Bunny Cannon does, too, but since everyone tells him a different story, he need to straighten things out. Luckily this involves nothing more playing a game of pachinko where bunnies fired from cannons multiply as soon as they come in contact with the opposite gender. It's a lot like Peggle or Coin Drop!, only so much cuter and with so many more rabbits.

The enemies are coming, and you know what that means! DINNER TIME! Though it may sound horrific, Little Guy Games delivers an absolutely adorable and addictive arcade game for your iOS that sends you ricocheting around the screen to destroy the invading force and feed your friends. Vibrant and gorgeously designed with some surprisingly clever and varied gameplay, it's simple to pick up but hard to put down.

Everyone remember Boulder Dash? Back in 1984, a little developer called First Star Software released a puzzle game for Atari 8-bit computers that featured a treasure-hungry character named Rockford who spent his time digging through dirt looking for gems the size of himself. Turns out that activity worked out quite well for him, and it worked out well for us players, too, as the game thrived over the decades with a number of sequels and ports to other systems. Now, almost 30 years later, the hunt goes in in Boulder Dash-XL, a re-imagined and updated version of the classic game that has finally made its way to mobile devices. And you know what? It's still a pretty good time!

Ozzle wants to deceive you. Ozzle is bright and colorful, its fonts look like balloons, two big googley eyes watch you while you play, there's pink everywhere. But it's a puzzle game that will make you think and plan and execute only to realize you made a boneheaded move and could have done things much better. So, you try again, knowing you're smart enough to slide some bubbles around to match a stupid little pattern. All of this happens on the first or second set of puzzles, meaning they're easy. Easy! How on Earth are you going to make it through 60 of these things? By summoning the spirit of the relentless bear (that solves puzzles), that's how!

100 Doors 2013 is a new point and click escape game for mobile devices created by Gipnetix Games. Like the handful of similarly titled games before it (100 Lights, Doors & Rooms, DOOORS), 100 Doors 2013 puts you in a series of single-room stages with one goal: open the elevator and get to the next floor. Sure, you'll be trapped as soon as you step out, but you never know, there might be something cool waiting for you at the end. We hear test subjects are often promised cake in these situations.

QatQi is like Scrabble with fewer letters and a much more pressing size constraint. The unique word puzzle game from ZWorkBench gives you a small handful of letters, each with its own value, and sets you in front of a small board and tells you "Go forth! Spell!" The catch is you must use all of the letters in order to pass the stage (some children don't have the luxury of wasting letters, you know), forcing frequent use of the undo button when you can't seem to get it just right. If you're both lucky and possess an unusually lush vocabulary, you might just find yourself on QatQi's high score board!

Not sure you were aware of this, but balloons have some friends that appear to be a thorn in the side for the world's monkey population: bloons. The bloons never diminish in number no matter how many bloons-related games are released, and the air-filled fiends are still going strong in Ninjakiwi's Bloons Tower Defense 5 for iOS devices. In this tower defense strategy game, it's time for you to prove that you paid just enough attention in history class to know how to place troops but not enough to hinder your gaming expertise!

Fleas aren't something you think could be endearing. Strangely enough, The Odd Gentleman has made them not only endearing but capable of musical talent. With your assistance of course. In Flea Symphony, a bizarrely delightful physics puzzle game, you must help the fleas save the music store they live in by playing a variety of instruments.

You've played memory before, right? That old chestnut of a game where you turn over cards one by one, trying to match pairs so you can remove them from the board. Well, how about memory mixed with the excitement of an arcade game? Fruitiny is a puzzle/memory game from Totano Corp. centered around this very mechanic, challenging you to turn over tiles, match pairs, and do it all with an increasingly fast rhythm. It's a simple concept illustrated with fantastic flair, and it's just the sort of game you can get hooked on. Plus: delicious pixel fruit!

Help Volty is a gorgeous arcade avoidance game with puzzle elements for your iPad. Work your way through a box of electrifying puzzles to help Volty the beetle escape. You'll need a clear head an fast fingers to get anywhere. Earn coins to progress, and watch out for mechanical monsters who will do anything to stop you!

Alas, magic poker chips do not exist in real life. But how cool would it be if you could take a handful of poker chips, stack them together, and they instantly become a single, larger poker chip? And what if you also had a deck of magic cards that could change those chips at will? MAGIC. Well, for all your card-and-chip whims, we recommend Chip Chain, a classy match-3-like puzzle where racking up runs of chips can lead to big points.

Dreamy, addictive, easily playable and challenging at the same time, Dawn of Play's gorgeous little iOS arcade puzzler is the sort of thing that can take up all your free time. In two modes of "reverse Tetris" style gameplay, dismantle grids of blocks with the shapes at hand, either as fast as you can to stay ahead of the fall in arcade mode, or carefully and with planning in the deceptively more relaxing puzzle mode.

And what made you think your super secret spy assignment was over? Put on your spy hat (a baseball cap turned backwards, your home team's logo marked out, of course), polish off that decoder ring, and sit down with your mobile device to enjoy IQ Mission Epilogue, an expansion to the original IQ Mission puzzle and brain teaser game that adds three new cities, each featuring the same extraordinarily high level of artwork and music that makes the experience just irresistible.