The king is dead. Dibs on his crown! Ascent of Kings is a platform adventure game by Nostatic Software that sends you on an epic quest to become the next king. Your brothers are out to do the same, but because nobody thinks you've got the guts to do it, you have something to prove! The road from your home to the Shrine of Kings is a twisted and treacherous path, but there are a few handy items you'll encounter along the way that help you traverse the 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.

Dojo Danger from Kihon is the kind of game you can't wait to be good at. One part strategy and one part arcade physics, the setup is a bit reminiscent of the SQUIDS series, putting you in control of a group of heroes who can be shot around the screen in order to defeat the bad guys. This time around, though, you get to play as a band of ninjas ridding the world of a zombie invasion by smacking into them and knocking them into spike traps!

Block Fortress is Minecraft meets tower defense meets first person shooter, all squeezed down into a mobile game. Build a base in the middle of a blocky wilderness, place turrets and towers and power supplies to fortify your position, then send in the waves of enemies. Once combat begins, you shift from building mode to combat mode, taking a gun into battle and watching over your fort by blasting enemies by hand. It's incredibly exciting and also deeply rooted in upgrades and tactics, making it the sort of game you can play for months without truly mastering.

Fishing isn't exactly the wackiest sport. Tag it as Ridiculous Fishing, though, and suddenly everybody expects a certain level of, oh, ridiculousness. From Super Crate Box creator Vlambeer along with Greg Wohlwend of Mikengreg and Zach Gage of SpellTower fame, Ridiculous Fishing is a wholly upgraded version of the browser game Radical Fishing released in 2011. The premise? Fishing taken to a ridiculous level.

Minesweeper is the kind of game everyone's played at least once in their life. Or 57 times simply because, hey, it's there. When you combine zombies and the very familiar logic puzzle you get Zombie Minesweeper, a game from Frogtoss Games that is exactly what it sounds like: minesweeper with zombies chasing after you. Your job is to carefully move across the minefield, planting flags to mark dangerous tiles while you aim for the detonator at the end. Reach it and it won't be your brains splattered across the place.

Run, Commander Video, Run! Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien is the next chapter in the BIT.TRIP series by Gaijin Games. You've got to jump, slide, kick, and glide your way to all of the gold bars while avoiding getting bonked by a ton of enemies. Sporting a wonderfully wacky atmosphere and fantastically catchy soundtrack, Runner2 is definitely a game you'll want to make a dash for.

Dungeon Plunder is one of those mobile games whose name says it all. Created by Dominic Duchesne, this randomly generated roguelike ditches most of the story and gives you precisely what you want in an RPG: looting, equipment, stuff to fight, and experience to gain. The best part is that combat is handled not with a menu system but with a good old fashioned slot machine!

From Dumb and Fat Games, creator of Phantasmaburbia, Sling It! is a quick-fire arcade game perfectly suited for satisfying your urge to break things while ridding the world of smoke-belching machines. It uses a simple-style difficulty progression that throws enemy after enemy in your face, challenging you to chip their metallic bodies apart and use the debris as a weapon. A bit of poetic justice, maybe?

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!

The Silent Age: Episode One from House on Fire is built like a classic point-and-click adventure game. It goes to extreme lengths to keep everything as crisp and minimalist as possible, reducing the controls to quick taps and pouring on massive amounts of attention-getting atmospheric details using just a few sound effects and some subtle gradients. But it's that stark simplicity that makes The Silent Age such a fetching game, one that will have you eagerly awaiting future installments!

The dead walk!... and it's you! In this wonderfully bizarre hybrid of slot machine and RPG, take control of a zombie king and his undead army as they rampage across the country through a series of graphic novel-styled adventures, doing battle over the reels and amassing enough loot to buy more units and weapons to expand your arsenal. Simple, fun, and immediately addictive, with a great sense of surreal ghoulish charm.

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.

New in the line of mobile room escape games with "100" in their name ("door exit" games, if you will), 100 Crypts takes a bit of a darker tone with its series of point-and-click puzzles. Dropped off in a series of one screen rooms, your goal is to find a way to unlock the door, unseal the tomb, open the port hole, or do whatever it takes to leave the area, usually so you can find yourself in the exact same situation when you reach the other side!

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!

Year Walk, the latest mobile release from Simogo, is almost the exact opposite of the team's previous release Beat Sneak Bandit. It's a great credit to the studio, however, that such different games can be pulled off with equally impressive results. Structured like a minimalist point-and-click puzzle game, Year Walk weaves together various pieces of Scandinavian folklore to set an atmosphere of cold intrigue and foreboding mystery. It's a beautiful and very meaningful game, and quite the haunting experience if you sit down and let yourself get drawn into the story.

The original zombie-defending gardening sensation may be a few years old, but Plants vs. Zombies lives strong as it makes its way to more and more devices. The killer PopCap app hasn't changed much from its original incarnation, it's just been optimized for touch-based controls and smaller screens. It's just as wacky and fun as ever, though, so if you've never given it a try, now's your chance! It's Apple's Free App of the Week!

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!

It's not often one can look at a racing game and say "Wow, that appeals to a wide audience!" Cubed Rally Redline is one of those games. Created by No Can Win, this pixel art racing game has more in common with mission-based arcade games like Jetpack Joyride than your average racer. Hit the track, jump a few ponds, dodge some cows, and see how far you can go without crashing.

The world needs a QuestLord, and you're just the lucky person to do it! In QuestLord by Eric Kinkead, you play the only hero in a retro-styled, turn-based, first person RPG. Also, it's your job to save the Shattered Realm from destruction! You start with little more than a basic set of adventuring equipment and head into the wilderness ready to face skeletons, giant rats, living trees, and most frightening of all, greedy shopkeepers!

Explore a surreal, magical world inhabited by unusual monsters and other oddities, helping a little girl recover her stolen teddy bear in this point-and-tap adventure from Storybird. Solve conventional adventure game puzzles as well as tone-based riddles to progress through three beautiful chapters, unlock remarkable artwork in the gallery, and enjoy a lovely narrative-free story so charming that it will capture your heart and make you its everlasting friend.

Back in the olden days the life of our earliest ancestors was one of struggle and strife. Vegans and pescetarians hadn't found their chance to emerge yet and instead life was sustained through the efforts of hunters and gatherers. In Feast or Famine, a brilliant new action platform game by X4 Games, you will play the role of the hunter chasing after birds and bison while dodging an assortment of cranky creatures and environmental hazards. Shown through art inspired by caveman paintings this game is good enough for caveman and a throwback treat for us modern folk.

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?

Broom attack! Also, you might be trapped in a dream. Or some other sort of subconscious realm. It's tough to tell, but judging from the strange sights and the cryptic "as legend has foretold" messages from sages and statues, there's definitely something odd going on here. Anodyne from Sean Hogan and Jonathan Kittaka is an adventure through a melancholy world that plays out like a classic 16-bit RPG. It borrows some of the best micro-concepts from games like The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Yume Nikki, and even Earthbound, creating a world that's as innocent as it is moving and as dangerous as it is surreal.

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.

Vampires, man. They're jerks! But admittedly if you decide to live right underneath the most notorious one of them all, you probably deserve whatever's coming to you. Still, when a pack of demon's abduct Luke's pregnant wife Grace in the middle of the night, he sets out to bring her home in this somewhat clunky but gloriously cheesy and fun classic point-and-click adventure for download or iOS.

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.

Calling all heroes! It's up to you to defend the castles of the kingdom in Wild Heroes. In this tower defense game you must place your heroes wisely to keep the enemy at bay. Upgrade them to wild status to really do some damage. Show the monsters what a hero is really capable of!

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.

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!

Ever had a tennis ball delivered to your face? Not in the gentle way your local postal service worker might deliver a package (*snicker*), the kind of delivery where a professional aims for your head and gives it a good shot? We're glad you answered "no", because if it were true, you might end up like the villains in Tennis in the Face, a game of precision physics from 10tons. A little bit of aiming and a whole lot of ricocheting can go a long way. It's time to take down the corporate machine!

Rise of the Blobs is a colorful, creative, and fruity puzzle matching game from Robot Invader, the studio behind Wind-up Knight. In a world where marshmallows talk and pieces of fruit are weapons, you have the honor of saving the corn syrupy folk in an endless arcade game that isn't afraid to crank up the speed. In a welcome change from the norm, you must manage a three dimensional puzzle board that rotates at the touch of your finger, meaning you won't always be able to see what those pesky blobs are up to!

What's inside the Cave, DoubleFine's latest platforming puzzle adventure? For seven very unusual and very different heroes, that answer is quite personal indeed. But no matter which three you set off to solve the mysteries of the depths with, you can be sure you'll encounter hilarity, challenging puzzles, memorable characters, stunning visuals, and more than a few secrets of the bizarre and personal sort.

Puzzle and Dragons is a fusion of puzzle gameplay and Pokemon-like monster hunting, training and collecting. From the safety of your mobile device you get to manage a team of tiny elemental creatures who can be fused and evolved to become more powerful fighting machines. When your crew is ready to roll, head into the dungeon where you'll battle enemies by swapping gems on a Bejeweled-like grid. It's an almost perfect blend of puzzle matching and role playing, streamlined to be casual friendly without removing too much of the team management bits we love to obsess over.

Riven, the 1997 sequel to Myst, has finally made its way to iPad! Ported to iOS back in 2010, the team at Cyan had some graphics issues to deal with before a large screen release would be possible. After lots of tinkering it finally happened, and the result is the lush and intriguing Age of Riven staring you in the face, complete with a refined interface and full touch screen controls.

Dolls are suspicious. We all know it. They're little, creepy, and just packed with possession potential. But we've never really had proof before now, when your niece comes under the thrall of one seriously nasty specimen whose history is much darker and more mysterious than you might suspect. In this iOS exclusive horror hidden-object adventure, meet bizarre characters and track a sinister plot back to its origins in one strange town.

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.

Inverse Universe from FireRabbit, the creator of the Stalker Room Escape series, is a lovely 3D rendered escape game crafted especially for mobile devices. Instead of the usual single room to bust your way out of, Inverse Universe employs a more traditional layout with a dozen or so areas to explore, each with items and clues you'll put to use elsewhere in the game. It's a nice set-up with some good puzzles and a light sense of humor, making it an excellent and extremely mobile-friendly diversion!

What are you doing? Protect those plant seeds! When zombies get it in their heads they'd rather eat seeds than brains, the plant kingdom rallies together to form the Vegendary Heroes, a group of fearsome warriors dedicated to fighting off the invading undead. I Am Vegend: Zombiegeddon is the tale of this epic struggle, taking a tongue-in-cheek setting and sense of humor from games like Plants vs. Zombies and setting it in a two dimensional defense world.

Gunslugs from Orange Pixel is an arcade game. It's an arcade game with guns and shooting and enemies, helicopters jetpacks and tanks. There's lots of destruction, lots of replayability, unlockable characters, and plenty of weapons with which you can cause said destruction. Basically, it's everything you could ask for from a rampaging action game, all packed up in a neat little mobile release with ample amounts of retro-style visuals, music and secrets.

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!

Mushrooms. It's all about mushrooms. And keys and crates and stuff, too, but really, mushrooms. In Corrypt, a puzzle game by Zaga-33 creator Michael Brough, your job is to work your way through maze-like screens as you hunt for the items you need to appease unsettled citizens. Using a slightly tweaked sokoban-style setup, be ready to sit and scratch your head as you wonder at the logic of carving a path through groups of wooden crates.

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.

Asteroids have long been the nemesis of creatures living on Earth. Just ask the dinosaurs. Or the makers of that gem of an arcade game, Asteroids. Or the NASA researchers who were trying to figure out if we'd get smacked with a big chunk of space rock in a few decades (spoiler: we won't). Crumble Zone from Rebel Twins understands that ancient fear and it capitalizes on it by letting you save the world over and over again by tossing little missiles towards the sky. With satisfying sound effects, a soundtrack that actually rocks, and plenty of things to unlock, it's quite possibly the most exciting asteroid defense "simulation" around!

Remember pinball? Not the the massive stand-up tables you'd feed with quarters at the arcade while your friends foolishly played Mortal Kombat. We're talking about the handheld versions with simple boards and inexplicably infinite replay value! Sauce Digital looks to recreate that world of tiny metal pellets and plastic flippers with Pinball Kid, a small and simple arcade game for iOS devices. It looks retro, it plays retro, and with board names like Rocktopus, Zombeaver and Antdroid, it's almost impossible to resist.

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!

Sometimes you just wanna jump on a trampoline. And turn three sets of reversing flips while in the air and land without smacking your face! Bouncy from monogames is an impressively illustrated arcade game that is essentially an upgradeable stunt trampoline for your iOS device. It's better than risking your cranial integrity on a real life trampoline, and you get to fight for higher scores and upgrade your equipment in the process. Plus, buck-toothed bunny!

The world of creativity games continues to expand, but this time it's on mobile devices! Growtopia, a combined effort from Robot Wants developer Hamumu and Dungeon Scroll creator Robinson Technologies, strips out a lot of the complexities often found in creativity games like Minecraft or Terraria, allowing you to build and decorate your own little world that goes wherever your mobile device goes. Bored on the bus? Growtopia! Don't wanna listen to your boss droning on? Growtopia! Entire evening free? GROWTOPIA!

Joe Danger is kind of a big deal. Not only is he the World's Most Determined Stuntman, he can also leap across shark-infested pools, dodge giant mousetraps, evade threatening speed bumps, and apparently hover atop giant fans. Pretty sweet deal, right? After Joe's initial outing as a console download, the fearless stunt driver has landed on iOS devices with Joe Danger Touch, a fantastic arcade game from Happy Games with tons of things to unlock and plenty of wild rides to pursue. Great mobile racing game, or the greatest mobile racing game?

Kitty minions, go forth and fight! In Battle Cats from PONOS, you control legions of tall cats, chubby cats, flying cats, cows (which aren't cats), and plenty of other cute warriors whose sole purpose is to defend their base from legions of tiny stickmen, hippos, snakes and other bad guys. It's a familiar combat-oriented defense set-up we've seen before, but there's so much lovable style poured into this game, you can't help but to play until the wee hours of the morning, pitting cartoon cat against cartoon cat.

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.

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!

The Journey Down: Chapter One is an adventure game from SkyGoblin that made the trip from desktop download to mobile app without a hitch. First released in 2010, the game has since been remastered with brand new visuals, voice acting, and lots of additional content. It looks fantastic and plays like an expertly-crafted adventure game of old, even with the fancy futuristic touch screen interface!

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!

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.

Choice of Games and Alana Joli Abbott deliver a gorgeously detailed and immersive text adventure for iOS and Android set against the backdrop of mystical ancient China. Outwit or succumb to mischievous fox spirits, challenge or support the emperor, become a student or one day a teacher of an ancient art, and craft a legacy that will stand the test of time.

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.

Graduation time at Spellwood Academy! Biggles the bespectacled bunny wizard is ready for finals, but unlike most school exams, these happen to be quite entertaining. Spellwood from Three Rings (creator of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates) drops you in a cheery fantasy world of one-on-one word battles, allowing you to face off against opponents in turn-based tile combat. Think of it as Scrabble meets Puzzle Quest with wands and anthropomorphic animals and you'll have a good idea what to expect!

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?

The smash-hit comic series invades your iOS in this gorgeous real-time strategy game. Following officer Rick Grimes as he regains consciousness in a hospital some time after the zombie apocalypse has already begun, the game takes you through a series of iconic locations and allows you to recruit and upgrade all your favourite characters, each with their own unique abilities, to assemble your zombie-hunting dream team. Learn how to make the best of your heroes on the fly, working both solo and as a team, and activate distractions in your environment in order to stay alive and complete bonus challenges.

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.

Double Fine Productions knows the spreadsheet is mightier than the death ray, but only when it has some serious super power to back it up! Hire, train, and manage a squad of elite superheroes from the ground up as they handle the day-to-day task of fighting crime and more in this fun and funny free simulation for iOS.

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.

Welcome to the life of a teaching assistant (and/or editor)! The Grading Game by Mode of Expression is a beefed-up version of the arcade-style browser release First Person Tutor. It puts you in the unenviable role of a TA grading papers for a grumpy proffessor who wants his students to get the grade they deserve: a perfect F! Since you're a bit strapped for cash you have no choice but to capitulate, sifting through papers and marking every error you see with a big red pen.

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!

Looking for a little extra adventure in your mobile gaming life? 3D Methods has released another casual point and click title that follows the layout of Forever Lost, The Haunt, and the game's own spiritual companion, Cryptic Kingdoms. Instead of rattling about in a surreal fantasy world, though, Cryptic Caverns drops you in a dark and dreary island filled with an intriguing backstory and more than a few ancient mysteries to stumble across.

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.

When your homeworld falls to an alien threat, you find yourself embroiled in a mess of intergalactic politics that could influence its very survival. Choice of Games delivers a sci-fi text adventure for your mobile device that's lighter on character development than usual in favour of delivering an action-packed story that will have you questioning who you can trust on and off the battlefield, provided you survive it.

GemCraft, one of the best tower defense series around, is now available for your iOS device! Use mana to build towers and traps. Combine gems to slow, poison or just plain destroy incoming creeps. Level up to unlock numerous maps and seven game modes. Hours of fun await!

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!

Oh, now, where'd that smiling stump with the spectacles go? It was just there but now... Anyway, you've got three other weirdo creatures to find, and Hidden Doodles isn't going to slow down so you can take in the scenery. A hidden object game without all the story or adventure elements, Hidden Doodles from Invedars is similar to Little Things Forever releases, dropping you into level after level of crowded scenes filled with some amazingly creative drawings. Take your entire comic book collection, tear it up (please don't, not really), put it in a blender (don't!), then arrange everything on the table and try to find Superman with Bart Simpson's head. That's Hidden Doodles in a nutshell, and you're going to love it.

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!

Earn To Die 2012 is an update to Toffee Games arcade-style hit, and has all the post-apocalyptic racing action you could hope for, without the danger of infected bites! Customize your car and plow through waves of the undead. A zombie-smushing good time, though undoubtedly constructed as a teaser for the enhanced mobile version.

Get ready to smackdown your opponent in the one or two player game Wrestle Jump! Control a Mexican wrestler with the single goal of pounding the other guy's head to the ground. Kick your leg against the arena floor to throw your opponent wildly around. Whoever gets the most smackdowns wins!

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.

Hey, you're trapped in a room! Where's that Nelson guy to laugh at you when you need him? You're not going to sit around and get mocked, though. You're clever, you're resourceful, and even though every time you leave the room you end up in an almost identical location, you're determined to get out. Doors

Stay on your toes (or in this case, your fingertips) in this fast-paced game of Lemmings-style mining arcade action for your iOS. Draw paths for relentlessly cheery little squads of miners deep into the earth, guiding them around peril to plunder. As stages advance, the challenge ramps up as more and more new elements come into play, but a stellar retro style and some seriously quirky humour will keep you coming back for more.

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.

TNNS is a wild arcade game from Action Button Entertainment and Rabbx that plays like a cross between Breakout and Pong, only about a billion times better (rough estimate). Imagine using a rubber paddle to smack a rubber ball around a stage filled with blocks, stars and arrows, then using some sort of telekinetic powers to make the ball curve a bit. That's TNNS, and if you're not laughing with amazement each time you fail/succeed, you're probably doing it wrong.

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.

Bart Bonte's particle physics puzzle goes mobile with 35 all new levels plus (of course!) a sandbox mode. Thousands of sugar particles pouring down onto the screen with no place else to go until you draw a line here, another there, and a bit of gravity manipulation in the middle to direct all that sweetness into the cups. What begins as a simple task steadily increases in complexity until your cup overflowth with fun!

Angry Birds Star Wars is exactly what the name suggests: Angry Birds with licensed Star Wars characters! Developer Rovio has dabbled in different genres in recent months with the building game Amazing Alex and the contraption-centric Bad Piggies, but now the team has returned to old form, pasting together two franchises whose success could never be doubted. Star Wars fans will squeal with delight the moment the title screen starts to materialize, and if by some twist of fate you're not a Star Wars fan, well, it's still Angry Birds, and it's still a whole lot of good-looking physics destruction entertainment!

Kung Fu FIGHT! is a non-stop jump and run arcade game from Nostatic Software, creator of Quiet, Please! It's a game where you fight the bad guys to save the girl, just like in the cheesy old movies and video games from yesteryear! Sporting a variety of obstacles and a number of ways to deal with them, you'll fight your way across dojo and village on your quest, and since Nostatic loves us so very much, there are plenty of unlockable trophies as well as checkpoints to record your progress. Hooray!

Speedy delivery! Or, no delivery, it seems. Static Quest: The Delivery from CookieBit is a survival-based arcade game packed with enemies, spells, weapons and items, all of which can be upgraded as you continue to punch baddies that get in your way. It's a little bit like Earn to Die, a little bit like Punch-Out!!, and a little bit like being glued to the floor while your older brother punches you in the arm and keeps asking why you're hitting yourself. But, you know, in an entertaining, good kind of way!