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Hexonia is a mini-strategy for Android only. It's a free download, with 3 free tribes included, a few you can unlock over time, and a bunch you can pay to unlock. You can also unlock unique units over time. The daily rewards and optional ads give a very "monetized" impression, but I've enjoyed unlocking tribes slowly without spending money.

It's like a hex-based Civilization, stripped down to the bare essentials of a tech tree and strategy game. Each tribe has the same unit types, with unique 3D models and animations. But they all have 2 unlockable units with unique stats and special abilities. Starter unit and techs vary for each tribe, which has a big effect when the options are so limited.

Starting out, you can play a small map versus 2 other tribes. You can choose between 3 difficulty levels, which really are a good challenge range. Winning each difficulty for a tribe gives "gems", the currency for unlocking more things. The "Master" level is pretty hard to beat, but using the free daily items at the start of the game gives a big head start. Combined with the 3 levels, you can choose Free for All, or Allied AI; Allied AIs are a lot harder :) As you unlock more tribes, you can increase the map size, which adds more AI players.

There's no multiplayer. This is a short, relaxed strategy game, though it gets longer as you unlock larger map sizes. I spend about an hour to play through a game of 1v3 . The random maps and daily challenges add to the re-playability. Tribes are $3 each if you wanna pay, haven't tried that yet!

The developer seems to be done, their web page is down. The reddit community recommended Polytopia as a similar game, but I haven't tried that one. Maybe later! Hexonia is a complete game and it will be a while before I've unlocked everything.

• Hexonia on Google Play

Mushroom Musume can be described as a magical mushroom life simulator. The art and music are very soothing, and could be described as "lo-fi", "1-bit", and/or "cozy". You go through a short story-driven character creation process, followed by making choices from random events.

It's a perfect display size for Android phone, but it has downloads for the PC, Mac, and Linux. The gameplay is mostly text-based, but its always surrounded by art and music. Each play might take you 30-45 minutes; you'll probably set goals and try to find all the achievements and endings. There are dice rolls you can fail half the time, but it's not a "reload the game" type of situation. Though Save/Reload is an option! It's very replayable, so I usually just go hard-core roguelike with no saving.

Very rarely, you'll encounter a different story-teller, one of whom has a tale that plays like a text-based adventure game + dungeon crawler. There are certainly some hidden surprises in this simulator of a year in the life of a mushroom. Some things are not documented at all.. if a choice has a spiral on it, click the spiral to spend some resources on it! Part of the "fun" is figuring out what the recurring symbols on some of the choices mean.

Itch.io uses its standard "pay what you like" model.

• Itchio page

Apparently this is only cheap on mobile. Somehow it only cost me $2.11 on Google Play, but it's listed as $6.99 now. I also spent $7.41 on the in-app upgrade. I'm seeing $20 on Steam? That might even be worth it, but is not cheap! Someone else would have to say if the modding scene makes the difference worthwhile.

Best $2.11 I've spent there! Here is a Cheap Games Android pro-tip: You can make about $1 per week from Google Play Rewards app, mostly from confirming that Google's GPS behavior tracking was accurate. So that's like $50 in "free" games and in-app purchases per year.

I could describe the game as "anti-idle pseudo-turn-based". Like Dwarf Fortress, you'll spend a lot of time with the clock on pause. Make your moves by dragging cards to the appropriate places, unpausing and waiting for the next event. I've always got the timer on double-speed when it's not on pause. Every 60 seconds, one new recurring event will recur.

So that all sounds kind of boring, but there is a lot of lore in the game. The fun is all in learning what is possible, figuring out how to survive, ultimately conquering an intimidating system and setting new, loftier goals.

Dragging cards around works really well on tablet, but it's almost frustrating on a small device like phone. I still spent a lot of time playing it on my phone when I couldn't use tablet, though :) I did things the hard way without a wiki or subreddit, that was a fun way to do it. First day learning curve is steep, pretty fun after that.

• Cultist Simulator on Google Play

It's written in RenPy, and it's cheap, so it's a Cheap Game! This is a light visual novel that you can complete in under 2 hours. There's two endings, and not many choices to make, but they are big ones!

I had a very fun time pressing X on my controller to continue. The game is all story, so you'd better enjoy reading. A lot like watching an anime with subtitles.

This is "name your own price", so you can download for free, but you would not regret donating a dollar for the creator's art and storytelling.

• Itch.io page

The Battle for Wesnoth is a scenario-based fantasy wargame. You pick a campaign to play, and your units and characters progress from battle to battle, gaining experience and telling a story along the way.

Definitely more of a focus on the war-game than the story, but it's interesting and a bit like Fire Emblem. You can set a high difficulty, but also save and reload as much as you like.

It's open source , you can download for free and create your own maps/scenarios . There is a 20-year development history, though I only heard about it 2 years ago. Had lots of fun playing through with occasional reloads.. OK in a few places I reloaded a lot :)

• About
• Steam Page
• Forums

Another "True Roguelike", Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (DCSS) started out as "Dungeon Crawl" in 1995 and has continually evolved since. There are tons of playable races and classes, and it can even recommend the ones that are easier to play 🙂 It's very easy to jump into, you can play in a browser with tiles and mouse support in less than a minute. DCSS is still actively developed, there are tournaments and you can observe in-progress online games.

Recommended to use keyboard with a bit of mouse for examining and targeting. The graphical tiles are easy to understand, the defaults are convenient like auto-pickup of more valuable items and automatic melee attacks. Still, expect to press ? ? a lot to review the controls. There's also a quickstart guide from ? ^. I've tried the Android version a year ago and did not like the interface. If offline is your thing, you can download the version you like and keep the save files on your computer.

You start off alone on Dungeon Level 1, as is tradition. It starts off not too difficult; the monsters are weak and you are strong. Later you will have to proceed carefully, there can be large hordes with more elite enemies mixed in. A bit like a turn-based Diablo. Expect to die, but "winning" might be easier than Nethack for example. There are all sorts of metrics you can use for a "better win", typically a number of runes collected before ascending.

The most interesting aspect for me was the religious worship system. Different gods have their own rules and rewards that will incentivize how you play the game. For example, Xom the god of chaos will do all sorts of good and bad things, but if you bore them... they will do more bad things, more often.

Summary: Fun traditional rogue-like, lots of features and more approachable than Nethack.

• Home Page
• Game Wiki
• Last tournament

Another multi-platform banger! Most of the game is building resource extractors, processors, conveyors, and sorters. There are tower defense elements, but there's usually a long interval where you are expanding your base as you see fit.

Soundtrack is pretty good. It is very open source. Seems to be lots of mods and multi-player servers available, though I had plenty of fun with all the single-player missions. I played on the tablet, controls were pretty good, painting build locations on the screen.

• Mindustry on Itch.io
• Discord
• Github

Modern clone of Civilization games. This is definitely about the gameplay and not the art! Sort-of-shameful admission, I never bought Civ IV, V, or VI. Playing Unciv gave me some insight to those new Civ gameplay concepts people were talking about!

The installation was very lightweight. There were ways to export your save file as a text file for transferring between Android and PC, though I recall a little buginess with that. Maybe keep a few saves.

• GitHub
• Google Play

Haven and Hearth is a multiplayer online survival RPG. It's hard to classify, the experience totally depends on the players you encounter. You might have a great 6 months building a village, roleplaying, feasting with friends, sailing the world, and then be brutally murdered while out on a routine trip to market.

Another game that's been in development for 12 years, there are deep systems for character development and continuous improvement of item quality. It's a single server with a map resetting about once every 2 years. Player-count will be about 1000 people very heavily playing the first month, and tails off to about 200 regulars after a year.

It's a huge map for the number of players. Sailing across the world could be an 8 hour trek, but fast-travel locations can be used once discovered. Local fast-travel routes can also be constructed by players to make repeat trips easy. Things like map data and market surveys are all collected by players and published on third-party websites.

Playing as a hermit or joining a group are both common. A normal first-time experience would be getting killed by bears a few times before finding a place you'd like to settle; constructing a wooden palisade and waiting a day, to be safe from any would-be murderers, and then making progress on farms and mines. Eventually you'll brave out to meet your neighbors, find a route to the inevitable player-built market-city, and go sailing in a Snekkja.

It is free to play, with a 1-time $7 fee for "normal" increase of inventory space and chopping/mining speed, and optional subscription for cosmetic hats and more inventory space. I played free for a year, and did the 1-time fee when the new world came out, haven't felt the need for the subscription. There is a token system inspired by Eve-online, where you can buy subscription tokens from the developers, and securely trade those with other players. Anything besides cosmetic hats and the tokens can be stolen, if you die outside of your base.

I'll have to edit this post in a bit, lots I could say about this game and my time playing.

• Official Website
• World Map
• Haven & Hearth Wiki : Ring of Brodgar
• Unofficial Discord : The Discord natives are bitter, elitist power-gamers who mock anyone that actually plays the game. It's a lot of fun.

Descended from watabou's original open-source Pixel Dungeon , Shattered Pixel Dungeon is a real rogue-like that is well-polished for playing on Android / iOS. Speedrunners will use the PC version, though.

Price is $0 on Android with a one-time in-app cosmetic upgrade, $5 on iOS but I haven't played that one.

• Website
• Github
• Pixel Dungeon Discord Use the reactions in #version-roles to join the Pixel Dungeon channel you're interested in.

2D real-time space exploration / trading / fighting game. The main draw are the space battles. $15 , I raised my definition of cheap just to include this one!

There is an actual storyline with characters and some choices, which you are mostly free to ignore as you colonize planets and earn money from missions. It might be impossible to get through the game as a pure trader with no fighting.

It has been in "alpha" for like 13 years, seems to have a new release every year. It's very stable, with a large modding community and active discord.

• Starsector website
• "Unofficial" Starsector Discord

Saw someone asking, maybe there's an FAQ for that?