Great Mobile Games are Like Digital Haiku
Excellent game design is available on your phone, you just have to know where to look for it
The hardest thing about mobile gaming, I think, is twofold.
Mobile gaming is mostly associated with the types of addictive, microtransaction filled garbage that are basically extensive skinner gambling boxes.
The only types of games that can hold are attention on phones are fundamentally habit forming, because that’s the sort of expectation we have when we pull out a mobile device.
And yet…
Mobile games might be my favorite types of games. This is probably in part because of a yearning for the Game Boy I was (honestly probably rightly) never allowed to own as a kid. But it’s also because I find the types of designs that come out of phone games so fascinating.
A mobile game feels like a game that was built from the ground up around the cramped affordance of a slab of glass, that a player might pick up or put down in 5 minutes time. Great mobile games feel like the poetry of the art form. Tiny explosions that burst with creativity if you know how to read them and where to look.
It’s Not that Easy to Design For
For example, board games would seem to be a great fit for a tablet. But board games take up way more space so you have to spend a bunch of time pinching and zooming. And the complexity scale of board games doesn’t match the experience of a tablet. Games with fewer moving parts are meant to be played socially around a table, and more complex games aren’t really begging to be played via a series of drop down boxes that make them seem even more like spreadsheet exercises than they already are.
And in the digital space, even classics can find it challenging to fit in. Games like Minesweeper aren’t great fits for phones. Just wait til you mistap a bomb the first time and end your game. It’s not great.
The Suspicion is Real and Earned
Mobile games also have a lot of very deserved hatred for mostly being freemium messes that try to yank money out of the wallets of casual players. When Apple says things like “our services growth is huge”, what they really mean is that people continue to spend a lot of money on in-app purchases for mobile games.
And… Apple Arcade has mostly been a dud when it comes to changing the tenor of phone games because… well… see previous. But there are great phone games and there continue to be great phone games published every year. It genuinely sucks that the only sorts of interactions we seem capable of having with our phones anymore are fundamentally addictive. If it’s not grabbing you by the ears and pulling your attention in it can feel impossible to pay attention to.
And yet, great mobile games truly can be an antidote to that. They are the types of games that you can pick up and put down in short bursts, but reward thoughtful engagement.
Games Don’t Have Genres, They Have Platforms
When I think about the difference between a mobile game and a PC game or a console game or a Steam Deck game, the biggest thing that comes to mind is what style of play fits best. Sure, there are popular genres (action/adventure, fps, interactive novel) or mechanics (point and click, roguelike, survival crafting sim), but what really differentiates a lot of games for me is how they are built for specific platforms and the types of UI affordances that fit within that platform. It’s why something like Florence feels so different from something like Boyfriend Dungeon.
And while, there are lots of games that are “available” on mobile, playing a game that feels like it was built for a phone experience is a totally different ballgame. So assuming that mobile gaming has nothing to offer doesn’t just mean you’re not able to play the latest tower defense game on a phone, it means you’re really missing a whole potential experience of tower defense that doesn’t feel the same on a console or a computer.
This is also partly probably while great mobile games feel so hidden. They pack so much information in such a small format that they can feel imposing to pick up or maybe too complex to learn. But when you do it’s well worth the effort.
The Games
These are not the only games, by any stretch. I have a list of 20 right next to me. But I want to highlight these three because they each represent a different aspect of the mobile gaming experience I so enjoy.
LOK Digital (2025)
This was inspired by the latest release of what was a puzzle book into a phone game, LOK. LOK is described as a language puzzle game, but… to me it feels much more like the type of game that describes how programming works in my brain. LOK puzzles all have the goal of trying to fill in every square on a grid. However, you can fill out certain commands that give you special powers to execute. So, for example, if you find the letters L-O-K in sequence, you can fill in an extra tile for free. The game expands from there, and you will regularly find yourself in mind bending combinations of sequences.
The game is available on computer via Steam and also as a booklet that you can purchase. When I first “played” the game in book form, I was concerned that the book would get too scuffed up, but the “hook” in each puzzle was easy to find and understand with a little thought. So I rarely found myself with an unintelligable page at the end.
LOK, for me, represents the type of puzzle game that’s contained on a single screen. You don’t have to scroll or bounce around, and there’s no progression. It’s as close as possible to that single piece of paper. That you get to play around with!
Slice & Dice (v3, 2024)
Slice & Dice is what if Yahtzee was a dungeon crawl. I don’t really know a better way to put it. Imagine you’re an adventuring party, but each adventurer is represented by a dice. And honestly, it’s just incredible and brilliant.
There are so many little ways that the game expands over the 20 rounds you can play, but what’s so enchanting is how the interaction pattern manages to stay the same. Every turn you play Yahtzee. You get three rolls, to find the sides you want, and then you use those results to do battle with the monsters in front of you. It’s so simple that it allows the complexity of the game to unfold without the upfront weight of trying to do a million calculations to get anywhere.
As a phone game, it’s great because it manages to ride that line between two and three dimensions. Each dice is 3 dimensional, so it evokes the tactile feeling of the role, but the battle itself is two dimensional almost like a board game.
Isle of Arrows (2022)
The extent that the aesthetic of Carcassonne (the board game, not the French city, I’m sure it’s lovely but I’ve never been) lives rent free in my head is probably unhealthy. Isle of Towers is like what if a tower defense game had the vibes of Carcassonne.
It’s an isometric 3d game and unlike the first two it is possible to move the camera around as you play (though not far) as you expand out your route you’ll have to shift the camera around. But the entire vocabulary of the game feels built for a phone. From the constraints of the board (it’s highly restricted and expands slowly over time), to the way you get to select new towers and paths (you cannot simply buy them they’re dealt out to you like a deck). Each decision feels in conversation with the constraints and opportunities afforded by a phone. And the aesthetic is incredibly sharp.
Mobile Games are Great
Mobile gaming, the type of designed game experiences I’m interested in anyway, is a challenging space. It’s not the type of game that smaller publishers aim for because audiences aren’t (often) looking for those experiences. And audiences don’t look for those experiences because we don’t use our phones that way, and because it can feel like those games simply don’t exist.
But they do! You just have to know where to look.