Casual mobile games worth installing
"Casual" has been stretched to cover almost anything you can install on a phone, which makes it close to useless as a label. We use it narrowly: a game you can understand in one sitting, stop in the middle of without losing anything, and come back to a fortnight later without having forgotten how it works. Everything on this page fits that, and everything on this page has a full review behind it.
Sort by how much attention it wants
Games that wait for you. Flow Free, Monument Valley, Candy Crush Saga. Nothing moves until you move it. These are the ones to pick if your day gets interrupted — you can stop mid-thought and the board is still there tomorrow.
Games that run on their own clock. Stack, Paper.io 2, Sonic Dash, Subway Surfers, Badland. Sessions are measured in seconds and putting the phone down means losing the run. Excellent in a queue, frustrating in a room where people talk to you.
Games that need other people. Among Us, Brawl Stars, Stumble Guys. All three are substantially worse alone than the scores suggest, and substantially better with friends. Judge them by whether you have the company, not by the number.
If you only install one
Monument Valley, if you want to be impressed, and Flow Free if you want something that will still be useful in three years. They are opposite answers to the same question: the first is a short, beautiful, finite thing, and the second is an infinite supply of small problems that never asks anything of you.
Everything we have reviewed
- Among Us — Social deduction. Scored 8.0/10.
- Brawl Stars — Arena brawler. Scored 8.0/10.
- Candy Crush Saga — Match puzzle. Scored 7.0/10.
- Monument Valley — Perspective puzzle. Scored 9.0/10.
- Stumble Guys — Party platformer. Scored 7.0/10.
- Subway Surfers — Endless runner. Scored 8.0/10.
- Flow Free — Pipe puzzle. Scored 8.0/10.
- Badland — Side-scrolling puzzle. Scored 8.5/10.
- Paper.io 2 — Territory arcade. Scored 6.5/10.
- Sonic Dash — Endless runner. Scored 6.5/10.
- Stack — Timing arcade. Scored 7.5/10.
What we do not cover
We leave out games whose first screen is a shop. If a game hands you a currency before it hands you a rule, a review of the rules would miss the point of it and would be out of date within a month. We also skip anything that will not open without a connection — a casual game that cannot run on a bus is not doing the job.