Internet at the cottage isn’t the best, and it’s not like we have rigs to manage the load here anyway.  I can work off my phone for the majority of the day, and there’s a need to decompress a tad between work and life.

There’s a couple tablets we have with, and in this ever-connected world, it’s a challenge to find things that work offline.  I’d hazard to say that most things work better offline, since they cannot access the ad servers – and nearly everything mobile has ads.  You end up losing an ad banner, or some injected ad in the middle of play. (Side note, if more than 10% of my time is spent watching ads, then that’s an uninstall.)  There are games that simply will not work offline – Super Mario Run is certainly one of them.  I get multiplayer / server hosted games… but others make less sense.

I end up with puzzlers instead, since they are rarely online.  There are some good ones out there.

The Room Series by Fireproof Games is a solid choice.  They last about 4-5 hours each, use touch controls, and have some decent puzzles.  Often there are branching choices near the end.  They are big games, so you want to be on wifi to download them.  Easy to be engrossed.

The House of Davinci by Blue Brain Games is also quite good.  The overall design is quite impressive, and most of the puzzles follow a logical flow.  It’s a notch under the Room series, but still incredibly higher than the next ones you can find.

Wordscapes has an absolutely horrendous ad system when you’re online.  When offline, it’s serene!

Sudoku puzzles abound, and it would be hard to make any serious recommendation.  They fit the niche between crosswords (which I find purposefully obtuse) and find-a-word.  The best part here is the option to select a difficulty.  Sometimes I want stupid easy, other times a tougher go.

Hidden Folks is awesome.  Like a monochrome Where’s Waldo.  Not terribly long, but very easy to get through – and the art is neat.

Monument Valley (and sequel) are great picks.  Escher paintings have always intrigued me and its even cooler to see them in motion.

Guild of Dungeoneering is a rogue-like card based dungeon explorer.  The game is somewhat simple, with a lot of unlocks along the road.  Its presentation values are astounding – like you were in a P&P game.

There are others that I flit to/from.  Puzzles/sims seem to be the ones I enjoy the most.  There’s a few idle games that come up, but I’d prefer to play than to wait for some cooldown to be available.

You’ll notice that nearly all these recommendations are games you need to pay for.  It’s impressive how much quality you can get for $5.  I can’t stand gatcha games, or the crazy grind / f2p bullplop that permeates mobile gaming.  You won’t find me downloading a Square Enix game at $30 (!!) but the $5-7 range seems to provide the best bang for the buck.  And it’s not like anyone is ordering a coffee anymore…