Carcassonne

The rules are simple, the strategy less so.

Mostly excellent conversion of the classic board game. The interface is lovely, playing against the AI is fun and it’s a wonderful conversion. It’s let down a bit by what appears to be a completely broken online implementation – many games I’ve tried to play have been full of baffled chat messages and no actual game – but when it works it’s excellent. Easy to pick up, but brain-twisting in the best possible way as you try to make long-term plans based on hopes and educated guesses. Buy it as a single-player or local-multiplayer game with a possibility of bonus online multiplayer against friends and you won’t be disappointed.

Civilization Revolution

Conquer the world in a lunchtime.

The App Store is built on novelty. Games appear for pennies, are the best thing ever for ten minutes, then disappear. Civilization Revolution is different. It eats both hours and battery life with equal abandon and is almost impossible to put down once you’ve started a game. You start with a small, wandering prehistoric tribe capable only of building a small settlement. You end up with tanks and fighter plans and nuclear weapons as you struggle to dominate the world through your military, cultural, economic or scientific might. It’s all incredibly absorbing and doesn’t deserve to be left to rot as you devour the latest, greatest arcade novelty.

Cubed Rally Racer

You will crash. A lot.

Of course, there’s a lot to be said for arcade thrills and Cubed Rally Racer is one of the best of the newer games on the App Store. Essentially it’s an isometric driving game, where the aim is simply to make it to the end of the randomly generated course with as many points as possible. You simply choose how long you want the course to be – ten sections for a commercial break, twenty-five sections for a serious challenge – and then try to get to the finish line without crashing. Hard to put down, seemingly infinitely replayable, this is a serious bargain.

Dungeon Solitaire

You will be needing the tutorial, but it the game is a lot less scary than it looks.

Fed up of traditional Solitaire? Has even Spider Solitaire got tiresome? Try this. It’s very much a Solitaire game – it’s all based on a deck of cards and the shuffle is as important as the strategy – but you’ll also have to engage your brain. It’s a great game with the default deck, but there are numerous expansions that add new cards, often with new rules. It’s nothing like Magic The Gathering, despite the screenshot suggesting otherwise, but it is the best Solitaire game I’ve ever played.

FIFA World Cup

It's even got a good replay viewer.

This would not feature in a list of the ten best iPhone games, but you can’t really get more topical. And if you do get swept up in World Cup fever and want to play with real players on your iPhone, then EA have had the decency to put a decent game in this bit of merchandise. Nice features like arrows showing where your passes will go and excellent replays mean that this is a very solid game. Will you be playing long after the World Cup is over? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good game to have right now.

iNetHack

As a conversion of a game that uses almost every key on your keyboard, the iPhone conversion works far better than you might expect.

It’s always good to get free games. It’s especially good to get free games when they’re absolute classics. Initially baffling, if you can work your way inside NetHack, you’ll be rewarded with a deep, endlessly-replayable roguelike. You move through the dungeon, killing monsters, trying strange potions, attacking shopkeepers by mistake and, inevitably, dying. Just don’t get too attached to your pets.

Orbital

Make circles. Then destroy them.

An absolute, stone cold classic. This should be preinstalled on every iPhone. Today, for example, the queue in Spar was huge, so what did I do while I waited to buy my Mini Cheddars? Yes, I played Orbital. Three game modes, all worth playing, all sorts of high scores and a cold, yet beautiful, aesthetic. Absolutely essential.

Robot Unicorn Attack

Keep jumping so the unicorn doesn't explode.

This is one of those arcade novelties. Maybe you won’t play it forever. Maybe it’s not as good as the free Flash version. Maybe it’s overpriced at £1.79. Whatever. Right now, today, this is great fun. And it makes a change from Canabalt.

Slay

Conquer the world in a tea break.

If Civilization Revolution seems a bit too much, play Slay instead. Games are quicker, military conquest is the only option and, well, it’s not even remotely the same, apart from being turn-based and based on conquering territory on a map. It’s been around for many years, but the fact that it’s the same as the ancient PC game shows how well the mechanics have stood the test of time. Easy to overlook if you’ve not played it, this really deserves your attention.

Trucker’s Delight: Episode One

Sexual harassment for fun and profit.

And let’s finish off with another novelty. Beautiful graphics, simple yet addictive gameplay and a fairly worrying backstory based on a music video. I played it solidly for two days and haven’t been back since. I keep meaning to, but somehow things get in the way.

Poor Meatbreath. A monster killed him as soon as we stepped out of the starting room.

It’s a problem. Especially when I faint from lack of food and end up being eaten alive by sewer rats, while helpless. That’s a terribly ignominious end for any adventurer.

I tried iNetHack out a long, long time ago and found it a little too fiddly, as I remember. The latest version, though, is much improved, with a far better interface and lovely graphics that combine familiar letters and simbols with nicely-drawn graphics.

Get out of the way, dog.

It’s still NetHack – and as such probably incomprehensible to newcomers, though help is available – but it’s a great implementation and the developer has to be applauded for improving the game so much from the initial release.

The biggest test for me when I come back from a long time away from NetHack is how easily I can find a way to rename my pet. I had to look through a fair few menus in this version, but I found it fairly quickly and now have a lovely little dog called Ralph. He keeps wandering off, but he does like eating goblin corpses, bless him.

Took me all of ten seconds to realise that I’ve completely forgotten how to play NetHack. I couldn’t even remember how to rename my pet. Or, indeed, myself. (It didn’t seem to ask me for a name when I started, but I could well have missed something.) I can’t even remember if NetHack is the correct capitalisation of the name. Maybe it’s Nethack.

So I put it down, decided to refresh myself with a desktop version of the game and a wiki and haven’t been back yet. Hardly worth blogging about, really, but I took the screen shot, so I have to. That’s the rule. That I just made up.

Got down to level six, before a milky potion made me hallucinate and fail to fight off the monsters that came to get me. I forgot to try praying again, but I’d prayed a little earlier to get over a bought of food poisoning so my god probably wouldn’t have done anything for me, anyway.

I was continuing a game from yesterday lunchtime, where I’d got down to level nine in the dungeons, much, much better than normal. I had some good equipment and was doing well. I attacked a floating eye (I think) and suddenly I was dead. The message history just had “The Tengu bites” all down it and I couldn’t scroll back any further.

I guess that the floating eye had frozen me or something and the tengu had come up behind me and killed me while I was helpless, but it would have been nice to have been able to see what happened. Boo.

Nothing much of note happened last night. I started, I got a few floors down, I died. Over and over again. Sometimes it seemed unfair, like when I walked into a room and was immediately by a hobbit firing a magic missile at me. But that’s NetHack for you.

The biggest thing of note was that in one game I – ironic gasp! – didn’t actually play as an orc barbarian. I let the game choose for me and I ended up as an poncy elven ranger. Still, he did okay. No worse than anyone else, anyway.

Sigh.