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.

I nearly played Civiilzation Revolutions last night, but it seemed like too much effort.

Fantastic as always, but I’d love it if the game gave me a warning if I was about to create a unit that would take me above my maintenance limit.

Of course, the real problem with Slay is that once you start playing it’s difficult to stop. Those of you who’ve played it will know what I mean. And if you haven’t, it’s probably about time you started.

…and conquered worlds.

Well, I’ve picked up little men and dropped them around islands made up of hexagons, but it’s more or less the same thing.

And at the moment, the answer is always yes, because I’m still on the very easy levels, where trees are more dangerous than my actual enemies. Seriously they’re brain dead at this level. If they ever manage to disrupt my plans, it’s only ever by sheer fluke. I don’t have to be careful with positioning or worry about defending my territory, I just grow and expand however I like and eventually they surrender. The only challenge comes from trying to beat the levels in as few moves as possible.

It’s a very good way to get back into the game, but I’m starting to want a little bit more in the way of competition.

Well, not until Saturday, at least.

Slay is an old PC game I remember playing years ago. It’s at least fourteen years old, maybe more. It’s a simple but stragetically interesting hex-based game of conquest. It was great on the PC, but looked rubbish. Fifteen years later, it’s on the iPhone, still great, still looking rubbish. I does look better than the PC version did back in the day, but that’s the very definition of faint praise.

You shouldn’t run away, though. The graphics are clear and let you see what’s going on at a glance, which is far more important than any fancy stuff. The game’s completely unchanged, with mechanics it would be pointless to describe in detail. In short, though, you create men to capture territory, castles to guard it and upgrade your soldiers when you can afford to.

The game’s survived because it’s a masterpiece of design and the iPhone version works exactly as it should, even down to having an undo button just in case you click the wrong hex. (Which you will.)

I also like the structure of this version. Instead of choosing a map and then a difficulty level, there’s just a list of over four hundred levels arranged in ascending order of difficulty. Excellent.

I urge you to try this game if you’ve not done so already. It takes a few minutes to learn the rules – remember to make sure you can afford a new unit before creating it – but once you have, you never forget them. I managed to leap right in even though I’ve not played for many years.

There’s a Lite version to try, but it seems to be an older version of the game than the current one. Still, the core gameplay is exactly the same, so it’s a good way to learn the ropes.