I love asynchronous phone/tablet games. The asynchronous part means they’re multiplayer but you don’t have to both being playing at the same time. Typically you take a turn whenever you want, and then the other person is notified that you took your turn, and at their convenience they can watch the turn you took and reply with their own turn. Back and forth. This works great for things like board games.
But I was having trouble finding a good list of these on the web anywhere, and it seems like there aren’t that many of them, but maybe some are just hard to find. It’s too bad because so many games would translate well to this style. So I thought we might create a thread to document them.
List the game, describe how it works, mention if it’s iOS or Android or both.
Words with Friends. Cross platform. I think this is the most popular one. Zynga game. I’ve heard horrible stuff about zynga, but their phone games work fine in my experience. This one is a scrabble clone pretty much exactly. You take your turn, build a word off a previous word made on the board, and there are special scoring tiles that increase your score if you use them. Free with ads, or $3 for ad free versions.
Draw Something. Cross platform. Cooperative Pictionary. Each person is given a choice of 3 words to draw associated with 3 different difficulties. They then draw the words out using their finger as a pen with a selection of colors. On the other side, the person is given a grid of about 16 letters, some of which form the thing that the person is trying to draw. Once the word is guessed, the sides are reversed. Scoring, such that it is, is just how many of these you can get between the two of you before one of you is stumped and gives up. Free, or $3 for ad free versions.
Scramble with Friends/Ruzzle. Cross platform. These are both boggle clones. You get a grid of 16 letters arranged 4x4 and you have 3 two-minute rounds. Each letter is worth a certain amount of points like scrabble (Z is worth 10, A is worth 1), and like scrabble, there are bonus tiles with letter and word multipliers. Each player gets the same grid of letters to work with, and at the end of 3 rounds the highest score wins. Scramble has up to 3 power ups you choose at the beginning of each round. Rotate the board, freeze the board for a few seconds, find specific words for extra time, automatically find 3 random words for you, and a ridiculous pay to win bonus, have an extra minute in the round to work with that you have to buy for a buck. Scramble also has a stupid regenerating token system that limits the amount of games you can play in a certain time period unless you pay for more. Ruzzle is much cleaner/more pure - no power ups of any sort. I’m leaning towards recommending Ruzzle. Both have free ad-supported versions, Scramble is a buck, ruzzle 2 bucks.
Hanging with friends. More zygna. Cross platform. Hangman game. You create a word out of the letters it gives you, and the other person has to guess what this word is letter by letter. The longer the word, the fewer mistakes/bad guesses they can make before they lose that round. First person to lose 5 rounds loses. Free with ads or $3 on iOS, can’t confirm price on Android, probably the same.
What can you add to the list?