Ravel. ($0.99, version 1.0.0)

iTunes Link.


Ravel is a word game akin Wheel of Fortune. You are presented with a saying, a name, a thing, something composed of one or more words. Your goal is to guess what it is. It's just you and the blanks.

When you start the app you get to a title screen from which you can start a game, go to options, or get some help. The help is extremely detailed and offers an overview, goes over controls, lets you know how to put letters in the blanks, goes over the different hint and tool options available, and gives you a few hints which are actually really helpful.



Options include the option to turn the sound on or off, an option to clear all game data, and credits. Sounds are turned off by default. This is the first app I've encountered that has it set up like that. Neither negative nor positive, just different. Sounds includes both music and sound effects. There's different beeping sounds when you choose menu options and paper rustling sounds along with a transition from screen to screen that includes sheets of paper falling all over the screen and then disappearing. There's different tapping noises during the actual game and an upbeat sound when you beat a board. There's no music during the actual game, just around the different non-game screens. The main screen also shows highest level and cash obtained.



There's a lot of options to help you along. You start each new game with $10 and when you beat a board you earn money. You can use this money to buy hints. There's three kinds of hints. Lockdown shows you which letters are in the correct spot. You can also pick a letter and it'll let you know where it goes. The third hint shows you what letter goes in a particular spot.

There's also free tools to use. Clear removes all letters from the board. If you had previously selected Lockdown, the letters that were in the correct spot stay there. Shuffle fills up all blank spots with letters. Pass lets you skip the puzzle, but can only be used three times.

The game says it ends when you go broke, but I haven't found a way to go broke yet. If you don't have enough money left for hints you simple can't select them. You pretty much play until you run out of passes and hints and give up the current board and go back to the main menu.



The game screen includes the Hints button, the Tools button, the current level, your cash, and an option to exit to the main menu. Exiting ends the current game. Pressing Home and then restarting the app saves your current game. It's not essential but it would be great to have an option to have the option of a new game or of resuming your previous game from the main menu, and having the exit button save your current progress.



The game boasts over 600 puzzles and no repeats, and so far I haven't seen any questions repeated. For a dollar this is well worth it for fans of words and/or puzzles.

Wordee. ($0.99, version 1.0.0)

iTunes Link.

Lite Version.


I was very excited to play Wordee at first because I love word games. My excitement diminished somewhat when I found out it's not really a word game but a sliding game. You've probably played sliding games before. You have square with numbers or images on them and you have 1 blank square. You slide the other squares around until you recreate the image or put the numbers in sequence. Wordee is just like that, except that you recreate pre-determined words.



When you first start up the app you can go ahead and start playing or go to the options. The options include the credits, sound on or off, and a clear data button that erases all progress. It remembers your settings after the app is restarted.



Once you press play you get taken to the level selection screen. From here you can go back to the main menu and access four pages of help, including some hints. Your completion percentage is on the bottom center. There are a total of 70 levels. Something really nice is that you can choose to complete a level at any time without having to have finished all the levels before.



Once you select a level, you are taken to the main game screen. The level number is on the upper right and on the bottom you have buttons to go back to the level selection screen and to get to the help screens. Something extremely nice is that each level saves your progress if you exit out or use the button to go back to the level selection screen. So you could be working on several levels at the same time.

You finish a level by moving letters around and getting them into their correct spot. Once the letters are in the right spot, they light up. You can still move around in order to get the other letters in place. The trick is to use the empty space(s) to help you move the letters around to their right spot.



I realized it was a sliding game and not a word game when I formed valid words but the letters wouldn't light up. It doesn't matter if you form words, you just have to form the pre-determined words and place them in their pre-determined place. This is the main reason why this isn't a word game. There could be numbers or pictures instead of words and the gameplay would be the same.

There's clicking sounds when you select menu items and a nice wooshing sound when a board appear and a little congratulatory sound when you beat the level, along with beeping noises as you slide tiles around. There's no music.



My main reason for disliking this game is because it's mis-categorized. It's not a word game, it's a sliding game. I like word games but dislike sliding games. If you like sliding games, this is as good as any and more challenging, as it gives you 70 different levels in ascending difficulty. The recommendation is based on what you expect this game to be. If you expect this to be a word game, you may be in for a big letdown and disappointment as I don't think it's a word game at all. If you are looking for a sliding puzzle game, this has tons of level, saves each level indivially, looks great, and has a lot of replayability and is very challenging. Word game? Skip it. Sliding game? Highly recommended. Try out the Lite version and see how you like it.

Scarab Solitaire. ($1.99, version 1.0)

iTunes Link.


Card games. There's a thousand and one variations out there. When most people think "Solitaire" they are actually thinking of one of the countless versions of Solitaire named Klondike. I first came upon the Tri-peak variation on the Nintendo DS and have been looking for a good version on the Touch. I have a few of the Solitaire compilations and those that include it don't have a version I can truly enjoy like the one in the DS. I have finally found the app to fill my Tri-peak void: Scarab Solitaire.



In this version of Solitaire, you have a card arrangement that looks like three pyramids. You start with 10 cards face up. Then you 9 cards behind them (one in-between each of the 10 cards). Then you have six cards behind them (two cards in-between, then an empty space, two cards in-between, then an empty space, then two more cards in-between). You finally have three cards, one in-between each of the three pairs of cards in the row before. There's two variations. The bottom row is always face-up. One variation has the rest of the pyramid cards face up and the other variation has them face-down. I would say it's more common to have them face down as this game does.



The rest of the cards are placed in a pile to the bottom left. You flip up the top most card and the game begins. Your goal is remove all cards from the pyramids. You can only remove a card if it's face up, i.e. no card on top of it. You remove it by either going one up or one down the face-up card at the bottom. I.e. if the card that is face up at the bottom is a four, you can select a three or a five. One such combination would be 4-5-4-3-2-3-4-5-4. You can keep going up and down until you cannot make any more matches. Kings wrap over to Aces and Aces wrap back to Kings.

The game saves your progress to the card, which is great with this type of game. You have a timer that counts down and is reset as soon as you make any move. I never ran out of time, as it gives you ample time to think. I would prefer a per-level time scheme like the DS version, and the time available keeps shrinking as the stages progress.

My biggest complaint about the game is that there's only five levels. I would like unlimited levels that you go through with decreasing available time (again, like the DS version). I've reached level 5 a few times so far. It's not a piece of cake, but it's not extremely hard either.



There's an element of luck to this Solitaire variant but there's also a lot of strategy involved. You have a 4, and have a 5 and a 3 in the pyramids. Did you already turn up all the sixes or the twos? This move could decide whether you win the game or not.

The graphics are very polished and the cards very readable, specially since there's so many cards in the game screen at a time. The sound is great, with some belly-dancing music. I sometimes let the game run just to hear the music. Controls are simple and spot-on, and you simply touch a card to select it. It's extremely precise. There's some good card-flipping sound effects. At the top of the screen you can see your current score, the current level, and your high score. The move timer is to the bottom right, and there's some graphics in the background that give the impression that you're in some sort of ancient ruins adventure. On the top right there's an arrow that takes you back to the main menu. From here you can play a new game, resume your current game, get instructions on how to play the game and the scoring, and you can view the credits. The instructions are in-game, which is how card game instructions should be handled. One should not have to go to Wikipedia to learn how to play the game.



As it is right now, it is the best Tri-peaks game in the store that I have tried. It would be the ultimate perfect Tri-peaks game if there were unlimited levels with decreasing level time. Why pay for one version of Solitaire where you can get compilations with a whole lot more? Polish and perfection. If a developer focuses on just one variant they can create a much better game than if they're just cramming variants into a compilation game, as can be witnessed with this game. At $2 this is a no-brainer. It helps if you like the variant, of course. I would suggest reading up on it and maybe trying to find an online flash game or playing it with real cards to get a feeling for the variant. If you like it, this game cannot come with any higher recommendation. This is a keeper.

Flip Disc. ($0.99, version 1.02)

iTunes Link.


I got this game on 4/17, and found that the controls made the game unplayable for me. The controls were updated and I still found the game unplayable. The controls were updated one more time, and I was finally able to enjoy this game. And enjoy I do. I have been in communication with the developer this whole time and it speaks volumes about a developer when they keep tweaking the controls so that the game is accessible to even more people. I found control scheme number one to be perfect for me.



The gameplay consists of matching five balls of the same color. You have five concentric rings of varying sizes. You have eight holes on top of the outer ring, and different-colored balls come out of those holes. Only one ball comes out at a time, but as you progress through levels, they will start to come out faster and faster. You also start getting more ball colors as the levels increase. You have to make 10 matches in order to go up a level, and after 10 levels/100 matches, you get an achievement for "finishing" the game. I tap out at around 20 matches, so 100 matches is quite a challenge and adds lots of replayability to the game. It would be great to have an achievement system, which could include achievements such as 100 total matches or three hours played. Since I started seeing games that keep track of how long you've played them I've really grown to like that feature and would love to see it added to all games. Each time you make a match, you get 10 points added to your score.

There are a few power-ups to help you out. There's power-ups to boost your score, to temporarily stop the production of new balls, to destroy all the balls lying in the same disc, to block for a few seconds the disc where the power-up was lying (I would suppose this would make it harder, not easier, but I have not encountered this power-up during gameplay yet), and a black ball that cannot be used to form lines but disappears after a certain period of time.

When you first start up the game, you get to a menu of options. You can start a new game, change options around, see the credits, view the instructions, view the high scores, resume a game (if you have one going), and an option that I haven't seen in any other game - Exit, which does the same as pressing the Home button on the iDevice. Options include sliders for music and sound effects and the option to choose the control mode. There are four control modes. The first one (and my favorite) allows you to just tap on a ring to select it and then draw arcs with your finger to rotate it. The second one gives you buttons on the screen for rotation and disc selection (this was the default control scheme when the app first came out and my least favorite). The third one is kind of the opposite of number one: rotate the inner disc left or right to go through the disc selection and move your finger up and down through the rings to rotate the current ring. The final one has you tapping in the center to go down the discs and at the edge to go up the discs and draw arcs with your finger to rotate. There's a control scheme to please just about anybody now, and the developer is again to be commended for adapting rather quickly to customers' requests.



The instructions are very detailed and include pictures. The game screen gives you the current level, number of lines cleared (a match of five balls is considered one line), your score, the next ball coming, a Danger sign that flashes and makes noise if you are running out of room, and a pause button that allows you to either return to the main menu (and save your game) or continue. You can also save your current game by pressing the Home button. There's also a bar to the right that shows you how close you are to running out of room. You can tap on the upcoming ball to have the next ball come out without having to wait.

The sound is upbeat. There's beeping noises when selecting menu items, scraping noises when you rotate discs, and sucking noises when you make a match and the balls are sucked into the center.

I really like how the game handles losing the game. It will keep shooting out balls until every single spot is filled. Not just when one hole gets plugged up: ALL holes have to be plugged up in order for the game to end. This allows you to frantically clear some lines and get some more gameplay out of it. There are still two more tweaks that I would like to see in the game, and a wishlist item. I've gotten up to 20 lines or so and I've only seen a couple of bombs per game. I have not seen the other power-ups yet. It would be great if the help information included what triggers a power-up to appear - chance, score, a certain number of lines? But what I would really like to see is a greater frequency and variety of power-ups.

Developer reply regarding power-ups:

Regarding the special gems: they appear by chance and based on the current level. For example, the black and blocker gems only appear during the last levels. The game is also programmed in such a way that there cannot be more than 4 special gems on the board. The reason behind that decision is that only one special gem can be used to form a line and, during testing, I found out that if I didn't limit the number of simultaneous special gems the player could suddenly found she would be unable to form a line.


The other tweak I would love to see is to have the game start even slower. I can manage the speed, but it would be a more enjoyable experience at least for me if the speed is lowered a couple of notches more.



The other thing is not essential to the gameplay but I'd love to have the option to slide my finger up and down lines and have the balls move up or down that line, so that you could not only send balls left or right, but up or down as well. Yes this would make the game a whole lot easier. There could be an option to turn vertical swapping on or of. That way those who want more of a challenge can leave it off and those who are looking for a more casual game can turn it on.

There is one more change that I would like to see that does not involve the gameplay, and that involves the mechanism to put your name in the high scores. I believe it's a combination of swiping left and right to go through the spots and up and down to go through the alphabet, but I was only able to get an A on the final spot out of it in the three times I tried it. A pop-up keyboard would be a lot better, or at least have it looked at to see what could be going on.



While reviewing the game I found a bug. If you press Home while the Game Over! screen is up (I did this to go back to the menu quickly to work on the review), it got stuck in the Game Over! screen. I restarted the app but it remained stuck on that screen and would not go back to the main menu. Even after resetting my iDevice, it would not go back to the main menu. I had to wait until I got home to delete the game and re-download it. I'm more than confident that this will be addressed (and will update the review if it does).

Graphics are polished, music is enjoyable, gameplay is solid, and the game is constantly being updated. lf those are not the signs of a keeper, I don't know what is.

Modulo. ($1.99, version 1.0)

iTunes Link.

Lite Version.


Modulo is a strategic puzzle game. You have different wheels with one arrow pointing outwards. Your goal is to have all wheels pointing up.



When you start the game you are taken to the first level. It's a very busy and beautifully drawn game screen. On the top you can see the level you are on. On the upper left there's the lowest number of moves you have taken to complete the level (if previously completed) and on the upper right is the current number of moves. In between these three items there's a level reset button. On the bottom left there's a help button, on the bottom center there's a button to take you back to the level section menu, and on the bottom right there's the options buttons.



Options include on/off and sliders for the music and sound effects, a button to view more games by the same developer, a game reset button that erases all your progress in the entire game, and a credits button. Pressing the options button again takes you back to the game. The help includes some basic game instructions, and pressing help again takes you back to the game. The levels button takes you to the difficulty selection screen (and pressing the levels button again surprisingly takes you back to the game).



I was surprised to see levels, as I got through Easy into Amateur before I got to the levels screen. You could finish the entire game and never see the levels screen. There are six levels of difficulty: Easy, Amateur, Experienced, Seasoned, Adept, and Auteur. Each difficulty level has 30 puzzles, which means 180 puzzles total.



That's it for menu and options. On to the gameplay. You have a certain number of wheels on the board and you have to point all of them up. There's a catch, though. Some balls are connected to other balls, and if you move a certain ball one way another ball might move another way. The trick is to figure out the relationship between the different wheels. A strategy I use is to figure out which wheels don't affect the other wheels - I leave these for last. Also try to figure out which wheels affect other wheels but are not affected by other wheels, and do these first.



Through trial and error you can probably solve all puzzles. There's a lot of replayability because you can always try to solve each puzzle with less and less moves. Depending on how many moves you take the game either congratulates you or lets you know you can do better. I like that there's not a maximum number of moves because it lets me relax and just focus on solving the puzzle.



When you exit the game screen by either pressing Home on the iDevice or by using the levels button your progress in a level is not saved but this is not a deal-breaker as each level is not terribly long. If you exit out of the app and open it again you are taken back to the start of the level you last played.



The music is one of the best I've hard on the app store. There are clicking noises as you turn the wheels and a noise like a lamp turning on when you place the wheel in the correct position. There are some sound effects as you go through the menus.



The entry price is well worth a few hours of entertainment, and the game is polished and has great music. Since you can solve it by trial-and-error it's not inaccessible for the casual player and an unlimited number of moves makes this a great relaxing game when you have a few minutes to kill. Recommended. And you can always try the Lite version first.

Rich Diamond. ($2.99, version 1.1)

iTunes Link.


Rich Diamond is a puzzle game in which you navigate obstacles to get to the goal. When you first fire up the app, you get a splash intro screen and then go right into the main menu. From this menu you have quite a bit of options. You can play the last puzzle selected, you can select which of the 100 puzzles from the current puzzle pack to play, you can select a puzzle pack, you can view your progress in the current puzzle pack, you can select options, view help, or go to the developer's website. The current difficulty level selected appears on the top of the main menu screen.



The first thing to note is that there are 300 puzzles total (so far). The puzzle packs are divided into Easy, Medium, and Hard, and each level has 100 puzzles. The second thing to note is that you can do any puzzle at any time without having to unlock it. This is really nice in case you get stuck in any particular puzzle.



In the options you can turn up or down (all the way to off) the sound effects or the music volume. The volume is a nice adventurish score. From options you can also choose your perspective. You can choose between a top-down viewpoint or a 3D perspective. Help is very detailed and includes an introduction, moving around, things in the game, menu controls, selecting puzzles, and even further online help if needed.




There are many things that will get in your way. There are walls that you cannot walk through, boxes that you can push and throw into water to make bridges, rocks to plug pits and make bridges over lava, arrows that block your way once they're shot, bombs (it's a good idea not to be next to them when they explode and not to run into them), water, lava, pits, grass that gets trampled if you go over it but makes things get stuck to it if not trampled, slopes, slopes that change direction, ice that makes you slip, lattices that traps some item to it, items that push you into a different direction, bi-directional and uni-directional doors and doors that need keys to open or a plate to be activated to open them, power-ups that protect you from other things, robots that chase you and zap you, monster and spiders that want nothing good with you, and surprise squares - you never know what's below!



Needless to say, you're in for an adventure.

If you go to the select puzzle screen, you are presented with the puzzles for the current difficulty level. They have one of three colored diamonds. Grey if not completed, red if completed, and blue if completed in a certain number of steps (mastered). You can change the level selection menu to show number of steps taken in each level as opposed to the level number.



Once you have selected a level, the fun begins. You can move a step at a time by either tapping in the direction you want to move in anywhere on the screen. If you are at the bottom left and you tap the upper right area, you will move right. You can also use a control pad at the bottom center of the screen. At the top of the screen you have the puzzle number which alternates with how many gems you have yet to collect and also the lowest number of steps you have taken to complete that level (which doesn't appear if it's your first time doing that level and instead shows that it has not been solved yet). You also have how many steps you have taken so far and what is the maximum number of steps you can take in order to get that coveted blue diamond on the level screen and master the level. You can Skip a move, which means you don't move but the board does (i.e. enemies; this is helpful if you're trying to escape an enemy's path). There's also an undo button. This means you can pretty much keep undoing and moving until you master any particular level.



From the game screen you can also tap Menu to get more options.
Hint: The game will show you the next move. If you have taken some extraneous moves, if will back you up to where you started on the wrong path.

Show: Your position is saved and the solution shown.

Redo: If you have used the undo button, this undos the undo.

Begin: Re-start the current level.

Save: You can have one save per puzzle and it will save the moves you have taken so far in the game.

Play: Returns you to the checkpoint, if any.

More: Even more menu options.

Quit: Go back to the level selection screen.

The third menu is only activated if you have solved the puzzle before, and it will take through the solution step by step or show you the best (lowest number of steps taken) solution. Show also seems to be activated only when you have completed a level.




The game pretty much allows you a great amount of freedom. You can take as many steps as you want to solve a level without having to worry about time. Once you solve it you can "cheat" and see the best solution and then copy it to get that blue diamond. Or you can try and try again until you come to the answer yourself.

When you are playing, the exit door to a level remains closed until you collect all the gems. There are "jungle" sounds in the game sometimes, along with sound effects when you interact with the environment such as splashing when something falls in water or burning if a box falls on lava. The graphics are basic sprites but do not take away from the gameplay.



This is not a half an hour game (and if is, leave a comment so that you can be properly admired). At a minute a puzzle, that's five hours. And some puzzles will certainly take you much more than a minute, specially is you try to master all of them. This much gameplay is certainly worth $3. Highly recommended!

Azkend. ($2.99, version 1.10)

iTunes Link.


I held off buying Azkend when it first came out because it was a $3 game. $1 games are impulse buys. I've been burned too many times with $3+ games to keep blindly buying them. I then saw on a forum that there was a free online (or it could have been a downloadable) version, and I tried it out. Big mistake. Played it for 30 seconds, closed it out, and bought Azkend immediately. It is that good.

The best part of Azkend is the controls. It's a match 3+ game, but you swipe your finger over like tiles to create a chain and then release your finger to break the tiles. It is oddly satisfying, and one of the best match-3 control schemes I have ever tried (and I've tried a lot of them).

When you first start up the app you get a bit of back story. You found a relic in far Asia and took it back home. As relics tend to do, it brought a curse over your head, which you now wish to get rid of. You are retracing your steps to put the relic back. I find a backstory is always welcomed because it keeps pushing you until the end to see how it all works out.

Right at the beginning you get to select whether you want sounds or not. I don't particularly like this because you have to restart the app to change your choice. This is the first app that does this and I'm curious as to why they chose to handle it this way.



The gameplay is deeper than most match-# games. First you match 3+ tiles to turn their spot blue. Sometimes they're filled with obstacles and you have to turn tiles around them or on them to first break them free, THEN you can turn their spot to blue by matching the item on that tile again. Once you turn the whole board blue, you then get either a talisman piece or a gem at the top of the board and you clear tiles below them to get them to touch the bottom of the screen. The obstacles include steel, ice, and tar. You have to match objects on a tile twice to break through steel, you have to turn tiles around a tile to break through ice, and you have to turn tiles around tar to make it disappear. Take too much time with the tar and it infects adjoining tiles. You also get wildcards that can take the place of any other tile. Sometimes part of the board are locked out and you have to turn tiles around them to unlock them. Sometimes there's holes that make matching more difficult. If you wait a few seconds without making a move, there's two ways the game helps you. It points out possible tiles to match and sometimes it shows you what tiles you have left to turn. It would be nice to be able to turn these suggestions on or off.



From the main menu you can select Play, Instructions, and Options. Instructions cover just the basics (Talismans are not covered here), but at least are nicely illustrated. There's just a couple of options: To turn the music on or off, and the sound effects on or off. There's also some credits information under options, and the version number. Once you press play you have two modes to try out: Adventure and Survival. Adventure mode has a total of 70 levels. It will take approximately two and a half hours of game time to complete, given you don't fail any levels the first time around. Survival it just what it sounds like: Keep going at it until the timer runs out. As you progress the timer resets back about 10 clock minutes (out of 60).



If you have a game in progress you can continue it or start a new game. If you were in the middle of a stage and you either exited out to the iDevice's springboard or selected Save & Exit to go back to the game menu, your progress in the current stage is saved, which is really nice. The "world map" shows how many stages you've done, how many stages you have left, how many stages you have gold-starred (completed the stage in a certain amount of time or less), Achievements, Talismans, Play the current level, or Save & Exit.

The Achievements page is pretty detailed. It shows how many Achievements (out of seven) you have obtained, how many tiles matched, total time played, total levels completed, Talismans activated (power-ups used), Expert Levels Rank (out of 100%), and longest chain. Clicking on each Achievement shows a mini-description. They include:

- Completing 40 levels with expert rank
- Strung together 24 or more tiles
- Played over 5 hours
- Unleashed the power of Talismans over 200 times
- Summoned 9 or more lightning bolts with one move
- Strung together 12 or more tiles
- Played 20 levels

The last four are relatively easy to get, while the first three will take some time.


Talismans are special tiles. Match 4 or more to activate them. They include:

- Explode tiles around it (more tiles matched, bigger explosion)
- Shoots a destroying (i.e. tile turning) ray of light from the last selected item
- Gives you a lightning rune (more on this later)
- Calls a falling star to help you turn tiles
- Summon a destroying hammer
- Lightning arcs zaps multiple random items on board
- Destroys all items underneath the activated item (my favorite, as if you get this at the top of the board it really helps your progress)
- Destroys all extinction tiles on board

At the game screen you have your game progress to the lower left, the timer to the lower right, and your lightning meter at the bottom center of the screen. Tapping on any of them brings up the in-game menu, which includes the option to go back to the game, access to the paltry options menu, access to the instructions page, and the option to save and exit back to the main screen.

Every time you match at least one-non-blue tile, you get a lightning bolt added to your lightning meter. Once you get five, you get some lightning strikes that turn tiles.

As far as sounds, there are clicking noise when you select menu items. There's also different sound effects during the game, depending on whether you are matching tiles, using a Talisman, or obtaining a gem piece. There some Indiana Jones-esque music. I found (through using an iPod Touch 2G's speakers) that in order to be able to hear the music properly I had to turn the volume all the way up, but then the sound effects were too loud. It would be great to have different sliders for the music and sound effects.



The biggest complaint I have with the game is that you cannot replay a specific stage. I would love to be able to go back to any stage I already complete in the Adventure game and re-do it over and over again until I get gold. You can only go once through each stage as you go through the game. Hopefully this gets added to a future version of the game!

You cannot go wrong with this $3 game. You can spend an easy three hours on this on the first go-around and then go back to it for more. I can see myself replaying the main adventure mode two or three times, and that's 4-7 hours right there It would extend the replayability if you could re-do individual stages. The Survival mode lets you jump right in to the main gameplay. Highly recommended, as it has polished graphics, satisfying controls, inventive gameplay, nice music, and different modes to keep you occupied for hours on end.