Underhand is a nice little resource management game.
Legends of runeterra has a single player campaign that is probably the funnest card game ive ever played. There are in app purchases, but ive been playing off and on for about 6 years and ive never bought anything. No ads either. Rogue card adventure i think is another really good one despite the less than impressive name.
Optionally, its fully possible to get an emulator on your phone. Id recommend a bluetooth controller (a lot of older phones wont allow wired controllers even with the adapter, but ime every phone allows bluetooth controllers) but its not required. You can emulate any game from atari all the way up to gamecube on the shittiest $20 walmart phone with a screen.
Finally, as long as you are on android, technically you can get almost any app for free. Super illegal and they definitely (wont) prosecute you, so i would highly advise against checking websites like apkaward, as you might find malicious programs that install fully playable games on your device, such as the amazing star wars:knights of the old republic 2 android port that can be found on that site. Fair warning though, if you accidently end up up with kotor 2 on your phone id highly recommend getting the content restored mod. It adds back in all the cut content and fixes a slee of potentially gamebreaking bugs. On current android you do have to use a conputer to install the mod, but its very easy and i can help you with that part as it is entirely legal.
Hoplite
Pixel Dungeon
Xeonjia, It’s on fdroid.
Sword of Convallaria, it’s a gacha game, but the gacha is probably least intrusive i ever seen in similar games, and it actually have entire story mode that you can play for free with barely even engaging in main mode since it have separate character pools. It’s also heavily modelled after Final Fantasy Tactics and imo managed to keep the vibes and feeling better than any other similar game.
Mindustry, great open source game. Although it was so addictive I ended up deleting it. Now I don’t have any games on my phone.
When i have 5 minutes to burn on a commute, I play chess puzzles on lichess.
That’s a really wide question. I’ll give you my list of answers.
Here are my top three:
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Shattered Pixel Dungeon, a roguelike descended from Pixel Dungeon. It’s strayed quite far afield from the original PD, but I think most of the changes are good.
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Mindustry, a hybrid tower defense and systems-building game. I’ve heard it compared to a game called Factorio, but I’ve never played that, so you’ll have to take it with a grain of salt. Sorry.
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Forkyz, a crossword app, which is a fork (appropriately) of a game called Shortyz. It allows you to download daily crosswords from bunches of sources for free and play them at your leisure.
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Chip Defense, a tower defense game themed around computers. It’s really fun if you like computers and/or tower defense.
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Space Trader, a text-based game heavily inspired by Elite. Travel a galaxy, trade goods, blow people up, complete quests, buy a moon.
Here are some games on F-Droid that I’m not going to link, because i don’t know how they do on Android, but I love them on PC:
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Luanti, which used to be called Minetest. It’s an open-source voxel building game engine (like Minecraft). It’s very scriptable, and you can build a lot of stuff with a little knowledge and looking at examples.
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Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based hex-grid strategy game with day/night mechanics and multiple campaigns, both included and downloadable. And it’s got multiplayer too!
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Endless Sky, a spaceflight game which borrows heavily from the Escape Velocity series. If you like the concept of Elite, you should check it out.
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OpenTTD, an open-source version of the classic Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but so much more.
I second shattered pixel dungeon (there’s even a lemmy sub in here somewhere) and endless skyes (runs quite well on a phone)
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Open Sudoku you can download thousands of new puzzles.
For a chill puzzle game, I’ve been enjoying the water sort puzzle from Martin Kunze. I like that version specifically because there’s no ads, no monetization, no data collection, no login, no nothing. You just sort colored water until it stops being fun.
I like Pirate Solitaire.
Recently became aware of Minedustry. Looks interesting.
I don’t play on mobile, but I (and a bunch of my family) have sunk a ton of time into this game. It’s great. Very deep and engaging. It is still being updated by the dev, and is on multiple platforms.
Polytopia
Seconded. Polytopia is free and was extremely addicting when I first began. Kept me busy whole flight to Japan because you can play it offline too.
Depends on what your definition of “good” and “free” is. If “free” means no money down and also no ads then I’d recommend Unciv. I think it’s quite good.
