
I don’t even want to TALK about my mobile gaming backlog, because it’s ridiculously huge and not likely to be tackled by me during my lifetime. Maybe my grandson’s. The thing is, in the rare moments when I do whip out my phone or iPad to play a game, I want something simple, mindless, and not requiring a lot of effort to learn. New game discovery just isn’t high up on my priority list; I usually gravitate toward old and tested staples.
That said, there are two new (to me) games I’ve been enjoying lately that I wanted to share, with the first being Disney Sorcerer’s Arena. This is, I realized, a Disneyfied version of Dungeon Boss, an old favorite of mine that involved slowly collecting and building up a team of heroes to run dungeon gauntlets. In this game, the big changes are that every character is from some Disney or Pixar animated film and that it’s more like stationary battles on a field rather than running through an instance.
Like Dungeon Boss, Sorcerer’s Arena is monetized within an inch of its life as it tries to get you to spend money on everything from seasonal passes to lockboxes to character tokens. Yet if you ignore all that — and I’m very good at ignoring F2P crud — there’s a somewhat entertaining and relaxing free game here. I particularly like the animations and design, as well as an emphasis on strategy. You can have the game automate battles, but I find that I’ll do much better if I manually pick targets and spells.
It’s also kind of amusing to see this weird mix-and-matching of all of Disney’s properties under one roof. Jack Skellington fighting Elsa, Gaston squaring off against Trigger from Robin Hood, that sort of thing. I’ve pretty much only been playing this for about 15 minutes in the morning while doing my exercise biking, but it’s proven a nice distraction.

The game I really wanted to recommend to you, however, is Endless Cards. This one set me back an entire dollar, and I have to say that it was worth every one of the 100 pennies I spent. It’s a minimalistic, cleverly designed game where you try to navigate a character through a field of cards to grab as much gold and survive as many fights as you can before dying. Gear and food help with armor and health, while enemies subtract from armor first and health second when you cross paths. There are the occasional items to get, store, and use as well.
What I love here is that (a) the games are pretty quick (quicker if you can’t survive long), (b) there’s a lot of strategy in picking paths and prioritizing cards, and (c) that by unlocking special cards and new characters, you get to change the rules of the game. One character, for example, affects gravity, so any cards touched will cause others to fall up or down instead of remaining in place.
The gold gathered can be spent on new cards and characters, and I hope that the devs continue to support this with even more additions in the future. It’s a perfect solitaire fix for the RPG nerd in me, and I think it deserves some more love than it’s currently getting.