A quiet desk for board and turn-based games

A chess workshop rather than a chess app: you can redraw the board, invent pieces with movement rules of your own and decide what counts as a finished game. Playing your own variant against the built-in opponent is the fastest way to find out which ideas hold up over a whole game and which collapse on the third move. Matches run against the AI or with a friend online, and most sit inside a quarter of an hour.

• Board game
• PEGI 3
• 1M+ downloads
• Free to download

Go, taught patiently: short lessons first, then thousands of tsumego problems to work through at your own pace. The teaching is the strong part, because each problem is a shape you will meet again in a real game and the app explains why the answer works rather than only marking it correct. Play against the AI or against people, on the small nine-line board and on the full nineteen.

• Board game
• PEGI 3
• 1M+ downloads
• Free to download

Draughts with fourteen rule sets gathered into one app, from the English and Turkish versions to Brazilian and international. Written down the differences look tiny, whether a king slides one square or many, whether a capture is compulsory, and in play they change the shape of the whole game. Solo games against the computer, two players on one device and online tables are all here.

• Board game
• PEGI 3
• 5M+ downloads
• Free to download

A compact turn-based strategy on a small square map: one tribe, one starting technology and a fixed number of turns in which to explore, grow cities and research. Because the map is small and the turn count is firm, a decision about where to expand is answered within minutes instead of hours. A solo map takes about half an hour; games with friends run a turn at a time over days.

• Turn-based strategy
• PEGI 7
• 10M+ downloads
• Free to download

A turn-based roguelike that moves only when you do, which leaves room to think a step through before you take it. Every run redraws the floors and hands you unfamiliar items to identify, so most of the depth sits in deciding when to spend what you are carrying. Free, open source and entirely offline; a run lasts from twenty minutes to a long evening.

• Role-playing
• PEGI 7
• 5M+ downloads
• Free to download

An old-school grid crawler: one square at a time, mapping as you go, with encounters resolved turn by turn. The long game is character building, where skill points, equipment and the order of your party count for far more than reaction speed. It runs offline from start to finish and saves wherever you stop.

• Role-playing
• PEGI 12
• 1M+ downloads
• Free to download

A compact offline crawler built around turn-based encounters and a steady stream of equipment to weigh up. Progress arrives in small increments: a better item, one more level, another floor added to the map. It suits short sittings, since a single floor rarely takes more than a quarter of an hour.

• Role-playing
• PEGI 12
• 1M+ downloads
• Free to download

Almost all of this one is text: a paragraph tells you where you are, and you pick from a handful of options underneath. Inventory management carries the game, because each item has a limited number of uses and choosing what to carry and what to leave behind is the real puzzle. Runs are short, it works offline and it reads comfortably one-handed.

• Role-playing
• PEGI 3
• 500K+ downloads
• Free to download

The single entry on this desk that runs in real time rather than by turns. It holds its place on the character sheet: three classes, a skill tree that repays planning between runs, and equipment choices that read like a tabletop build. Levels are short and the whole thing works offline.

• Role-playing
• PEGI 7
• 1M+ downloads
• Free to download