Your phone is the ultimate bus stop, train station or dull-day-in-the-office friend. When it comes to finding a few minutes of insta-fun, there’s an absolutely vast amount of choice.
Still, just because a game is fun doesn’t mean it’s the best skiving material. The perfect skiving app is completely disposable: it shouldn’t matter if you duck out of it when the boss approaches, and you should be able to pick up where you left off every time. The perfect skive should be engaging, lightweight fun that you come back to again and again. Often it’s only after a few hours you realise you’re either onto a smasher or wasting time.
Luckily for you, we’re your skive-time heroes. These apps are tried-and-tested timewasters, great for either skimming or sinking your teeth into. Your coffee break will never be the same again.
1 Smash Hit
Smash Hit is a tiny work of continuously scrolling genius. As you’re propelled forwards, tap the screen to launch marbles at smashable panes of glass and ornaments. The ornaments supply you with more marbles; the panes of glass cost you marbles if you hit them. Unbelievably addictive.
2 Simpsons Tapped Out
Tapped Out doesn’t look much like a dip-in-and-out game: styled a little like infamous time-suck SimCity, progress depends on you building your virtual Springfield. Thing is, the process is agonisingly slow: if you don’t spend real money on virtual donuts to speed things up, you can be looking at days for big projects to complete. That makes Tapped Out the perfect break-room companion: start a new build, check on it the following day.
3 Skyscanner All Flights!
Wasting time doesn’t have to be wasted entirely. Skyscanner is a flight aggregator whose search engine takes in hundreds of airlines across thousands of destinations. You can search for the best prices throughout an entire month, or view prices overlaid on a globe to help inspire your next trip.
4 Pac-Man friends
This is everything a Pac-Man game should be: unbelievably difficult, horribly addictive, and pick-uppable at will. The graphics have had an update since the 1980 original, and you can use your phone’s accelerometers to control Pac-Man, or go for a more traditional touchscreen D-pad.
5 Badland
Adorable, side-scrolling and sometimes stupidly difficult, Badland sees you take on the destiny of hundreds of fluffy forest inhabitants, who need guiding to various portals past traps and obstacles. It’s a bit like a monochromatic Lemmings, albeit with absolutely stunning graphics. Play a few levels at a time, or commit to hours of frustrating fun.
6 Flight Control
A Google Play classic. Draw lines from incoming airliners to their destination runways and try to avoid them smashing into each other. Deeply satisfying, occasionally frantic and as addictive as an ATM dishing out free cash.
7 Office Jerk
Soon to be cited in a “rampaging office worker” tabloid story, Office Jerk sees you playing the roll of a jerk in the office who chucks stapers, coffee mugs and cupcakes at your colleagues. Or maybe the colleague is supposed to be the jerk, which would explain why you’re forever launching eggs, golf balls and sticks of dynamite at him. All in the name of a high score, of course.
All these apps look better on a big, bright screen. The ace LG G3 has a Quad HD, 5.5in display that makes anything you put on it look amazing. See here to find out all you need to know.
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