3 Android game recommendations: Home Town 🎴, Number Salad 🔢, Atom Idle ☢️

Only 1 idle game out of 3? A new record low! This month had maths, solitaire, and atoms.

#1: Tripeaks Solitaire - Home Town

It’s just Tripeaks solitaire in a nice package, nothing crazy!

Review

Home Town is not too different from the many many many other Tripeaks solitaire games, and I can’t quite explain why I ended up trying it. Regardless, I’m glad I did, since it’s my current “casual gaming just before bed whilst watching a video” game.

You’ve probably played Tripeaks before, click cards one higher or one lower, that’s it. Home Town has all the typical special cards (cards that increment each turn, “frozen” cards, cards that reward coins), as well as a few more novel board elements that definitely add a bit of difficulty. For example:

A board wider than the screen, where the leftmost card needs to be played to “scroll” sideways and access the rest.
A “lock” that requires cards of specific suits to be played before the locked cards can be accessed.
Suit cards that work with any card of the specified suit.

A few of these elements are combined in every level, ensuring the gameplay is always familiar, but never the same. Additionally, the game feels fair. This is hard to objectively measure, but a lot of card games will intentionally make you just about lose, so you’re inclined to pay / watch adverts, whereas Home Town seems to leave winning or losing entirely up to you.

Surrounding this satisfying core gameplay is a farm aesthetic, where completing a level rewards you progression in a few areas. You’ll receive:

Career pass progress (every 10 levels receive a free item).
Coins (a bit more than you paid to play).
Farm items like eggs and flour (used to complete customer orders for extra coins).
Progress towards missions (coins again!).
Stars (essentially XP, unlocks next crop to increase “harvest” idle income).

All of these extra features and progression systems don’t require changing your play style, instead they’re primarily sources of occasional extra coins, ensuring you won’t run out so long as you play relatively well. For example, I’ve played 100+ levels and failed perhaps 2-3, although I have used plenty of items and purchased a few (with coins).

Besides the typical power-ups (wild cards, “blow away” visible cards, add card holding spot), there’s a fun “high stakes” mode. On any level you can pay 2 or 4 times the entry fee, and win 2 or 4 times the coins! I always do the highest stakes, and now have 110,000 coins (enough to lose 50 games in a row), this definitely isn’t a game trying to constantly run you out of coins.

Finally, there’s a “Master level” mode. These very hard levels are free to play, but failing one uses one of your “lives” that recharge over time. You’ll also receive a star rating on completion, and earning enough stars earns you various trophies and bonuses, making this challenge mode feel like a good use of time if coins are ever sparse. I’ve not spent much time here, preferring the main game.

Overall, the “fair” Tripeaks solitaire gameplay, lack of any timers / pressure / forced adverts, and laid back aesthetic makes Home Town a very easy game to enjoy. Even when I stop playing it daily I strongly suspect it’ll end up in my folder of games I occasionally get an urge to play!

Monetisation

Pretty standard optional monetisation model, with most of it made redundant if you can play well enough to keep stocked up on coins! For example, when you run out of cards to play you can pay coins (or watch an advert) for more, but this isn’t necessary very often.

The store sells coin / power-up packs from $2 to $100, and adverts can be watched for coins, I haven’t done either of these.

However, I did buy the “Career Pass” unlock for $1 that adds free items every 5 levels to your existing free item per 10 levels, tripling the number of rewards. These aren’t at all required, but having a steady supply of power-ups lets you have an easier time on a few levels. It’s important to mention I didn’t buy this until level 90ish, so coins are abundant even without it!

Tips

It’s Tripeaks, so all the usual tips apply:
- Prioritise cards that have many cards underneath them.
- Prioritise tricky cards like auto-incrementing or frozen cards.
- Plan the order of cards you’re going to play to get longer streaks.
Paying for 5 cards on a failed level costs as much as starting the level again, so is rarely worth it.
Make sure to claim missions / orders / harvest on the main screen when they have an indicator.

Screenshots

All screenshots are from version 1.8.1.20231106:

Farm view	Gameplay	Orders

#2: Number Salad

Remember Word Salad? Number Salad is that, but with a lot more numbers & maths!

Review

I massively enjoyed developer Bleppo’s previous game, and Number Salad is very, very similar.

Instead of a word-based theme, it’s number-themed. Whilst this sounds like a minor change, it actually adds a lot of complexity, since choosing when to multiply drastically changes the final number!

Similarly to Word Salad, there’s a new level every day, plus a couple of thousand standard puzzles to play. These are separated by difficulty, but even the hardest aren’t that tricky. With 8 tiles, and every target requiring 2-6 tiles, you can idly try combinations until you get close, then fine tune.

Instead of requiring knowledge of words and decoding the level’s topic, Number Salad instead requires the ability to identify patterns and intuitively predict just how high a multiplier will transform a number.

Multipliers make up all the difficulty in Number Salad, since deciding whether to collect a number before and after a x7 multiplier changes your total significantly! The ability to quickly do mental maths (especially multiplication) is very helpful.

There are a few indicators that this is a first release, with minor bugs. For example, “See Achievements” and “Share” do nothing, and I get prompted to enable a Google Play Profile every time I open the game(?). Despite these minor issues, if you’re into maths puzzles you will enjoy Number Salad. There’s a completely optional timer, and once this is turned off it’s just you vs the puzzle, with the only limitation your own mathematical ability. Excellent.

Update: The developer reached out and informed me the mentioned bugs are now fixed, and were due to a misconfigured Google Play option.

Monetisation

Similarly to the previous game, monetisation consists of:

Short adverts every couple of levels.
A £4.79 ($6) payment to remove adverts.
Buying “hints” or watching adverts to earn them.

These are pretty reasonable, although with the current format just putting up with the adverts seems preferable to paying.

Tips

The multiplier is the most important part of any combination, aim to multiply to just below the target, then add a number or two to complete.
The hints are useful! If you get stuck, use them.
If a level seems impossible, try randomly combining tiles and you might unexpectedly end up close to the target.

Screenshots

All screenshots are from version 1.5:

Overall level select	Puzzle types	Gameplay

#3: Atom Idle

Atom Idle is a pretty standard incremental game, albeit one with some variety, with the distinguishing feature being the atom-based theme!

Review

The core of Atom Idle is a merge game, where the objects being merged are (unsurprisingly) atoms, earning you “energy” (just currency). Building on top of this are standard features like upgrades with various currencies, achievements that increase income, and the ability to manually tap to spawn atoms faster.

Luckily, the game doesn’t stop at these basics, and adds multiple areas that help increase your income. Each of these is essentially a whole other incremental game, with their own currency, yet it all feeds into the core game:

There’s a research lab with scientists to hire, and a skill tree.
There’s a microchip factory, with an Adventure Capitalist-style gameplay for “F-coins”.
There’s a nuclear reactor, with particles used to increase your multiplayer.
There’s a particle collider with antimatter, isotope traps, neutrinos, and all kinds of science-y jargon.

The end result is like playing 5 quite basic incremental games at once, which has a bit of a learning curve. There is a help button on each screen that has plenty of description of all the bits and pieces, but there are so many things available to upgrade at any one time that there’s a bit of decision paralysis.

Should I buy an injection for my collider which does something unknown to do with antimatter, buy my 50th Intel 8088 for some sort of F-coin improvement, maybe upgrade my superconductivity? Who knows!

I really wanted to like Atom Idle, as there’s clearly a lot of passion put into the gameplay mechanic, and it looks and plays great. However, I never quite managed to care about the game, perhaps because there are just so many simple things going on. Nothing complex, but many little pieces.

I’ve come back to Atom Idle a few times over the past few weeks, and whilst the gameplay is always solid, it neve quite managed to hook me in. There’s definitely a lot of depth, if you can push past the initial jargon word salad!

Monetisation

You can watch adverts to skip various things, earn various currencies, and upgrade bits and pieces, and I did this a few times.

There’s also 13 currency microtransactions (although they get pretty expensive, £55 at half price!), 4 donation options, a payment to remove the constant banner ad, and an expensive payment to remove all ads (£9 down from £19).

I purchased the £1 banner removal as it seemed a good price, I definitely won’t be spending any more.

Tips

It’s hard to give tips when I spent most of my time either feeling confused or that I was probably working on the wrong area!

The only advice to give is use the help screens, they really do describe every button and feature in detail. There’s also a Discord.

Screenshots

All screenshots are from version 1.1.173:

Main area	Antimatter upgrades	Processor upgrades