strategy

Challenging card game

Championship Spades All-Stars is a simple program that makes it no trick to learn and play the classic card game Spades. It's a great game for players of all skill levels, from absolute beginners to top-level competitors.

The program's interface was a treat, packed with professional-looking graphics, basic commands, and, best of all, a tutorial. This onscreen teacher laid out the rules and strategies of Spades so that anyone could follow. We were able to immediately jump into game play, first by choosing our partner and opponents, and then by choosing between the five variations of Spades. Play … Read more

Simple Rummy game

DreamQuest's 100% Free Rummy Board Game for Windows is a simple way to play and learn Rummy, the classic card game. With a fantastic tutorial and excellent gameplay, this is a great choice for card players of any skill level.

The program's interface immediately made us comfortable, even though we'd never played Rummy before. It has a professional layout, albeit slightly cartoonish, yet the effect was fun and not distracting. The onscreen tutorial was great. This extension of the Help file taught us the rules and strategy of the game, such as melding a hand, runs, and … Read more

Five awesome iPhone tower defense games

If there's a bigger game genre for the iPhone than Tower Defense clones, I haven't found it. A quick search of the App Store reveals well over 100 titles matching that description.

No surprise there: the iPhone's touch screen lends itself perfectly to this kind of game (which, for the uninitiated, requires strategic placement of defensive armaments to ward off increasingly powerful attackers).

OK, but which TD titles are worth your time--and cash? Here's a roundup of my five favorites. It's by no means a definitive list, but I think fans of the genre will enjoy them all.

Bloons Tower Defense Balloons. Monkeys. Darts. Nearly everything from the beloved Web-based classic appears in the iPhone version. The controls are a little finicky, but if you want to introduce young kids to the world of tower defense, this $2.99 game is the one to get. Navy Patrol: Coastal Defense Though the learning curve is a bit steep and the onscreen action can get a little cluttered, this naval-themed, open-path TD exercise offers some of the most in-depth and challenging gameplay I've found. And the $1.99 purchase price includes new maps as they get added to the game.… Read more

NPR hosts unique Digital Think-In with Silicon Valley thought leaders

Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.

Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise … Read more

Lottery helper

Lotto Sorcerer claims to help you make better guesses at the nightly lottery picks. We were impressed with the program's tools and options, but ultimately weren't convinced that it was capable of picking winners.

We were not blown away by the program's interface. Even though it was simple to navigate and came with an instructional Help file, the layout felt a decade old. Regardless, we soon discovered its positives, like automatically pulling lotto results from any state and any specific drawing. We were shown several years of results and then the program provided us a guess about … Read more

Defend Mars from attack

Sentinel: Mars Defense is a visually rich, science-fiction-flavored, fixed-path tower-defense game, the less interesting--but also less expensive--predecessor to Sentinel 2: Earth Defense. You command the dropship Sentinel, tasked with defending a colony on Mars from seemingly endless waves of remorseless aliens.

Following a traditional fixed-path format, aliens advance up a single (sometimes forking) route, as you use your limited resources to marshal an array of upgradeable towers to stop them across four different maps, making strategic decisions on which towers to buy, where to place them on a grid, and whether to sell or upgrade units. The enemies are largely … Read more

Top Tower Defense games for iPhone

If you browse the iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch games, you've probably noticed there is no shortage of Tower Defense titles. It's probably because this genre seems to be a natural fit for the touch-screen interface. I decided to put together a collection of my favorite Tower Defense games (all rated highly), just in case you've been looking for a new time-waster or just want to sample what Tower Defense is all about.

Check out our collection of Top Tower Defense games for iPhone and iPod Touch.

Defend the dungeon against greedy adventurers!

Dungeon Defense is a promising game with ample swords-and-sorcery ambiance and an innovative take on the traditional tower-defense format. You have to protect a dangerous dungeon, commanding an evil army of skeletons as it fights off heroic (or maybe just greedy?) adventurer types. But the "towers" in this tower-defense game are your skeleton warriors, and the skeletons--being skeletons--they move.

The interface mimics many other tower-defense games: you pick from three skeleton types (light, heavy, and archer), you choose where you want to place them on certain locations on the map, and then you can sell, upgrade, and heal … Read more

Defend against an endless onslaught

FieldRunners is a polished tower defense game with crisp graphics, realistic sounds, and extremely addictive gameplay. Instead of defending a set path like in many games of this genre, in FieldRunners you need to construct your towers in such a way to force the baddies to take the most damage. We had the most luck by creating a sort of maze which forces the soldiers to double back and take damage from the same towers several times. As you progress you earn money, which allows you to buy more towers and to upgrade old ones. You also can unlock maps … Read more