Get Through Insufferable Family Time This Thanksgiving With These Mobile Games

4 hours ago 10

A pre-teen boy concentrating on smartphone with ear buds and bowls of snacks.

If you’ve got a big family but very little to talk to them about, the holidays can see you go from happy to helpless real quick. What are you to do when Thanksgiving dinner is two hours late and you’ve run out of small talk with that one uncle from out of town who may or may not have voted for the worst person in the world? More doom-scrolling is always an option, but haven’t you done enough of that this month? Luckily, there’s something else you could be doing with your handy dandy distraction device.

For those of us whose phone batteries last longer than our social batteries, read on to see a few mobile games that Kotaku has covered and might be worth your time as you seek to avoid death by boredom this holiday.

The new mobile card game Pokémon TCG Pocket has been with us for just over a week, which has given 20 million people time to discover its highs, lows, and utterly bewildering mess of in-game currencies. It’s also, unfortunately, long enough for most people to have left the honeymoon phase in which the game throws endless items at you, letting you rip open packs of cards with wild abandon before cutting us off hard. Oof, our dopamine. — John Walker

A new Star Wars game launched yesterday and it’s pretty fun. Odds are, however, that you didn’t know that a new Star Wars game launched yesterday because Star Wars: Hunters—an Overwatch-like F2P shooter—is only available on mobile devices and the Nintendo Switch. That’s a shame, because Hunters is a fun (if a bit simple and messy) Star Wars shooter that I bet a lot of people would enjoy. — Zack Zwiezen

Fans jumping into the newly released mobile ports of the Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition games are discovering something surprising: It seems to include improved visual settings that more closely match the look of the original PlayStation 2 games, as well as new bug fixes. That’s good news, but folks are now wondering if these improvements will make the leap to other platforms in the future. — Zack Zwiezen

A screenshot shows a joker card talking to you.

An illustration of an iPhone against a gray background.

There was a time where iPhone games were merely a distraction. You’d play them on a commute, or while the water boiled, or during Destiny loading screens. But that was then, and this is now. In case you didn’t know, today’s options are just as polished (and fun!) as many console counterparts. And now that there are more games on the App Store than stars in the Milky Way, some curation is imperative. That’s where we come in. Here are the best iPhone games on the market. — Kotaku Staff

Android: not just another word for “robot.” It’s also a good option for anyone who wants a mobile device unshackled by the closed operating systems used by certain other smartphone manufacturers. Or, most importantly for our purposes, a library of games that’s nearly bottomless. — Kotaku Staff