One of the ways I like wasting my time is playing app games on my iPad. It can be tough to find games that aren’t childish or repetitive. I’ve also found that many app games will be fun for a while, but after a certain point they become nearly impossible to keep playing without paying for in-app purchases to get ‘coins’ or ‘gems’ or something like that to keep going. I thought I would share my top three favorites, that I am currently a little addicted to!

Cooking Fever. This game lets you buy and run restaurants. You have customers come in and place orders which you cook up for them. There are two forms of currency in the game, coins and gems. Coins are earned from fulfilling orders in the game, while you earn 7 gems each time you hit a new level in the game (it takes about 2 days for me), and 2 gems daily for logging in. The big trick to this game is the casino. You can use coins in the casino to play for a chance to win gems. I read online that if you play once a day (it resets after 24 hours, not after midnight!) with the 500-coin option then you’ll win 15 gems per day. Most days it only takes 5-10 spins before I win the 15 gems, but some days it takes quite a bit. You cannot win the 15 gems if you are only betting 100 or 200 coins, only if you bet 500.

Through winning 15 gems per day in the casino, it has allowed me to play this game daily for weeks. There are several restaurants to unlock, and 4 levels per restaurant. There have been a few times where I have run low on coins, so I will go back and re-play levels to earn up extra coins to keep going in the casino. At times, I’ve had to wait 24 hours to win 15 more gems before unlocking a new restaurant, as well. I’ve never had to wait more than 24 hours to keep playing the game though. This game does not give you a set number of lives per day or anything, you can play as much as you want which I love. No waiting around for no reason!

Second up is MyCafe. I’ve only been playing this about a week, and it was a little slow going at first. You run a cafe, but you do not prepare ingredients so it doesn’t feel like you are cooking. Instead, customers come in, you talk to them, and your worker automatically fulfills their orders without any clicks/taps from you. The ‘manual’ work that you do in the game comes in later levels, through prioritizing phone-orders, a food truck, and township festivals. Overall I would say thi game is more ‘business management’ than being a chef or barista.  A big part of this game is getting spice to make special drinks, and they can be earned through phone orders or truck orders. Or, you can buy them with gems, and the gems can be won through ding regular orders. This way, nothing that you do comes down to forcing (or nearly forcing) you to pay to play. There are also no timed lives so you aren’t waiting around to get a new life!

Third is called Good Pizza, Great Pizza. This is a pizzeria simulator where you are the cook. You take orders for pizzas and add the right ingredients, cook it the right way, and then serve to the customer. An odd twist to this game is the orders are not as simple as ‘pepperoni and onions’ all the time. Sometimes they are straightforward, but other times they will be something like ‘pep no chez’ which means pepperoni without cheese. Others are basically impossible to figure out without a hint, like ‘za’ and then if you ask for clarification they say ‘za? as in pizza? one pepperoni pizza please,’ I find this ‘twist’ annoying because it’s not a matter of skill, it’s just a matter of guessing right, or wasting your time dialoguing with the customer to find out. Another downside of this game is, if you serve a good, not great pizza it doesn’t tell you exactly what you did wrong. It may say ‘well, i can accept this’ or something similar – but you won’t know if it was because you didn’t add enough cheese, if you cut it the wrong way, or if it took too long to serve. If they at least let me know what I did wrong, I could improve over time. I like this game because it has no timer, and no pressure to pay for bonuses.