Review No. 1
The Daily Jester
Arcade / Juggling · Single player · Free to play · Editor's Choice
Every morning in The Daily Jester, the town square fills, the fountain burbles, and you — the town fool with a paper round — must keep the day's editions spinning in the air. Tap left, tap right, hold to slow a falling roll, and release with timing that becomes second nature somewhere around the third morning. It is the most immediately likeable game this desk has reviewed all year.
The genius is in the escalation. Monday gives you three papers. By Friday you are juggling six while dodging a pigeon with strong opinions, and the game's silent-film piano score stumbles theatrically every time you do. Failure costs nothing but a chuckle: the papers scatter, the crowd laughs kindly, and the morning simply restarts.
Sessions: 3–5 minutes
Difficulty: Gentle, rising to spirited
Best for: Tram rides and tea breaks
Verdict: 9 caps out of 10
What elevates The Daily Jester above the arcade crowd is its refusal to punish. There are no lives to buy back, no energy meters, no interruptions of any kind — the developers state plainly that the game is complete as installed, and after a month of daily play we found nothing behind the curtain to contradict them. Progress is measured in a scrapbook of front pages you have "delivered", each one a little engraved joke.
The juggling model deserves particular praise. Each rolled paper has believable weight, and the difference between a lazy underhand toss and a panicked flick is felt in the fingertips. Accessibility options include a slower "Sunday edition" mode and a one-handed layout, both thoughtfully done.
If we must grumble: the pigeon. Our critic maintains the pigeon arrives one morning too early in the difficulty curve, and the letters page is open to readers who wish to defend the bird. Otherwise, this is the rare casual game we expect to keep on the front page of our own phones long after the review has been filed. An easy Editor's Choice.
Review No. 2
Broadsheet Bluff
Cards / Trick-taking · Single player vs. computer · Free to play · Recommended
Broadsheet Bluff seats you in a Victorian reading room opposite a rotating cast of computer opponents — the Colonel, the Sub-Editor, the Widow Fairweather — for a trick-taking card game in which the joker card rewrites one rule per round. The writing is the star: each opponent bluffs in prose, muttering half-truths in speech bubbles that are just readable enough to be useful.
The card play itself is a tidy invention. Standard tricks are complicated by the "late edition" rule: once per round, the joker lets you reprint a trick already played and take it back. Learning when to spend that reprint is the whole game, and it is a good game.
Sessions: 10–15 minutes
Difficulty: Moderate
Best for: Armchair evenings
Verdict: 7.5 caps out of 10
Our reservations concern stamina. A single match is a delight; three in a row and the opponents' patter begins to repeat, and the reading room's four wallpapers grow familiar. The developers have promised seasonal opponents, and the game's changelog suggests they keep their promises, so we file this verdict in pencil rather than ink.
Presentation is impeccable throughout — crosshatched portraits, a crackling fireplace, and the pleasing thwack of card on baize. The tutorial deserves a special mention: it is delivered as a mock etiquette manual, and it taught our most card-averse critic the rules in seven minutes flat.
Recommended without hesitation for short sittings. Readers who want a card game to live inside for months should temper expectations until the promised expansion of the cast arrives; readers who want a witty half hour with a scheming Colonel need not wait.
Review No. 3
Column of Fools
Puzzle / Physics stacking · Single player · Free to play · Recommended
The premise fits in a sentence: stack jester caps until the tower falls over. The pleasure, as with all good physics comedies, is in how it falls. Caps in Column of Fools flop, slump and slide with a fabric-like looseness that makes every collapse feel less like failure and more like a punchline you personally arranged.
Each cap you drop differs — floppy three-pointers, stiff two-pointers, an occasional absurd five-pointer that behaves like an umbrella — and the wind picks up gently as the tower climbs past each rooftop of the engraved town below.
Sessions: 2–4 minutes
Difficulty: Easy to start, cruel past thirty caps
Best for: One-more-go queues
Verdict: 7 caps out of 10 (stacked carefully)
The scoring is honest and local: your best tower is drawn on the town skyline, and friends passing the phone can attempt to overtop it in a pleasingly analogue multiplayer of the pass-it-around kind. There are no accounts, no leaderboard servers, and consequently no nagging.
A "steady hands" mode slows the swing of the crane for players who want a calmer stack, and a marvellous "one cap too many" replay system saves the final second of every collapse to a little flip-book gallery. Our office gallery currently holds forty-one collapses and is consulted more often than some reference books.
The game's only real flaw is thinness: past the hundredth tower, you have seen what it has to show you. But at a price of nothing and a size of almost nothing, Column of Fools earns its place on the home screen the way a good cartoon earns its place on the fridge.
Review No. 4
Crossword & Cap
Word / Crossword variant · Single player · Free to play · Recommended
Crossword & Cap is a daily crossword with a saboteur. Each puzzle hides one "fool's square" — a cell in which the printed clue lies to you, and only the joker lounging in the margin knows which. Solve around him, corner him, and the final word of the grid springs open with a jingle of bells.
It is a wonderful idea for lapsed crossword solvers: the lie forces you to hold answers loosely, to pencil rather than pen, and the moment of catching the fool's square produces a detective's satisfaction that ordinary grids rarely manage.
Sessions: 8–20 minutes daily
Difficulty: Adjustable, Wednesday spike
Best for: Morning coffee ritual
Verdict: 8 caps out of 10
The puzzles themselves are set with evident care and an Australian ear — expect the occasional "arvo" and a pleasing scatter of local rivers — and a full archive of past grids opens gradually as you solve, so new arrivals are never short of material. Hints are generous and unlimited: the jester will, if begged, point one languid finger toward the suspect square.
Our sole complaint is the Wednesday difficulty spike, which the setters clearly regard as tradition. Two of our critics regard it as ambush. The letters column awaits readers' views on this pressing editorial controversy.
For solvers who have grown too comfortable, Crossword & Cap restores the wobble to the morning grid. Recommended with the particular warmth this desk reserves for games that respect both the reader's intelligence and the reader's time.
Review No. 5
Pressroom Pairs
Memory / Matching · Single player · Free to play · Worth a Look
Pressroom Pairs takes the oldest casual formula — flip two cards, find the match — and sets it on a hand-cranked printing press that never quite stops moving. Cards roll off the press, take their place face-down on the drying rack, and shuffle themselves one row at a time as the cylinder turns. Memory, in this pressroom, has a conveyor belt working against it.
It is a modest game, and it knows it. Sessions are short, the joke is gentle, and the difficulty comes entirely from the drift of the rack rather than from any cruelty of design.
Sessions: 3–6 minutes
Difficulty: Gentle
Best for: Winding down
Verdict: 6.5 caps out of 10
The presentation carries much of the load: ink-smudged card backs, the clack and sigh of the press, and a joker foreman who applauds ironically when you match the final pair. A nightly "quiet print run" mode dims the palette and slows the belt, and proved genuinely soothing in our testing — two critics now play it in place of scrolling before sleep.
Depth-seekers should look elsewhere; the game's twelve rack layouts are exhausted within a fortnight, and the foreman's applause, however ironic, cannot disguise the repetition. But as a pocket wind-down with a printing-press soul, Pressroom Pairs does exactly what it sets in type.
Worth a look — particularly for readers who finished the crossword, stacked their fools, and want one calm game before the presses stop for the night.
