Top five games to play in lockdown with your loved ones

Here are some free apps you can play with friends and loved ones on a smartphone, to keep you entertained from afar:

– Psych!

Who can fake it best and fool the most people? That’s the aim of Psych!, in which you all must come up with the most convincing false answer to trivia – such as what do you call a group of zebras?

Each fake answer is submitted anonymously alongside the real answer, leaving you and everyone else to pick the correct one. Get it correct, you win a point, but also gain a point for every time someone else fell for your false answer.

There are different categories to choose from, and the ability to buy extension packs.

– Draw Something

Test your drawing skills – and that of friends and family on Facebook – with Draw Something.

The app will challenge you to draw something on your smartphone, which the other player must guess, and vice versa.

hings have always moved pretty fast in the mobile games business, but the explosive success story of Draw Something has got to have set some kind of record.

In just seven weeks, New York developer Omgpop went from a struggling firm on the brink of bankruptcy to an App Store powerhouse with a $180 million (£113 million) buyout offer from CityVille developer Zynga.

The game itself went from an invisible app that the press all but ignored, to the number one game in almost every major country, with a staggering 35 million downloads and a billion drawings a week.

The game, if you’re the last person on Earth to have not tried it out, is classic Pictionary. A player is given a choice of words to draw — a mashup of bog standard vocabulary (hammer, dandruff, rainbow) and pop culture icons (Bieber, Elvis, Vader) — and doodles one for a friend.

The secret, by the way, is that different regions get different words. Britain gets “Adele”, America gets “Tebowing” and Sweden gets “Ikea”, for example.

The drawing is then stored on a server, and the other player gets a push notification on their iPhone, iPad or Android device.

When they find time they can load up the game, guess the word, and then take their turn as artist.

It is to Pictionary what Words with Friends was to Scrabble. It takes a classic board game and makes it digital, social, viral and — perhaps most importantly — asynchronous, so two friends can play around their respective schedules.

Not coincidentally, Zynga previously purchased Words With Friends creator Newtoy, back in 2010. It handed over $53 million (£34 million) for the Texas-based developer and welcomed the Scrabble app into its caucus of games. The developer is now called Zynga with Friends.

The five-year-old Omgpop was a moderately successful firm before

Draw Something blew up. It had made 34 other games — stuff you’ve probably never heard of like Cupcake Corner and Putt Putt Penguin — and had raised around $15 million in two funding rounds.

It brings to mind another company: Rovio, the unassuming Finnish outfit that had published 51 largely invisible games for Nokia handsets before hitting the big time with

Angry Birds.

A New York Times report says the company “was on track to run out of money by May, and probably would have shut down by now,” if it wasn’t for Draw Something. It didn’t look good when the press ignored Omgpop’s latest game. “There was nothing written about us,” Dan Porter, CEO,

told Mashable. “[Reporters] weren’t interested. I tried, but I couldn’t even get their attention.

But despite the inauspicious launch on 1 February, it quickly caught on. On the day it launched, there were three drawings per second. A few weeks later and the game had 1,000 drawings every second. On the day Zynga made the buyout official, there were 3,000 drawings a second.

It reached 35 million downloads across iOS and Android, and at a time Draw Something was the number one word game in 84 countries according to Apple’s figures. The app is free, but users can cough up for in-game items like extra colours and tools to help guess words.

Porter attributes the success to word of mouth, more than press or even advertising.

Load up the game and the only way to play is to find a friend to play with. That means putting out a call for players over email, Facebook or Twitter. More players download the app, get their friends involved and the game spreads. Like an infectious disease.

When Rovio got big, it ditched publisher Chillingo to go alone.

New Card!

Earthquake is a Rare Spell that Deals full Damage per second to Crown Towers and 400% Damage to all other buildings. It damages and slows ground Troops, but does not affect flying units.
Goblin Cage is a Rare Building that would be added over time.

New Game Modes!

Mega Deck

Increased Elixir generation
Increased Deck size (8 Cards -> 18 Cards – that’s how Mega works)
Develop new strategies, and new ways to defeat your opponent!

Elixir Capture

Use Elixir from the Arena to defeat your opponent!
Elixir spawns on both bridges, and must be collected by Troops!
An Elixir Storage in the middle of the Arena gives 2 Elixir when destroyed.
The Elixir Storage has two health bars. Whichever side to deplete their own health bar first get the Elixir.
Use this extra Elixir to gain an advantage over your opponent!

Dragon Hunt

Players hunt an Elixir Egg with two health bars and the first to destroy their own health bar spawns a Dragon for their side!
When the Elixir Egg is destroyed, another one spawns after 30 seconds
The spawned Dragon can be either Baby Dragon, Inferno Dragon, or Electro Dragon!

Home Screen (Battle Tab) Changes

“Help, I can’t find Leaderboards or Training Camp!”
- We have cleaned up the Battle Tab, and rearranged some things. The Battle Tab menu now contains the following…
- Activity Log, Leaderboards, TV Royale, Training Camp, Tournaments and Settings.

New Event Tab!

This tab is your go-to for anything Event related! In the new Event Tab you will find…
- Global Tournaments
- Challenges
- Limited Time Game Modes
- Grand Challenges & Classic Challenges
Note: Private Tournaments now live in the Battle Tab menu!

Improvements, Balance, And Other Changes

Clone: Radius reduced 4 -> 3
New loading screen!
Emotes that are exclusive (not found in the Shop – won from Challenges etc) now have a snazzy Legendary background.
Players won’t see the same Emotes over and over in the Shop!
Track your Quests Chest reward progress from the Battle Tab.
Cleaner home screen UI
2v2 Battles now have a 3 minute Overtime.
New card images for Mortar, Tesla & Goblin Hut
Added a LIVE notification to News Royale, so you can watch live streams as they happen!
‘Last seen online’ status added to Clan Members
Various performance/crash issues fixed
Supercell ID ‘2.0’! Improved user flow and you can now do more with your Supercell ID. Check it out in Settings.

– Uno

Family classic Uno is brought to your smartphone, with the same principle as before.

There’s also the ability to take part in tournaments and work together in teams of two.

– Houseparty

Houseparty, the video chat app which has exploded in popularity during lockdown, features four different games to play, all while keeping the video conversation going in the background.

House Party is a 3D comedy adventure dating sim for Windows developed and published by American studio Eek! Games, LLC on Steam in 2017.^[ The game’s early access launch was a success, according to the developer, the game sold over 30,000 copies in the first few weeks^{[citation needed]} and 300,000 total sales during the first year. As of September, 2019 the game has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.

Gameplay

House Party is a point-and-click adventure set in sandbox sim. The player character interacts with several different party attendees, each of whom has their own distinct personalities and preferences. Each party attendee offers a series of objectives, which can be solved by picking up, talking to or using items on a variety of other objects and people in the game. Players’ actions throughout the game will dictate the gameplay and story direction heavily. Moral choices will yield different outcomes that can either cut off or open up narrative options often leading to risque outcomes.

Although players can interact with all characters that are in the game, they can not build up a romantic relationship with all of them. In order to do so, they will have to complete different quests for them.

Due to its strong sexual content and themes, Twitch blocked users from streaming gameplay footage of the title, regardless of which version of the game was being played.

Plot

The player character is invited to a house party at Madison’s house, they start the game walking in the door of the party already in progress.

There are over 25 story opportunities to discover and complete, much of the game’s narrative options are risqué in nature and touch on topics of debauchery, sex or violence between the player and the NPC’s. Some quests have negative side effects on other characters and not all opportunities can be completed within one gameplay, since several decisions can be contradicting.

Additionally, Eek! Games offer tools on their website to craft a custom story including full dialogues, interactions, and logic dictating how the player’s night goes and import it into the game.

Development

In July 2018, the game was removed from sale on Steam after a number of complaints over the game’s content. House Party is now available in two different versions, the base game is rated “Mature” via Steam in which sex scenes are censored with black censor bars There is an Explicit Content Add-On DLC rated “Adult Only”, (satisfying Steam’s terms of service agreement) that removes the censorship.

In 2018, Eek! Games held a competition to invite members of the public to audition to be included as part of the game with the gaming community to vote for their favorite. Of the entrants, two winners would be selected, one from the male entrants and other from the female entrants. On November 2, 2018, it was announced that streamer and influencer ‘Lety Does Stuff’ and the members of Game Grumps, Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan, were selected as the winners.

On April 11, 2019 Eek! Games announced the winners of their indie music artist contest. Popskyy and his song “FUNKBOX” was the winner, along with special mentions to Fokushi and the song “Dreamer”, Treclar and the song “Whip-its”, Kitanic Demon and the song “Chillax with KitanicDemon” and Fletnyx and the song “Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Reception

Because of the controversial nature of the game, it was quickly popularized by gaming streamers and influencers such as The Game Grumps, PewDiePie, Jacksepticeye, NerdCubed, MattShea, and others.

The game holds a very high rating on Steam, with a 87% ‘Very Positive’ overall and 95% ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ in recent reviews.

The game so far has few reviews by critics, John Walker of Rock, Paper, Shotgun named the game as “Worst Game of the Year” for 2017 citing issues of misogyny. Mark Steighner of Darkstation criticized the game as being “A juvenile take on sexuality, liberal profanity, and objectification of women.“

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