You Must Build A Boat

Kotaku video lead Eric Schulkin says that tile-matching game You Must Build A Boat “has not left [his] phone since 2015,” and though it hasn’t been updated since 2019, it doesn’t really matter when gameplay is this primed for swirling you into its galaxy. As you match tiles to perform actions—smashing a row of key tiles to unlock a treasure chest, for example, or cracking open a crate tile to grab a weapon from inside—you’ll eventually notice that three hours have passed. Yeah, you spent that long looking at Minecraft-level graphics. But You Must Build A Boat’s strategic puzzles are stimulating, and completing different runs helps you build your skinny pixel protagonist a giant boat. Sometimes it’s about the simple things in life.

A good match for: Puzzle enthusiasts, procrastinators.

Not a good match for: Those looking for an “AAA” experience,” anyone who never really “got” Candy Crush

Watch it in action.

Purchase from the App Store