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Ratings for games you won't put down on level three.
Seven free games from Google Play. Each one installed on a real phone, played for at least ninety minutes, and logged — including the minute we stopped and why.
No paid placements on the shortlist. The star numbers below are Google Play's own averages — we don't invent scores.
The shortlist
07 / 07
Price paid
$0.00
The shortlist 07 games
Seven free games worth the storage.
All free to install, all from studios you probably haven't heard of, none with more than five million installs. The quit point is where our tester stopped — sometimes that's a compliment.
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Pot Inc
Moonee Publishing Arcade
You throw a pot on the wheel with your thumb, glaze it, sell it, buy a second wheel. The clay physics are better than an idle game needs them to be — a pot that goes wobbly stays wobbly, and you either live with it or start again. Around the third studio upgrade it turns into a numbers game.
Open in Google PlayInstalls1M+
Quit point52 min — studio 3
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Cat Train Tycoon
Solid Games Casual
Cats queue, board, and ride; you decide which carriage goes where and when a second line opens. Underneath the soft art there's a genuinely fussy routing puzzle, which is the reason to install it. The waiting timers arrive early and often.
Open in Google PlayInstalls500K+
Quit point38 min — line 4
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WordPix
Hypercell Word
A crossword grid where the clues are small pictures instead of sentences. It reads faster than a normal word game and works in a lineup at the grocery store. The picture clues get vague at the higher levels, and that's when the hint buttons start looking friendly.
Open in Google PlayInstalls1M+
Quit point44 min — level 63
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Cafe Cat
MassDiGI Games Simulation
The smallest thing on this list — about ten thousand installs — and the one we'd defend hardest. You run a café counter for cats: take the order, make it, collect the tip. It's short, it's hand-drawn, and it ends before it wears out its welcome.
Open in Google PlayInstalls10K+
Quit point61 min — the tip loop
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Pic-a-Pix
Conceptis Puzzle
Colour nonograms: the numbers along each row and column tell you which squares to fill, and a picture appears if you got the logic right. Conceptis has been making these puzzles by hand since before phones, and it shows in the difficulty curve. Nothing here rushes you.
Open in Google PlayInstalls100K+
Quit pointNone — session ran out
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Kart Master
REG Studio Racing
Plain karting: a circuit, a clock, and a kart you tune between races. No items to throw, no rivals to bump — you're racing the lap time. The track list is thin, which is the honest reason our session ended where it did.
Open in Google PlayInstalls10K+
Quit point27 min — track repeat
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Editor's pick 07
circloO
Florian van Strien Puzzle
One circle, one ball, and a physics engine. Every time you collect a point the circle grows, and the level you already understood becomes a slightly different problem. It's made by one person in the Netherlands, it's black and white, and it's the only game on this list nobody at the desk stopped playing.
Open in Google PlayInstalls1M+
Quit pointNone — free chapters done
Method 04 steps
Ninety minutes, one phone, one notebook.
Every game on this page went through the same four steps. It isn't science. It is, at least, the same for everybody.
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01
Shortlist
Free to install, and under five million installs. Big studios have reviewers already. We read the store listing, the last two months of comments, and skip anything whose comments are mostly about money.
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02
Install on a real phone
A Pixel 6a and a Galaxy A54, both a few years old, both on regular home Wi-Fi. No emulators, no test accounts, no press builds. If it stutters on a mid-range phone, that goes in the notes.
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03
Ninety minutes, logged
One sitting where the game allows it. We write down the minute the first ad appears, the level where progress turns into waiting, and the minute we genuinely wanted to stop. That last number is the quit point, and it's the only number we produce ourselves.
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04
Write it, then check it
The paragraph is one tester's opinion, so it gets read by someone who didn't play it. The star number stays Google Play's own average, copied on the day we publish — if it moves after that, ours is out of date until the next issue.
What we don't do
We don't test on iOS. We don't cover paid games, so a good game behind a one-time purchase will never show up here. And we don't hand out scores out of a hundred — a number that precise would be pretending we measured something we didn't.
Frames From the store listings
What these actually look like.
Every image on this page is the developer's own store frame, pulled from Google Play the week we published. We don't restage screenshots or paint over them.
Icons, screenshots and names belong to their developers. See terms for the full note on that.
Revenue Plainly
Ads pay for this. Ratings aren't for sale.
Somebody always pays for a review site. Here it's advertising, and you should know exactly where it sits before you trust a word on this page.
Read the full disclosureTwo ways money arrives
Advertising placements for games, with links out to Google Play; and advertising revenue from the free Play4Free games we recommend, which earn from the ads built into them. Any placement that is advertising is labelled as advertising, on the spot.
An advertiser cannot change a verdict
Nobody buys a place on the shortlist, a star, or a sentence. A developer can pay to be advertised next to a review; a developer cannot pay to be in one. If that ever changes, it will say so here first.
Reader mail Printed with permission
Three notes from the inbox.
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I installed Cat Train Tycoon because of your quit-point note. Thirty-eight minutes was exactly right — I hit line four somewhere around Burnside and put the phone away at the same spot you did. Slightly annoyed you were that accurate.
Sasha Ostrowski
Dartmouth, NS Reader since 2024
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The line about Pot Inc turning into a numbers game saved me an evening. I installed it anyway. It's still a very good ten minutes.
Hana Bergeron
Laval, QC Issue 04 reader
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You're the only list I've found that prints Google Play's rating instead of inventing one out of ten. I don't always agree with the write-ups — the Kart Master one was harsh — but I can see where the number came from, which is more than I can say for most.
Tomas Weir
Kelowna, BC Reader since 2025
Subscribe Issue 08 — October
One note when the next seven go up.
Four issues a year, seven games each. We send the list, the quit points, and nothing else. If you allow browser notifications, you'll get the same note as a push — you can turn either off whenever you like.
You're on the list.
If your browser asks about notifications, that's us — say no and you'll still get the email. Unsubscribe links are in every issue.
FAQ 05 questions
The ones that keep arriving.
Yes — all of it, permanently. There's no account, no subscription and no review held back for members. The games we cover are free to install too; that's the entire remit of this desk.
Advertising, in two forms: paid promotional placements for games that link out to Google Play, and advertising revenue from the free Play4Free games we recommend, which earn from the ads inside them. Advertising never buys a spot on the shortlist or changes a verdict, and anything that is an ad is marked as one. The long version is in the terms.
The seven links in this issue aren't. They're plain store links to the games we tested, and nobody paid for them. When a link is a paid placement it carries the word advertising next to it — not a small grey asterisk at the bottom of the page.
Because two testers over ninety minutes can't produce an average that means anything, and pretending otherwise is how review sites end up with fifty games all sitting at 8.4. Play's average comes from thousands of players over years — it's a better number than we could make. Our contribution is the paragraph and the quit point.
No. They find out when you do. If we get a fact wrong — a feature that exists, a timer that changed in an update — write to the desk and we'll correct it in place and say what changed.
The desk Since March 2023
It started as a spreadsheet column nobody else was keeping.
Over the winter of 2022, Devon Marchand installed forty-one free games on a Pixel 4a, mostly on the ferry between Dartmouth and downtown Halifax. He tracked the usual things at first — rating, size, whether it needed an account. Then he added a column he kept coming back to: the minute I stopped playing.
That column turned out to be the only one that predicted anything. A 4.6 game he quit at nine minutes was a worse recommendation than a 4.0 he played until the ferry docked. In March 2023 he put the spreadsheet online from a flat above a bakery on Agricola Street, in Halifax's North End, and called it RAGEQUIT RATINGS — a joke about the moment you decide you're done, and about being honest enough to write it down.
Three of us work on it now, part-time, four issues a year. It pays for itself and not much more, which is roughly the point.
Devon Marchand
Editor Halifax
Started the spreadsheet. Still owns the Pixel 6a. Writes most of the shortlist and takes the corrections personally.
Priya Raghunathan
Testing Halifax
Runs the ninety-minute sessions on the Galaxy A54 and keeps the log. She is the reason the quit points have minutes in them and not adjectives.
Joanne Fillion
Copy & checks Moncton
Reads every review before it publishes, having deliberately not played the game. If a sentence can't be defended to her, it doesn't run.