For those that are adverse to freemium gaming and the various F2P shenanigans that many apps employ: Puzzle & Dragons is arguably the most generous F2P game I've ever played, giving out expensive premium currency <i>daily</i>. As a result, you can get atleast a month of playtime without hitting a paywall.<p>While the board mechanics mentioned in the linked article are fun and interesting, there is little variation in gameplay style from level-to-level, and as a result, PAD is <i>grindy as hell</i> and is the reason I've stopped playing. A modern freemium mechanic other apps use to combat player dropoff for this reason is Auto play, which lets the game play itself (or simulate a runthrough of a round) for the same rewards. There's been a lot of debate in the gaming community on whether this is good design, but Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, a F2P game which implements <i>both</i> styles of Autoplay, has been doing <i>very</i> well on the Top Grossing charts.
Being I was corrected by an GungHo employee I'd just like to point out the name is "Puzzle & Dragons" Puzzle is singular, Dragons is plural.<p>I also attended a talk in Tokyo by the designer of Puzzle & Dragons who pointed out he considered it an action game. It was specifically designed to require you to move fast. Since you can manipulate the entire board in a single move but you have a limited amount of time to do it the faster and more accurately you can move a piece the better you do at the game making it an action skill based game, not a typical pick 3 game.<p>Yes I realize that partly what the article is about.
Fascinating article. I got a little bit into the gme a couple years ago - just enough to get a taste of the crazy depth availble (and dedicated grind required to get far) before realizing that it was probably not a game I wanted a lose a couple of years of my life to. I had no idea about board maximizing websites though.
I tried installing Puzzle and Dragons once on my Nexus 4, and it was crashing at startup. The game uses native ARM code in a .so that couldn't be loaded because of (IIRC) missing symbols. I had a pretty standard Android install, nothing special about it, so really, I don't know how it ever worked on Android at all for other people.