Short on Time? Discover the Top 15 Android Titles Perfect for Brief Breaks

Quick Links

If you’re like me, you only play Android games that don’t require any commitment. However, finding such games is surprisingly difficult, so I’ve rounded up fifteen of my favorite games that you can just jump right in and play for a couple of minutes at a time.

1 QS Monkey Land: King of Fruits

QS Monkey Land: King of Fruits is essentially a Suika (Watermelon Game) clone. It’s an endless puzzle game where fruits drop into a container. Your goal is to match two of the same fruits to get a larger fruit. The largest fruit is the watermelon, and you can combine two watermelons to make them disappear and free up some space.

Although there’s no time limit, you can time your fruit drops because the container is affected by gravity. This deceptively simple game involves a lot of skill and thinking. I still haven’t matched two watermelons, even after two months of playing.

2 Alto’s Adventure

There are many endless runners perfect for quick sessions on the toilet , but my favorite is Alto’s Adventure. Its gorgeous, minimalistic graphics and interface are a breath of fresh air compared to other endless runners, such as Subway Surfers. Your character automatically snowboards to the right, and you control the character by tapping and holding to jump or maneuver.

Unlike Ski Safari, where you’re trying to escape an avalanche, in Alto’s Adventure, you lose when you fall. This means that most runs are short. You progress by doing fun mini-challenges to level up.

3 Horizon Chase – Arcade Racing

Horizon Chase pays homage to old-school Nintendo and Sega arcade racers like Lotus and Top Gear . This modernized retro racer has you blazing through tracks at neckbreak speeds, so most races are incredibly short. Although the cars aren’t licensed, they look just like the real deal.

4 Fallout Shelter

I played Fallout Shelter back when it was first released in 2015 (shortly before Fallout 4), and it’s been my favorite base-building simulator on mobile ever since. The goal is simple—keep your dwellers nourished and protected while simultaneously growing your base. It’s the type of game where you check in for a couple of minutes per day to be rewarded with steady progression.

If you’ve watched the Fallout TV series recently and can’t get enough of the Fallout universe, now is the perfect time to jump into Fallout Shelter because they recently added characters and locations from the show.

5 Egg, Inc.

If Fallout Shelter sounds too involved, Egg, Inc. is the perfect alternative. It’s an adorable idle clicker where you click a big red button to spawn chickens, which lay money-making eggs. As you progress, you get more money to upgrade your base to earn more money, and the cycle repeats. The most efficient way to play it is to open the app a few times per day to upgrade your base, so it’s ideal for two-minute sessions.

6 Crossy Road

Why did the chicken cross the road? To unlock new characters, of course. Crossy Roads is a fun little arcade platformer where your goal is to get as far across the road as possible without dying. Just like Floppy Bird, individual sessions are incredibly short and entirely depend on how good you are. My favorite part is unlocking new characters. Some of them even change the environment, which is pretty cool.

7 Mars: Mars

Mars: Mars is an endless platformer that involves jumping between platforms, but instead of starting from the beginning, when you fail, you go back to the previous platform. Just like in Crossy Roads, you can unlock new characters that completely change the environment. Many of them are based on historical figures, like Marilyn Monroe and Jimi Hendrix.

8 Don’t Touch The Spikes

Don’t Touch the Spikes is a dead simple game. You tap on the screen to make a bird fly, and you score points by hitting the side walls without touching the spikes. You can unlock new birds, but that’s about all there is to this game—it’s simple, addictive, and fun.

9 Bike Race: Motorcycle Games

Bike Race is all about completing bite-sized levels to earn one to three stars, depending on how fast you finish the track. It’s more of a platformer than a racing game, though. There’s also a healthy level of competition against other players in the form of leaderboards.

10 Minesweeper

Do you remember that one old-school Windows game that nobody knew how to play? Minesweeper is a logic puzzle game that requires you to think. Your goal is to uncover all squares without tripping any mines that hide under the squares. The numbers tell you how many mines are adjacent to that square in a 3x3 pattern. You can find a few tricks online to get better at the game, but even without any “game knowledge,” it’s a lot of fun, and you’ll hardly spend more than five minutes per session.

11 I Love Hue

I Love Hue is a beautiful visual puzzle game that involves arranging colored tiles in gradients. The game gets progressively harder as you go. You could argue that it sharpens your visual perception, but I just like it because it’s quick and relaxing.

12 Infinity Loop: Relaxing Puzzle

If colors aren’t your cup of tea, Infinity Loop is another puzzle game that gets progressively harder as you unlock higher levels. The goal is to connect all loops so that they don’t have any open ends. It’s simple, bite-sized fun, which is sometimes all you really need from a mobile game.

13 General Knowledge Quiz

General Knowledge Quiz is my favorite random trivia game, and I genuinely learned a thing or two from it. There are thousands of questions that get harder or easier, depending on how well you do thanks to the Elo rating system . I love how I can just whip out my phone and answer a few interesting questions in less than a minute.

14 Puzzly Words - word guess game

Puzzly Words is a unique word puzzle game where you’re given letters and have to use as many as possible to create three words in a minute. you get to play four rounds, so matches don’t last longer than five minutes in total. My colleague Tony Phillips featured Puzzly Words in his roundup of his favorite word games .

15 Tiny Gladiators 2

If you want a game that requires some level of skill and has an excellent progression system and multiplayer, Tiny Gladiators 2 is for you. You fight against various enemies and bosses in a 2D arena with nothing but a few simple movements and special attacks. There’s even a fun little story, complete with narrative cinematics. Most rounds only take a couple of minutes at most, but some game modes can go for longer.

Mobile games are best when they’re short and snappy, but I also enjoy playing Android games with amazing graphics when I have the time to sit down and play. I’ve personally played all the games on this list, and I hope that you’ll have as much fun as I did with them!

Hardware Help

Short on Time? Discover the Top 15 Android Titles Perfect for Brief Breaks