This times post will be about Puzzles and Dragons, Puzzles and Dragons is a free to play game that originated in Japan in 2012. February for the IOS and in September for the android OS, the first time Puzzles and Dragons came to America shortly after due to the immense popularity and how well received it was in Japan. Puzzles and Dragons had 13 million downloads in the middle of 2013 however currently there has been 20 million worldwide downloads in a period of 1 year.

Puzzles and Dragons is cross between popular titles such as candy crush saga / bejeweled and popular collection games such as Pokémon. In the game you move orbs of 5 colors or hearts to either heal or allow your cards / monsters to attack the enemies. Doing dungeons / stages using stamina upon completion of the dungeon will reward you with gold, experience, and eggs. Eggs are basically the babies of the monsters you kill in the dungeon; if an egg drops you will receive it upon completion of the dungeon. However if you leave or die in the dungeon all the rewards will be lost and you must attempt it again. Cards / Monsters can be leveled and evolved through fusion to make dungeons easier, or to attempt harder dungeons.

Alternatively there is a machine called a gacha (those machines that pop out bubbles that kids frequently spin to get toys / candy, essentially it is a slot machine). If you spend magic stones (the in game currency that you receive for spending real money) you can pull the gacha arm and out pops a rare card; from a random series (the current series in the game include – Japanese gods, norse gods, Chinese gods, ninjas, dragons, angels etc.)

The game is fundamentally different from candy crush saga and bejeweled because while you use stamina to enter dungeons, you can move one orb over the entire play area instead of only once. A play through I recorded of one of the dungeons will be posted below, to show the movement of the orbs and the attacking.

Personally I find this game extremely fun because I like collecting things, and this game is full of cards / monsters that I can collect. The game play is also not stale because they frequently add new content to the game in forms of rare cards or harder dungeons; they also have collaboration events with other mobile games which drop special cards / monsters from that game (recent collaborations include Clash of Clans and Emil Chronicle Online). The game also pulls you in by giving you something to strive for; an example of this would be putting something in the game such as gods that you really like, in my case the Chinese gods are based of zodiacs and one of them is my zodiac so I collected it and leveled it for my team.