asterroc | Timewasters / Puzzles (Reply)

spazzy444 was asking for games to play during her lunchbreak, so I made her a list. Here it is, in no particular order, because we all need more procrastination. Items in italics indicate factors that may make play difficult during a lunch break.

Tower Defense

Desktop Tower Defense - like tower defense in Warcraft 3, where you have to build towers to stop waves of enemies. speed

GemCraft - Because we all need more tower defenses with a taste of gems to them. This one has multiple levels with different maps and tower types. You also have abilities for yourself, for which you earn points as you play more. Save feature is awesome since it's long. speed, but less than most tower defense games

Protector IV - you pick a few universal bonuses at the start, and then you recruit heroes each with two "unit" (tower) types, and an element. You work your way through a "kingdom" of tower defense maps, each time you're allowed to bring only 3 heroes (so you can only build their type of tower, so you should choose which hero based on the enemies of that map). Over time you level up the heroes and yourself, and can hire more heroes. speed, but less than most tower defense games

Shooters

Bubble Tanks - gameplay similar to Geometry Wars, plus upgrades along a tech tree where you can go for fast but weak, or heavy tank. It's not clear to me how you lose the game. speed, but "levels" are short

Cartoon Physics

Magic Pen - a cartoon physics game involving drawing shapes.

Fantastic Contraption - another cartoon physics game, this one with wheels and trusses.

Puzzles

Portal: The Flash Version - a Flash-based 2-D ripoff of the X-Box 360 game Portal. You have to get through mazes by putting up teleportation portals on walls.

Set Daily Puzzle - a timed matching card game. You have to match three cards, and they have four properties: shape, number, color, shading. Each one you either have to have all the same, or all different. Reminds me a bit of how in Uno you have to either match color or number. timed

Web Paint By Number - not the watercolors thing for kids, the logic puzzle.

JigSawdoku - sudoku with a graphical interface where you drag puzzle pieces around. I like that you can change to pictures or letters, reemphasizing that this *isn't* a math game, it's a logic game. There's also smaller sizes. timed

Web Sudoku Daily Variation - it's not your father's sudoku puzzles. Also a link for the week's archive.

Word-related

Google Image Labler - you and a partner are shown an image. Come up with labels for it (which helps Google improve its image search engine). When you and the other player match on a label, you win points and move on to the next image. The second most altruistic game here after Free Rice. speed, typing

Wordy - Kinda like Boggle plus the falling blocks of Tetris. speed

FreeRice - vocabulary multiple choice run by the UN to solicit rice donations from advertisers for third world nations. The only truly altruistic game here.

Science

NASA Clickworkers - We've got so many high resolution images of Mars from the orbiter HiRISE, that the scientists don't know where to start looking at them, and that's not a task that computers can do either. We've also only scratched the surface on the photos: there are so many more places we haven't yet taken photos, and again there's so many places that scientists don't know where to look. Help out with this project, waste some time, and have an influence on future astronomy research all over your lunch break. training required

Stardust@Home - a project similar to Clickworkers, but with a name misleadingly like SETI@Home. Where SETI@Home is automatic, Stardust@Home, like Clickworkers, requires human input. Stardust was a mission to capture tiny dust particles from comet Wild 2. Now they've got a bunch of foam (called aerogel) with only a few specks of dust in it, and they need help finding those specks of dust. training required

GalaxyZoo - This one is classifying galaxies. After some training, you take a look at pictures of galaxies and tell astronomers if they're smooth, spiral, or funky. You'll learn a bit about galaxy morphology in the process too. training required

rosefox

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